2023-08-21 05:50:41
Daniel Cohen, in Paris, in June 2015. BRUNO CHAROY / PASCO
He could talk with the same greed and the same brilliance about the tennis destiny of Roger Federer, the debt crisis in Africa and the future of our civilization, both prosperous and unhappy. It is a great spirit of the world, the economist Daniel Cohen, who died this Sunday, August 20 at the age of 70 at the Necker hospital, in Paris, from a blood disease. He leaves a legacy of an exceptional generation of students, including a Nobel Prize, and an abundant and rich thought that has flourished in more than fifteen books.
He was for this the most respected of French economists and the most famous in the general public for the educational and enlightening virtue of his works. “Daniel Cohen was a teacher. A man of ideals and transmission. Debates and commitment. We are losing a great intellectual, an economist who made our French research shine, a sincere humanist,” said Emmanuel Macron on X (formerly Twitter).
Born June 16, 1953 in Tunis, he spent his childhood in Paris, pampered by a pharmacist mother and a doctor father. He was 15 when the student revolt of 1968 broke out, the first political awakening. Crack in math, dad dreamed of making him a polytechnician. He passed the competition but chose the Ecole Normale Supérieure and won the aggregation of mathematics in 1976. But the oil crisis of 1973, which signaled the end of the great post-war growth, intrigued him too much for he does not seek to understand this fundamental shift which will bring inflation, unemployment and deindustrialization a few years later. The end of one world and the beginning of another.
“We shared the same passion for the novels of Kundera, Garcia Marquez or Vargas Llosa, where politics and literature mingled”, tells the historian and philosopher Michel Marian, his friend from the Normal School. All this against the backdrop of the slow decomposition of Marxism that permeated all economics courses. Politics, culture, economics, the little math genius will never be able to bring himself to abandon a discipline because everything is useful for understanding and explaining the world.
A Cohen stable
The introductory sentence of his first book for the general public, The Misfortunes of Prosperity (Julliard, 1994), thus opens with an analogy between the disappearance of growth and that of Mademoiselle Albertine who makes Proust suffer so much in In Search of Lost Time. “But growth did not return, and the disappointed economic policy ended up decreeing its own uselessness, shifting the responsibility for its misfortunes to unfaithful growth”, continues Daniel Cohen, who thus poses, from the beginning of the 1990s, the diagnosis of a changing world in a style that is also very literary.
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