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Alain Touraine, 97, French sociologist
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Lenona
Jun 9, 2023, 9:47:45 AM6/9/23
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"Alain Touraine, a leading French sociologist, has died
"Touraine, who worked extensively on issues around labor, feminism and capitalism in France and abroad, died in Paris on Friday, his daughter said. He was 97."
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/obituaries/article/2023/06/09/alain-touraine-a-leading-french-sociologist-has-died_6030646_15.html
(paywall)
By Jean Birnbaum
A central figure on the French and international intellectual scene, sociologist Alain Touraine died in Paris on the morning of Friday, June 9, announced his daughter, former Socialist minister Marisol Touraine. He was 97 years old. From his earliest fieldwork in the Renault car factories to his latest writings on the metamorphoses of speculative capitalism, this enthusiastic traveler never ceased to observe the social world, its profound mutations, its new divisions and its sources of indignation and freedom. "What interests me, what I try to bring to light everywhere, is conflict," he told Le Monde in 2017. Telling the story of society and recounting its conflicts, such was the vocation of this flamboyant intellectual figure with boundless curiosity, inspired by literature and the Liberation of France.
Born on August 3, 1925, in Hermanville-sur-mer, in Normandy, in a rather bourgeois, conservative family, Touraine grew up surrounded by books. His father, a doctor and a professor of dermatology, subscribed to the first editions of several major publishing houses, including Gallimard and Grasset. "I belong to the last generation to have been raised by literature," he said. "My upbringing was more moralistic than political. For me, politics, at the time, was Malraux's Man's Hope."
Touraine was also a son of the fall of France in 1940. In the 1950s, while studying in the United States, he came across a lecture by the renowned sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902-1979), and was shocked: "It made me sick, and in two hours, I understood what I was against!" he recalled. "For Parsons, as for many Americans who had won the war, society was a no-brainer; they lived in it like a house with a roof and walls. I, on the other hand, was immediately ill at ease in a society that had misbehaved, collapsed and no longer knew what it wanted."
Seriousness and dedication
This social world, seen from the outset as a moral problem and a collective scrum, was one that the young Touraine quickly set his heart on studying closely, with the seriousness and dedication he always harbored. After entering the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in 1945, he started history studies at the Sorbonne. There, he met Marxist professor Ernest Labrousse, who sent him to Hungary for the centenary of the 1848 revolutions. The young Touraine stayed longer than initially planned, touring the country and visiting farms during an agrarian reform, just before the beginning of the Cold War.
Upon his return, still keen to get to grips with social reality, he took a job in a coal mine near Valenciennes in northern France. Much to his astonishment, he witnessed the regular brawls between German and Polish workers. Above all, it was then that he encountered what he would later call his "road to Damascus." One Sunday in a Valenciennes bookshop, he came across a book written by French sociologist George Friedmann (1902-1977), Industrial Society: The Emergence of Human Problems of Automation, which later became a well-known classic. As he read along, Touraine, who had studied literature in the prestigious French Khâgne program at the Paris' Lycée Louis-le-Grand and felt cut off from the rest of the world during WWII, discovered issues that seemed both concrete and fascinating...
(I can't read the rest)
"Touraine, who worked extensively on issues around labor, feminism and capitalism in France and abroad, died in Paris on Friday, his daughter said. He was 97."
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/obituaries/article/2023/06/09/alain-touraine-a-leading-french-sociologist-has-died_6030646_15.html
(paywall)
By Jean Birnbaum
A central figure on the French and international intellectual scene, sociologist Alain Touraine died in Paris on the morning of Friday, June 9, announced his daughter, former Socialist minister Marisol Touraine. He was 97 years old. From his earliest fieldwork in the Renault car factories to his latest writings on the metamorphoses of speculative capitalism, this enthusiastic traveler never ceased to observe the social world, its profound mutations, its new divisions and its sources of indignation and freedom. "What interests me, what I try to bring to light everywhere, is conflict," he told Le Monde in 2017. Telling the story of society and recounting its conflicts, such was the vocation of this flamboyant intellectual figure with boundless curiosity, inspired by literature and the Liberation of France.
Born on August 3, 1925, in Hermanville-sur-mer, in Normandy, in a rather bourgeois, conservative family, Touraine grew up surrounded by books. His father, a doctor and a professor of dermatology, subscribed to the first editions of several major publishing houses, including Gallimard and Grasset. "I belong to the last generation to have been raised by literature," he said. "My upbringing was more moralistic than political. For me, politics, at the time, was Malraux's Man's Hope."
Touraine was also a son of the fall of France in 1940. In the 1950s, while studying in the United States, he came across a lecture by the renowned sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902-1979), and was shocked: "It made me sick, and in two hours, I understood what I was against!" he recalled. "For Parsons, as for many Americans who had won the war, society was a no-brainer; they lived in it like a house with a roof and walls. I, on the other hand, was immediately ill at ease in a society that had misbehaved, collapsed and no longer knew what it wanted."
Seriousness and dedication
This social world, seen from the outset as a moral problem and a collective scrum, was one that the young Touraine quickly set his heart on studying closely, with the seriousness and dedication he always harbored. After entering the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in 1945, he started history studies at the Sorbonne. There, he met Marxist professor Ernest Labrousse, who sent him to Hungary for the centenary of the 1848 revolutions. The young Touraine stayed longer than initially planned, touring the country and visiting farms during an agrarian reform, just before the beginning of the Cold War.
Upon his return, still keen to get to grips with social reality, he took a job in a coal mine near Valenciennes in northern France. Much to his astonishment, he witnessed the regular brawls between German and Polish workers. Above all, it was then that he encountered what he would later call his "road to Damascus." One Sunday in a Valenciennes bookshop, he came across a book written by French sociologist George Friedmann (1902-1977), Industrial Society: The Emergence of Human Problems of Automation, which later became a well-known classic. As he read along, Touraine, who had studied literature in the prestigious French Khâgne program at the Paris' Lycée Louis-le-Grand and felt cut off from the rest of the world during WWII, discovered issues that seemed both concrete and fascinating...
(I can't read the rest)
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