French sociologist Alain Turenne has died

Although he came from a wealthy family, French sociologist Alain Turenne, He passed away on Friday, June 9, at the age of 97. chose to work as a miner, between 1947 and 1948, in order to experience the daily toil of the humble classes. His first book, published in 1955, was devoted to manpower management in Renault car workshops, and even later he often dealt with the worker situation, for example with an article on the Polish Independent Trade Union in the company. Edited by Solidarnosc, published in Italy in 1982 by Franco Angeli.

However, he was far from a worker. In fact, Turin is best known to the general public for coining the expression that gives the title of his essay Post-industrial societyIt was published in 1969 and translated the following year by Il Molino. When Marxism was still dominant among progressive intellectuals like himself, he realized that knowledge, in its various forms, had established itself as a major engine of growth and The class struggle is no longer at the heart of the social scenario, Whereas the struggle for creativity against the forces and limitations of devices has become decisive. Convinced that it is more correct to talk about alienation rather than exploitation, in the aftermath of 1968 he came to the conclusion that the university was the favorite place for the formation of new social conflicts. The tendency to favor the cultural dimension over the economic dimension, which has always been the cornerstone of his thought.

Born on 3 August 1925 in Normandy, Turenne studied, albeit sporadically, at the prestigious Ena (colenormale suprieure) and then devoted himself to sociology, working first at the National Center for Scientific Research and then at the École for Advanced Studies in Society. Sciences. He had majored at Harvard and traveled extensively in Latin America, particularly Chile, where he met his wife, Adriana Arenas. Many years later, in 1973, had personally witnessed the fall of democracy in that country, With the bloody coup of General Augusto Pinochet against the socialist President Salvador Allende, and the publication of the memoirs of those months entitled The life and death of a popular Chilean (Einaudi, 1974). Meanwhile, Turin argued PhD dissertation at the Sorbonne: Incidentally, he asked Raymond Aron, a famous liberal-conservative scholar, to chair the examination board. A very risky choice, since the candidate’s work, which in his opinion ranged more in philosophy than in sociology, was greatly demolished by the interested party.

Despite the unfortunate incident, Turenne bore no grudge: on the contrary, forty years later he would have paid tribute to Aron’s intellectual courage in opposing Marxist cultural hegemony with effective criticism. A keen observer of new movements, from environmentalism to feminism, in the 2000s, Turin was convinced of the need to develop a new paradigm for interpreting reality, which he lays out in vol. Globalization and the end of social (Al-Sayer, 2008). Considered The triumph of individuality now irrevocable, In order to transcend all borders by uncontrolled economic forces led to the fragmentation of what is called society. N. relied heavily on what he described as a Europe without Europeans, incapable of developing a common conscience and doomed to foolishness. However, Turin argued that it is possible to oppose subversive processes by claiming new cultural rights, based on the individual’s will to be the agent in his or her existence. The French sociologist called this positive aspect of individualism the subject and highlighted his resistance to the realm of impersonal consumption, a product of a liberalism for which social life is reduced to a market without rules in which each individual tries to fit into a product that defines a commodity. an agreement.

Here Turin glimpsed the fundamental conflict of our time, in which he gave a leading role to the feminine component, destined in his view to shape the future: it is no coincidence that one of his last books is precisely titled. Women’s world (Al-Sayer, 2009). The French researcher argued that It is the only way to inject a new creative force into our society It was to promote a possible reconfiguration between social life and personal experience. He saw women at the forefront of this project for their ability to think and act in ambivalent terms, more appropriate to times of complexity. A prophet of a post-industrial society, he announced the emergence of post-feminism more revolutionary than the traditions of Western civilization.