The French sociologist Alain Touraine – Corriere.it has died

Even though he came from a wealthy family, the French sociologist Alain Touraine, passed away on Friday 9 June at the age of 97, he had chosen to work as a miner, between 1947 and 1948, in order to experience firsthand the daily toil of the humbler classes. His first book, published in 1955, had been dedicated to the management of the workforce in the Renault car workshops and even later he had often dealt with the condition of the worker, for example with an essay on the independent Polish trade union in the co-edited volume Solidarnosc, published in Italy by Franco Angeli in 1982.

Nonetheless, he was far from being a workerist. Indeed, Touraine was best known to the general public for having coined the expression that gives the title to his essay The post-industrial society, released in 1969 and translated the following year by il Mulino. When Marxism was still hegemonic among progressive intellectuals like him, he had realized that knowledge, in its various forms, had established itself as the main engine of growth and class conflict was no longer at the center of the social scenario, while the struggle for creativity against the powers and constraints of the apparatuses had become crucial. Convinced that it was more correct to speak of alienation rather than exploitation, in the wake of 1968 he had come to the conclusion that the university was the privileged place for the formation of new social struggles. A tendency to privilege the cultural dimension over the economic one which had always remained the cornerstone of his thinking.

Born on August 3, 1925 in Normandy, Touraine had studied, albeit intermittently, 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 School of Advanced Studies in social Sciences. He had specialized at Harvard and had traveled extensively in Latin America, especially in Chile, where he had 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 had published a diary of those months with the title Life and Death of Popular Chile (Einaudi, 1974). Meanwhile Touraine had argued PhD thesis at the Sorbonne: on the occasion he had asked Raymond Aron, the famous liberal conservative scholar, to chair the examining board. An extremely risky choice, since the interested party had substantially demolished the candidate’s work, which in his opinion ranged much more in philosophy than in sociology.

Despite the unfortunate episode, Touraine bore no grudges: on the contrary, forty years later he had paid homage to Aron’s intellectual courage in opposing Marxist cultural hegemony with effective criticisms. An attentive observer of new movements, from ecology to feminism, in the 2000s Touraine was convinced of the need to develop a new paradigm of interpretation of reality, which he had set out in the volume Globalization and the end of the social (the Assayer, 2008). He considered the triumph of now irreversible individualism, for the overriding of every frontier by unchecked economic forces had led to the fragmentation of what was called society. N trusted very much in what he dismissed as a Europe without Europeans, incapable of developing a common conscience and doomed to ineptitude. However, Touraine argued, it was possible to oppose the disruptive processes with the claim of new cultural rights, based on the will of the individual to be the actor of his own existence. The French sociologist called this positive side of individualism the subject and highlighted its resistance to the impersonal world of consumption, the product of a liberalism for which social life is reduced to a market without rules in which everyone tries to appropriate a product that defines a good deal.

Here Touraine glimpsed the fundamental conflict of our age, in which he assigned a leading role to the female component, in his opinion destined to shape the future: it is no coincidence that one of his latest books was entitled precisely The world of women (the Assayer, 2009). The French scholar argued that it is the only way to infuse our society with a new creative force was to promote a possible recomposition between social life and personal experience. And he saw women at the forefront of this enterprise for their ability to think and act in ambivalent terms, more suited to the time of complexity. After having been the prophet of post-industrial society, he had thus proclaimed the advent of a post-feminism even more revolutionary than the tradition of Western civilization.