Alain Touraine, influential sociologist and thinker, dies at 97

Alain Touraine (Hermanville-sur-Mer, 1925 – Paris, 2023) has died early Friday morning at the age of 97 in Paris, as confirmed by his family to the newspaper Le Monde. He was one of the last survivors of a brilliant generation that marked the social sciences and Western thought from the mid-20th century to the beginning of the 21st. As a sociologist, his field of study has ranged from the post-war factories that built the country up to post-industrial society, and from social movements to the crisis of modernity. With his interventions in the public debate —in France, but also in other European countries such as Spain and Latin America—, Touraine became a benchmark for what in his country is called the second left —of a social democratic and clearly anti-totalitarian character. —.

The sociologist shared the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities in 2010 with fellow thinker Zygmunt Bauman (Poznan, Poland) for being “luminaries of European thought who have contributed to a better understanding of the social reality of a particularly unique world.” then explained the award jury.

Touraine began his career with a study on the evolution of work in Renault factories (1945). In the seventies he became interested not only in labor unionism, but also in new social movements such as that of the students of the May ’68, environmentalism and feminism. He was not convinced of the need to form a global social movement, but to recover the actors that were invented centuries ago: political parties to achieve civic rights and trade unions to achieve social rights.

He was a great analyst of periods of political and economic crisis. In the midst of the pandemic, in an interview with EL PAÍS, Touraine reflected on the current situation in the world: “What impresses me the most now, as a sociologist or historian of the present, is that it had been a long time since I felt such a void. There is an absence of actors, of sense, of ideas, of interest even: the only preference of the virus is towards the old. There is also no remedy or vaccine. We have no weapons, we go with our bare hands, we are locked up alone and isolated, abandoned. You don’t have to be in contact and you have to lock yourself up at home. This is not war!”

A survivor of World War II, he was 14 years old at the time, when he remembered the war and the present moment he found a clear distinction: “The occupation, afterwards, did mark my entire youth. Now it is something else: we are in a vacuum, reduced to nothing. We do not speak, we must not move, nor understand”.

Touraine defined himself as “very Europeanist, probably too much”. He lamented Brexit and the arrival of ultras like Matteo Salvini in Italy. “This epidemic takes place in a period in which we do not know how or why. It is too soon to know what to do financially, ”he assured in EL PAÍS. His prognosis on Europe was clear: “Now there are two fundamental decisions. First, liberation through women. That is to say, the collapse of reason at the center of the personality and the recomposition of affections around reason and communication, a society of the care [en inglés, cuidados]. And second, the reception of migrants, which I consider a serious problem. Our European countries are defined today by their attitude towards migrants”.

He wrote different essays on workers’ movements around the world, particularly in Latin American countries. Since 1960 he has been Director of Studies at L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and since 1989 a member of the College de la Prevention des Risques Tecnologiques. Among his extensive work, books such as What is democracy?, Equality and diversity (new tasks of democracy), How to get out of liberalism, Can we live together? o In search of himself.