Geoffrey Pleyers *
A
lain Touraine passed away on June 9, 2023. Due to his personal life (his wife Adriana Arenas was Chilean) and intellectual life, Alain Touraine was closely linked to Latin America. He lived in Santiago during the Popular Union government of Salvador Allende and during Pinochet’s coup. Fifteen years later, his main work on Latin America appeared, the word and the blood, which portrays the continent a few years after the fall of the military dictatorships. During his time in Latin America, he gave innumerable conferences, maintaining strong ties with Brazil, Chile and Mexico, where he trained numerous sociologists.
Born in 1925, Touraine graduated in history from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1950. He devoted the first 20 years to sociological research on industrial society and the great social conflict that drove it. Work was then at the center of social life, and he valued it deeply. However, Touraine was also one of the first to capture the overwhelming change that post-industrial society would bring about from the end of the 1960s. Conflicts over the distribution of resources did not disappear nor did factories stop working, but in the society that emerged, culture, education, information and communication, progressively surpasses the production of material goods in the orientation of society and social conflicts. Domination was not played exclusively in the workplace, but also in other settings such as school training, consumerism and information. Therefore, resistance and the transformation of society were also at stake in these arenas. With the expansion of access to higher education and the consumption of material and cultural goods, workers launched massive strikes, the peoples of Eastern Europe, African-American students in the United States, and youth in Mexico demanded democracy. Far from the protest model of industrial society, the students of 1968 proclaimed a creative and cultural revolution against a social, cultural and political model that continued to dominate.
This post-industrial society that was emerging before his eyes, he studied through the social movements that produced it: students, feminists, ecologists, and the Polish union Solidarnosc. Progressively, Touraine gave more and more space and importance to the personal subject, to the individual who seeks to become the author of his life and an ethical actor in his society. To the point of considering this personal subject as a central historical actor of the contemporary world. With this perspective, Touraine perceived before many the growing importance of the assertion of dignity and the demand for respect in contemporary movements. She considered Zapatismo as one of the movements that best embodied this perspective. At the age of 71, she traveled to the jungle of the Mexican southeast to participate in the first Intergalactic Encounter. He returned five years later with great enthusiasm for the March of the Color of the Earth that led the Zapatistas to Mexico City in 2001. The centrality of the affirmation of dignity in the face of oppressive systems and regimes was to spread to all continents. with the revolutions and citizen revolts that marked the second decade of the 21st century, from the Arab revolutions to the Chilean outbreak. But the affirmation of the personal subject is also at play in less visible spaces, even in everyday life and the internal conflicts of individuals, in a resistance of the singular entity towards mass production, mass consumption and mass communications through the mass media. We cannot oppose this invasion by universal principles, but we can through the resistance of our singular experience.
wrote Touraine in 2002.
Society had changed drastically from the industrial society in which Touraine had grown up and which he had researched. Not only at a material level or information flows that he studied with such brilliance his student Manuel Castells. They had also changed their main cultural orientations
. As he explained it in 2005, It’s become hard to believe [como fue el caso en la sociedad industrial] Only by integrating into society, its norms and laws, can the human being become a free and responsible individual.
. In our world, it is no longer society and the social that constitute the definition criteria of good and evil, but rather the individual-subject within his creative freedom and as creator of his own existence, author of his life and of his ethics. But in front of them rose new total powers
that seek to gain control over cultural orientations even in the most intimate part of the individual, and reactionary movements that, behind the old call to order, opposed the emancipation of dignified subjects in our era of late modernity to which he dedicated his work in the last 15 years.
He continued to work tirelessly until the end, in his Montparnasse salon full of books and with the strength of his ideas and his ability to capture essential events, always moved by his desire to understand this world. At 97 years old, the thought of him was still as alive as ever. And, as always, he was working on his next book. Touraine leaves a world in full turmoil. Analysis of it will be lacking to help us understand it. But he also leaves us analytical and conceptual tools, a vision of the world and of sociology, and dozens of Latin American sociologists that he trained or inspired to understand the contemporary world and, from there, contribute to transforming it. He taught all of us to see the world and societies not as a fixed entity or system of pure domination of the actors, but in transformation by the action and ideas of the actors and social movements. His legacy is immense.
* Vice President of the International Sociological Association
Geoffrey.Pleyers@uclouvain.be
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