Alain Touraine, one of the last intellectuals of a generation that marked Western thought, dies

Alain Touraine (Hermanville-sur-Mer, 1925 - Paris, 2023) died early Friday at the age of 97 in Paris, his family confirmed to Le Monde newspaper. He was one of the last survivors of a brilliant generation that marked the social sciences and Western thought from the mid-twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. As a sociologist, his field of study has ranged from the post-war factories that lifted the country 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 reference of what in his country they call the second left —of a social democratic and clearly anti-totalitarian character—.

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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," the jury explained at the time.

Touraine began his career with a study on the evolution of work in Renault factories (1945). In seventies she became interested not only in labor unionism, but also in new social movements such as the students of May 68, environmentalism and feminism. He was not convinced of the need to form a social movement worldwide, but to recover the actors that were invented centuries ago: political parties to achieve civic rights and 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 of the world: "What impresses me most now, as a sociologist or historian of the present, is that it has been a long time since I felt such an emptiness. There is an absence of actors, of meaning, 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 bare hands, we are locked up alone and isolated, abandoned. You don't have to be in touch and you have to lock yourself at home. This is not war!"

A survivor of the Second World War, he was 14 years old at the time, remembering the war and the present moment he found a clear distinction: "The occupation, afterwards, did mark all my youth. Now it is something else: we are in a vacuum, reduced to nothingness. We don't talk, we don't have to move, we don't understand."

Touraine defined himself as "very pro-European, probably too much". He lamented Brexit and the arrival of ultras like Matteo Salvini in Italy. "This epidemic is taking place at a time when we don't know how or why. It is too early to know what to do economically, "he said in EL PAÍS. His prognosis on Europe was clear: "Now there are two fundamental decisions. First, liberation through women. That is, the collapse of reason in the center of personality and the recomposition of affections around reason and communication, a society of care. And secondly, the reception of migrants, which I consider to be a major problem. Our European countries today are defined 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 he has been a member of the College de la Prevention des Risques Tecnologiques. His extensive work includes books such as What is democracy?, Equality and diversity (new tasks of democracy), How to get out of liberalism, Can we live together? or In search of himself.