French sociologist Alain Touraine, a specialist in the social evolution of his country in the second half of the twentieth century, died on Friday in Paris at the age of 97, his daughter, former minister Marisol Touraine, told AFP.
A left-wing intellectual with an increasingly liberal tendency, Touraine was a meticulous chronicler of social changes in France beginning in the 1950s, and also a scholar of the working class in Chile.
He was the widower of Chilean researcher Adriana Arenas Pizarro, who died in 1990.
Born in Hermanville-sur-Mer (northwest) on August 3, 1925, he studied history.
The French sociologist died Alain Touraine died. Photo AFP.
Although from a wealthy family, he was very interested in the working world in his youth and came to work briefly in a mine, an experience that later served him to write one of his first studies, on miners in Chile.
He worked as a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) between 1950 and 1958. In 1956 he was one of the creators of the Center for Research on the Sociology of Work at the University of Chile, where he met his wife.
The protests of students and workers in May 1968 in France led him to expand his field of study. That same year he published "The May Movement or Utopian Communism".
Alain Touraine died at the age of 97 in Paris.
The following year he predicted, like other experts, the arrival of the "post-industrial society", and became interested in feminism or regionalist movements in France.
In 1973, after the coup d'état, he published "Vida y muerte del Chile popular". He did not stop looking to Latin America, as he evolved towards more liberal positions.
Following the French intellectual tradition, he expressed himself in public, through tribunes or manifestos, sometimes in opposite ways: for example, he defended a reform of the pension system of the conservative French government in 1995, and the following year he signed an appeal in favor of the Zapatista armed movement in Mexico.
In 2010 he received the Prince of Asturias Award in the Communication and Humanities category.
Alain Touraine died, aged 97. Photo AFP. (Photo by JEAN-PIERRE MULLER / AFP.
Alain Touraine was doctor honoris causa of numerous Latin American universities: La Paz, Córdoba (Argentina), Valparaíso (Chile), Pontifical University of Peru...
He was also recognized in Poland, where he studied the anti-communist trade union movement Solidarnosc.
Source AFP