André Gorz

Austrian philosopher

Gérard Horst (ʒeʁaʁ ɔʁst; , ; 9 February 1923 – 22 September 2007), more commonly known by his pen names André Gorz (ɑ̃dʁe ɡɔʁts) and Michel Bosquet (miʃɛl bɔskɛ), was an Austrian and French social philosopher and journalist and critic of work. He co founded Le Nouvel Observateur weekly in 1964. A supporter of Jean Paul Sartre's existentialist version of Marxism after the Second World War, he became in the aftermath of the May '68 student riots more concerned with political ecology. In the 1960s and 1970s, he was a main theorist in the New Left movement and coined the concept of non reformist reform.

Born in Vienna as Gerhart Hirsch, he was the son of a Jewish wood salesman and a Catholic mother, who came from a cultivated background and worked as a secretary. Although his parents did not have any strong sense of national or religious identity, the rising anti Semitism led his father to convert to Catholicism in 1930. At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, his mother sent him to an institution in Switzerland to avoid his mobilization into the Wehrmacht. Thereafter, Hirsch was a stateless person until 12 April 1957, when he became naturalized as French citizen because of Pierre Mendès France's support. He graduated from the École polytechnique at University of Lausanne, now EPFL, in chemical engineering in 1945. Working at first as a translator of American short stories published by a Swiss editor, he then published his first articles in a co operative journal. In 1946, he met Jean Paul Sartre, and they became close. Gorz was then influenced mainly by existentialism and phenomenology. He contributed to the journals Les Temps modernes (Paris), New Left Review, Technologie und Politik (Reinbek). ), La Morale de l'histoire (Le Seuil, 1959) and the Fondements pour une morale (Galilée, 1977, published fifteen years later), which he signed for the first time as André Gorz, from the German name of the now Italian city (Görz), where the eyeglasses that were given to his father by the Austrian Army had been made.

Gorz also was a main theorist in the New Left movement, inspired by the young Marx, discussions of humanism and alienation and the liberation of humanity. Gorz was also influenced by the Frankfurt School since he was a friend of Herbert Marcuse. Other friends of his included Rossana Rossanda, founder of Il Manifesto newspaper, the photographer William Klein, younger intellectuals such as Marc Kravetz or Tiennot Grumbach, Imposing himself as the "intellectual leader of the 'Italian' tendency of the New Left",) he influenced activists of the UNEF students' union and the CFDT (in particular, Jean Auger, Michel Rolant and Fredo Krumnow) as a theorist of workers' self management, which has been recently embraced by the CFDT. His term "non reformist reform" refers to proposed programs of change that base their demands on human needs, rather than those of the current economic system. He directly addressed himself to trade unions in Stratégie ouvrière et néocapitalisme (Le Seuil, 1964) in which he criticized capitalist economic growth and expounded on the various strategies open to trade unions. The same year, he quit L'Express, along with Serge Lafaurie, Jacques Laurent Bost, K. S. Karol and Jean Daniel, to found Le Nouvel Observateur weekly and used the pseudonym Michel Bosquet. Deeply affected by May 1968, Gorz saw in the events a confirmation of his existential Marxist posture, which joined the students' criticisms towards institutional and state organisations: state, school, family, firm etc. Ivan Illich's ideas on education, medicine and the abolition of wage labour then became the focus of his attention. Gorz published one of Illich's speeches in Les Temps Modernes in 1961 and met him in 1971 in Le Nouvel Observateur at the publishing of Deschooling Society (Une Société sans école). Gorz later published a summary of Illich's Tools for Conviviality (1973) under the title Libérer l'avenir (Free Future). His links with Illich was strengthened after a trip to California in 1974, and he wrote several articles for Le Nouvel Observateur to discuss Illich's thesis. Gorz's evolution and political and philosophical stances led to some tensions with his colleagues on Les Temps Modernes for which he had assumed the chief editorial responsibilities in 1969. In April 1970, his article Destroy the University (Détruire l'Université) provoked the resignations of Jean Bertrand Pontalis and Bernard Pingaud. Gorz also criticised a Maoist tendency that had been in the journal since 1971 and supported by Sartre. In 1974, Gorz finally resigned as editor after a disagreement on an article about the Italian autonomist group Lotta Continua. He was also forced to the periphery of Le Nouvel Observateur since he was replaced by more classically oriented economists, and he supported a campaign against nuclear industry to which EDF, the state electricity firm, replied by withdrawing advertisements from the weekly. After it refused to let him publish a special issue on the nuclear issue, he published it in the Que Choisir? consumers' magazine. Gorz was becoming a leading figure of political ecology, with his ideas being popularised particularly by the ecologist monthly Le Sauvage, which had been founded by Alain Hervé, the founder of the French section of the Friends of the Earth. In 1975, Gorz published Ecologie et politique (Galilée, 1975), which included the essay Ecologie et liberté, "one of the foundational texts of the ecologic problematic". Gorz was also influenced by Louis Dumont in considering Marxism and liberalism to be two versions of economist thought. Gorz then opposed hedonist individualism and utilitarianism and materialist and productivist collectivism. He supported a humanist version of ecology similar to social ecology that opposes deep ecology. Gorz's ecologism, however, remained linked to a critique of capitalism, as he called for an "ecological, social and cultural revolution that abolishes the constraints of capitalism".

Gorz and his wife, Dorine, committed suicide by lethal injection together in their home in Vosnon, Aube. His wife had been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and they had already said that neither wanted to survive the other's death. His book Lettre à D. Histoire d'un amour (Galilée, 2006) was dedicated to his wife and was in fact a way for him to tell of his love for her. autoproduction.