Sociologist Alain Touraine died Friday in Paris at the age of 97, his daughter, former minister Marisol Touraine, told AFP. Alain Touraine, who did a lot of work on social issues, died in Paris at 3:30 a.m. on Friday, she said.
Intellectual on the left, but appreciated on the right, Alain Touraine has written an abundant body of work which has described the dynamics of societal change during the Trente Glorieuses and after.
Observer of “new social movements”
He had started by looking for this on the workers, his thesis relating to those of the car manufacturer Renault. Then, after May 1968, he had been attentive to the various “new social movements” which carried themes other than those of socialist workerism.
“Hasn’t the time of social struggles, class relations, social movements passed? “, he wondered in The Voice and the Gaze in 1978, a work of synthesis on the sociology of these movements, students, regionalists, feminists, etc. He was thus led to criticize the strike movement of December 1995 against the reform of Social Security, which according to him did not ask the right questions, focusing on the defense of employees.