Alain Touraine (1925-2023)

On Friday, June 9, the French sociologist Alain Touraine passed away. He was a member of a generation that actively participated in the debate on social sciences and Western thought from the mid-20th to the early 21st century. Always closely connected to Latin American realities, in 1956 he founded the Center for Studies in the Sociology of Work at the University of Chile; two years later, he founded the Workshop of Industrial Sociology in Paris, which he directed until 1993. He culminated his public career as Director of Studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris.

We share the profile of Professor Emeritus Gerónimo de Sierra on Alain Touraine (1925-2023)

French sociologist Alain Touraine has died at the age of 97. The mention of his nationality is almost superfluous, as his work had become a benchmark in the social sciences in Europe, the United States, and, of course, Latin America. 

Before briefly summarizing his immense body of work (40 books and several hundred articles), allow me to mention his ties to our faculty and Uruguay. He visited the country three times, twice at the invitation of the sociological community. The first visit was in the immediate aftermath of the dictatorship, at the initiative of the newly formed College of Sociologists, and the second was at the invitation of the Department of Sociology—already within the Faculty of Social Sciences—to teach courses in the Master's Program in Sociology, as well as giving lectures in the Paraninfo (main auditorium) and in the media. These were opportunities for fruitful exchange with professors from various departments within the faculty, especially Sociology and Political Science.

He also made a third visit at the invitation of President Julio María Sanguinetti, on the occasion of the inauguration in Montevideo of the so-called Montevideo Group made up of former presidents and various personalities.

It should also be noted that I personally had a long academic and professional relationship with Professor Touraine. I was his student for several years at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where I completed part of my undergraduate and postgraduate studies. Under his direction, I conducted important research on the Labor Movement and Development in the Dominican Republic during the period of the refounding of sociology in that country. Later, I was invited to join his team as Head of Work at the Laboratoire de Sociologie Industrielle in Paris, precisely during the May '68 events. In subsequent years, I again worked under his direction at the Centre d'Étude des Mouvements Sociaux, during part of my period of political exile.

Trained in the History and Sociology of Work at the École Normale Supérieure, Touraine began his research focusing on the labor movement and the sociology of industrial work. There he went on to develop his theory of the Sociology of Action and the Historical Subject, with which he sought to challenge the Parsonian-inspired sociology of psychosocial interaction. In particular, he engaged in debate with the Structural Functionalism that was so dominant in American sociology at that time.

Later, he broadened his study of the labor movement to include the new social movements of the time: student movements, women's movements, and environmentalism. He analyzed the May '68 movement in Paris, as well as in the United States and Germany. He then investigated Solidarity and various emerging movements, eventually focusing on the Zapatista Movement and its evolution, traveling to Mexico twice for this purpose. He created a specific method for studying social movements called Sociological Intervention. 

His primary vocation was to chronicle societal conflicts and decipher the transformations of what he called the post-industrial world, where social movements were "the engine of change." He focused, above all, on understanding society in terms of the existence of a social subject and on comprehending change as a continuous product of collective and transformative action. 

It has been said that he evolved from his empathy with the Popular Unity process in Allende's Chile to more liberal positions, but he always intervened to support processes of social change. For example, he studied the Zapatista movement in Mexico in depth and supported it.

He saw the world and societies not as a fixed entity or a system of pure domination by the actors, but as something in permanent transformation through the actions and ideas of social actors and movements.

Finally, it is worth mentioning his strong ties to Latin America and its processes, from the late 1950s in Chile to the present day. He trained several generations of prominent Latin American sociologists who attended his courses in Paris. He also demonstrated extreme fraternity and solidarity with students and colleagues persecuted by Latin American dictatorships, including myself.

Today, as I bid farewell to the Master, years later, I still remember with nostalgia his master classes on Thursday mornings, in Paris, rue Monsieur le Prince.

Some of his books: 

Evolution of Workers' Labor in Renault Factories, 1955; Sociology of Action, 1965; Workers' Consciousness, 1966; Post-Industrial Society, 1969; Life and Death of Popular Chile, 1973; Equality and Diversity, 1977; The Word and the Blood: Politics and Society in Latin America, 1988; The Voice and the Gaze, 1978; How to Get Out of Liberalism, 1999; What is Democracy?; The End of Societies, 2013; Can We Live Together?; Defense of Modernity, 2018.

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Alain Touraine, Sociologist of social and cultural change

Geoffrey PleyersVice President of the International Sociological Association

French sociologist Alain Touraine passed away on June 9, 2023. Through his personal life (his wife, Adriana Arenas, was Chilean) and intellectual pursuits, he was closely linked to Latin America. They were in Santiago during Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government and during Pinochet's coup. Fifteen years later, his major work on Latin America, "The Word and the Blood," was published, portraying a continent marked by military dictatorships and the hopes of those who brought them down. During his time in Latin America, he gave countless lectures and mentored dozens of sociologists. 

Born in 1925, Touraine graduated with a degree in history from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1950. He dedicated the first twenty years of his career to sociological research on industrial society and the great social conflict that drove it. Work was then at the heart of social life, and Touraine deeply valued it. However, he was also one of the first to grasp the sweeping change that post-industrial society would bring from the late 1960s onward. Conflicts over the distribution of resources did not disappear, nor did factories cease to operate, but in the emerging society, culture, education, information, and communication progressively surpassed the production of material goods in shaping society and social conflicts. Domination was not only played out in the workplace, but also in other arenas such as education, consumerism, and information. Therefore, resistance and societal transformation were also played out in these arenas. With the expansion of access to higher education and the consumption of material and cultural goods, workers launched mass strikes, and the peoples of Eastern Europe, African American students in the United States, and students in Mexico demanded democracy. Far removed 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 remained dominant. Touraine was then teaching at Nanterre, a university at the heart of the Parisian protests, where he defended his student Daniel Cohn-Bendit. He remained convinced that the cultural and social model of industrial society was doomed.

This post-industrial society emerging before his eyes was studied through the social movements that produced it: students, feminists, environmentalists, and the Polish Solidarity trade union. Gradually, Touraine increasingly gave space and importance to the personal subject, to the individual seeking to become the author of their own life and an ethical actor in their society. He came to consider this personal subject a central historical actor in the contemporary world. From this perspective, Touraine perceived, before many others, the growing importance of asserting dignity and demanding respect in contemporary movements. He considered Zapatismo one of the movements that best embodied this perspective. At 71, he traveled to the jungles of southeastern Mexico to participate in the First Intergalactic Encounter. He returned five years later with great enthusiasm for the March of the Color of the Earth, which led the Zapatistas to Mexico City in 2001. The centrality of asserting dignity in the face of oppressive systems and regimes was to spread across all continents with the revolutions and citizen uprisings that marked the 2010s, from the Arab Spring to the Chilean uprising. But the affirmation of the individual also plays out in less visible spaces, even in daily life and the internal conflicts of individuals, in “a resistance of the singular being to mass production, mass consumption, and mass communication through mass media. We cannot oppose this invasion through universal principles, but we can through the resistance of our singular experience,” Touraine wrote in 2002.

Society had changed drastically since the industrial society in which Touraine had grown up and initially conducted his research. This change wasn't limited to material factors or the flows of information so brilliantly studied by his student Manuel Castells. Its main "cultural orientations" had also shifted. As he explained in 2005, "it has become difficult to believe that, [as was the case in industrial society] only by integrating ourselves into society, its norms and laws, can human beings become free and responsible individuals." In our world, it is no longer society and the social sphere that constitute the criteria for defining good and evil, but rather the individual—the subject—within their creative freedom and as the creator of their own existence, the author of their life and their ethics. But in opposition to them arose new “total powers”, which seek to exert control over cultural orientations even in the most intimate aspects of the individual, and reactionary movements that, behind the old call for order, opposed the emancipations of worthy subjects in our era of late modernity to which he dedicated his work in the last 15 years.

He continued working tirelessly until the very end, always driven by the power of his ideas and his desire to understand the world. At 97, his thinking remained as sharp as ever. And, as always, he was working on his next book. 

Touraine leaves behind a world in turmoil. We will miss his analyses and his ability to understand it. But he also leaves us with analytical and conceptual tools, a vision of the world and of sociology, and dozens of Latin American sociologists whom he trained or inspired to understand the contemporary world and, from there, contribute to transforming it. He taught us all to see the world and societies not as a fixed entity, dominated by a set of structures, or a system of pure domination by actors, but as a historical and social configuration in transformation through the actions and ideas of actors and social movements. His legacy is immense.

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