Former French Minister of Health Marisol Touraine, daughter of the renowned sociologist, announced the death of her father. Alain Touraine, who was one of the pioneers in the concept of the “post-industrial society” and a specialist in the social evolution of France in the second half of the 20th century, passed away in Paris at the age of 97.
Touraine was a pioneer in researching contemporary social movements and changes in France around the 1950s. He was also a scholar of the working class in Chile, where he met his wife, Chilean researcher Adriana Arenas Pizarro, who passed away in 1990. They met during the creation of the Center for Research on the Sociology of Work at the University of Chile.
With more than twenty books to his name and countless articles, Touraine also published his doctoral thesis, “Sociology of Action” (1964), in which he proposed the analysis of society through the economic realm and the study of the groups that comprise it. His complementary work, “The Worker’s Consciousness,” was published two years later.
Touraine experienced working in the mines to understand the employer-worker relationship.
Touraine was born on August 3, 1925, in the community of Hermanville-sur-Mer, in northwestern France. He studied History and worked as a miner from 1947 to 1948 to firsthand experience the relationship between workers and bosses in that type of activity.
Between 1950 and 1958, he was a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). In 1968, he published “The May Movement or Utopian Communism,” based on the student and worker protests that took place in France that year, which led him to expand his field of study.
He was one of the experts who predicted the arrival of the “post-industrial society,” a concept that examines the social consequences of how immaterial elements (knowledge and information) have replaced machines as sources of wealth and power.
The sociologist also showed interest in feminism and regionalist movements in France, and after the coup d’état by Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1973, he published “Life and Death of the Popular Chile.” In 2010, he received the Prince of Asturias Award in the Communication and Humanities category.
Another of his studies focused on the genesis and development of the independent Polish trade union Solidarity, which led to the downfall of the communist regime and marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet regime.
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