André Gorz | |
---|---|
Born |
Gerhart Hirsch 9 February 1923 Vienna, Austria |
Died | 22 September 2007 Vosnon, France |
(aged 84)
Other names | Gérard Horst, Michel Bosquet |
Era | 20th-century philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
André Gorz (9 February 1923 – 22 September 2007), pen name of Gérard Horst, born Gerhart Hirsch, also known by his pen name Michel Bosquet, was a social philosopher. Also a journalist, 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. His central theme was wage labour issues such as liberation from work, the just distribution of work, social alienation, and a guaranteed basic income.
Born in Vienna as Gerhart Hirsch, he was the son of a Jewish wood-salesman and of 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 spreading anti-Semitism of the time led his father to convert to Catholicism in 1930. At the outbreak of World War II (1939), his mother sent him to an institution in Switzerland to avoid his mobilization into the Wehrmacht. Thereafter, Hirsch was a stateless person until 1954, when he was naturalized French thanks to Pierre Mendès-France's support. He graduated from the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne in chemical engineering in 1945.