Henri de Man
| Henri De Man | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
Henri De Man 17 November 1885 Antwerp, Belgium |
| Died | 20 June 1953 (aged 67) Greng, Switzerland |
| Nationality | Belgium |
| Occupation | politician |
Henri De Man (Dutch: Hendrik de Man; 17 November 1885 – 20 June 1953) was a Belgian politician and leader of the Belgian Labour Party (POB-BWP). He was one of the leading socialist theoreticians of his period and, during the German occupation of Belgium during World War II, was heavily involved in collaboration.
A politically-active socialist, he nevertheless fought with the Belgian army and supported the Allied cause in World War I. After the war, he taught sociology for a time at the University of Washington, then started a workers' education school in Belgium, before moving back to Germany where he taught for some years at the University of Frankfurt. He was at odds there with the predominant, leftwing and communist movements surrounding some of his colleagues. He was allied with Eugen Diderichs, a conservative publisher in Jena. Henri de Man's anti-semitism, expressed openly in his memoir of 1941, Apres Coup, developed during his years in Germany, although he lived in marriage with at least one Jewish woman (Apres Coup, Brussels: Editions de la Toison d'Or, 1941.]
Returning to Belgium after the Reichstag fire (his books were not popular with Hitler, and de Man was always a maverick relative to others' ideologies) he became Vice President of the Belgian Labour Party (POB-BWP). Upon the death of Emile Vandervelde in 1938, he assumed its presidency.
His views on socialism and his revision of Marxism were controversial. His promotion of the idea of "planisme", or planning, was widely influential in the early 1930s, in particular among the Non-Conformist Movement in France, a movement also called the Third Way; he was connected briefly to the Personalist Emmanuel Mounier, and even thought of himself as something of a "13th century Thomist." [See John Hellman]
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