Georges Friedmann (1902–1977)

Georges Friedmann was born in Paris, France, where his German-born parents Adolphe Friedmann, a merchant, and Elizabeth Nathan Friedmann had moved after their marriage in Berlin in 1882.

After a brief period studying industrial chemistry, he prepared for the philosophy agrégation at the Lycée Henri IV. He then studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure from 1923 to 1926. He served as an assistant to sociologist Célestin Bouglé at the Centre de documentation sociale and later the Rockefeller Foundation.

He began to write for the magazines Monde, Clarté, Europe, and for the daily newspaper L'Humanité. He took an interest in the psycho-sociological aspects of the industrialized world of work. He learned Russian at the Institut des langues orientales (Institute of Oriental Languages). Between 1932 and 1936, Friedmann made three trips to the Soviet Union that inspired two of his early books: La Crise du progrès (1936), in which he tried to show that Marxism gave a more human meaning to technical progress; and De la sainte Russie à l'U.R.S.S. (1938). However, after he castigated the Stalinist cult of personality and the Moscow show trials, he was expelled from all the French pacifist and Communist organizations to which he then belonged. At the start of World War II, he took his family to Toulouse and joined the French Resistance. His journals from the war years, published posthumously in 1987, recounted his experiences; he wrote that he escaped the Gestapo in 1943 and was hidden in a school in Dordogne by a pair of young schoolteachers. After the war, Friedmann received his Doctorat d'état with a major thesis on automation and mechanization in industrial production and a minor thesis on Leibniz and Spinoza, both of them published.
His
book Problèmes humains du machinisme industriel (1946) is considered a founding text of French sociologie du travail (sociology of work), and the re-founding of French sociology after the war. He played a major role in the creation of the Centre d'études sociologues and the Institute des Sciences Sociales du Travail. He was close to the Philosophies group that included Georges Politzer, Norbert Gutermann, Paul Nizan, and Henri Lefebvre. The group's initial journal, Esprit, and its successor, Philosophies, were funded by Friedmann's personal wealth, inherited from his father. He later founded the Centre d'études de communications de masse (CECMAS) at the École pratiques des hautes études, whose early participants included Edgar Morin and Roland Barthes.

Friedmann continued to travel extensively around the world, observing and publishing on labor practices and industrial models. His book The End of the Jewish People?, one of the few of his works to be translated into English, attracted much media attention in the USA. His final work, La Puissance et la Sagesse (1970), was a mixture of autobiography and reflection on contemporary society. In 1937,

Friedmann married his first wife, Hania Olszweska, a Polish Catholic, with whom he had a daughter. After her death in 1957, he remarried Marcelle Rémond in 1960. He donated a large part of his wealth to the Fondation Curie.