Georges Friedmann

Biography

Friedmann was the last child of Adolphe Friedmann (1857-1922), a Berlin merchant, and Elizabeth Nathan (1871-1940). He was born in Paris, where his parents moved after their marriage in Berlin in 1882. They acquired French nationality in 1903. Friedmann's sister, Marcelle Dujarric de la Rivière, was a member of the high French bourgeoisie, and maintained a salon at her hôtel particulier in Boulogne-Billancourt from 1930 to 1970.

After a brief period studying industrial chemistry, Friedmann prepared for the philosophy agrégation at the prestigious Lycée Henri IV in Paris. He studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure from 1923-1926. He received his Doctorat d'état in 1946, with his major thesis on mechanization in industrial production and minor thesis on Leibniz and Spinoza, both published as monographs.

Friedmann joined the French Resistance during World War II, when he was hunted by the Nazi Gestapo due to his Jewish heritage. He later wrote that he escaped the Gestapo in 1943, and was hidden in a school in Dordogne by a pair of young schoolteachers.^[2] Friedmann's journals from the war, published posthumously in 1987, recounted his experiences as a member of the resistance.

Scholarly work

At the ENS, Friedmann was close to the Philosophies group that opposed the influence of Henri Bergson and was influential in bringing Marx’s earlier philosophical texts to France, and 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.

During the 1930s, Friedmann made several trips to the Soviet Union, where observed the Soviet industry and technology. His 1938 book, De la Sainte Russie à l’U.R.S.S. established him as an authority on Soviet society in France. But even his moderate criticisms of the U.S.S.R. and Stalin caused bitter conflict with members of the French Communist Party and began Friedmann’s move away from political activism.

Friedmann’s doctoral thesis, published after the end of the war in 1946, examined the “human problems” of automation and mechanization European industrial production. A critical, historical overview of paradigms of industrial management, particularly scientific management, industrial psychology, and human relations, Problèmes humains du machinisme industriel examined social scientists’ efforts to “humanize” industrial labor that had been fragmented and de-skilled by industrialization and Taylorism. Friedmann argued that while these efforts were an improvement on the “technicist ideology” of management engineering, social science would not lead to significant changes in labor practices without class conflict and the transformation of the capitalist economic system.

Friedmann’s book is considered a founding text of French sociologie du travail, and his seminar influenced a number of younger sociologists, historians, and philosophers, including Edgar Morin and Alain Touraine. While holding various professorships and serving as the head of the French Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Friedmann continued to travel extensively around the world, observing and publishing on labor practices and industrial models in the United States, Israel, and South America. His analysis of the nature of the Jewish people and Israeli society in The End of the Jewish People?, one of his few works to be translated into English, attracted media attention in the United States.

Friedmann gradually shifted from emphasis on labor to a broader concern with “technical civilization.” His final book, La Puissance et la Sagesse, a mixture of autobiography and reflection on contemporary society, modified his earlier Marxism and emphasized the importance of interiority and morality on humanizing postwar consumer society.