Georges Friedmann was the third president of the International Sociological Association.
13 Facts About Georges Friedmann
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Georges Friedmann was born in Paris, where his parents moved after their marriage in Berlin in 1892.
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Georges Friedmann studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure from 1923 to 1926.
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Georges Friedmann served as an assistant to the sociologist Celestin Bougle at the Centre de documentation sociale, a social science research center at the ENS funded by the banker Albert Kahn and, later, the Rockefeller Foundation.
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Georges Friedmann eventually donated a large part of the fortune to the Fondation Curie for cancer research.
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Georges Friedmann married his first wife, Hania Olszweska, a Polish Catholic, in 1937.
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Georges Friedmann later wrote that he escaped the Gestapo in 1943, and was hidden in a school in Dordogne by a pair of young schoolteachers.
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Georges Friedmann identified as a secular Jew his entire life, but anti-Semitism, the horrors of the Holocaust, and later his engagement with the young state of Israel led him to become more sympathetic to and more engaged with the Jewish people, though usually from a distance as an observer and not as a whole-hearted member of any particular religious community.
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Georges Friedmann received his Doctorat d'etat in 1946, with his major thesis on mechanization in industrial production and minor thesis on Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza, both published as monographs.
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Georges 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.
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Georges Friedmann's book is considered a founding text of French sociologie du travail, and he was influential in the refounding of French sociology after World War II, playing a major role in the foundations of the Centre d'etudes sociologues and the Institute des Sciences Sociales du Travail.
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Georges Friedmann later founded the Centre d'etudes de communications de masse at the Ecole pratiques des hautes etudes, whose early participants included Edgar Morin and Roland Barthes.
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Georges 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.