A few hours ago, the sociologist Alain Touraine died in Paris. I was unexpectedly moved by his departure, even though he was already 97 years old. Maybe because I owe him a good part of my approach to life.
He took me in as a student in the early 80’s. In Chile, social protests showed their limits as a way to end the dictatorship. He felt orphaned because he lacked an intellectual framework to enlighten how the restoration of democracy could be achieved. Since then I had felt an affinity for his thoughts that I could not define. I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe it was a common Catholic matrix. In any case, I was satisfied with his vision of society as a conflicted mystery animated by culture and social actors; something that was in the antipodes of the discourse we heard incessantly in Chile back then, when the Chicago Boys told us that society doesn’t exist, that only the “laws of nature” of economics exist.
As a student I had the opportunity to see it in action. We solemnly arrived at his seminary at 10 a.m. on Thursday. He spoke for two hours based on notes he had written in small, incomprehensible handwriting on a blank piece of paper. He freely expressed what he researched and pondered, which would much later take the form of a book. He succeeded in doing this by continuously embedding historical references and contingent themes. Not what was happening on the elegant political stage, but what was happening underground, in social relations, in the cultural turmoil. At that time she was interested in trade unions and the world of work – a constant throughout her life -, regionalist and feminist movements, dissidents in real socialist countries, especially Poland. In these questions he was no mere observer. He assembled teams of researchers and students and went on-site to meet in person the forces shaping the society of the future. He did it with passion, as a militant would. But his thing, I insist, was not politics: it was society, in the uncontrollable dynamics of which he believed he saw historical changes.
In short, Touraine did not teach only or mainly through his books and lectures: he did so with the vital attitude he maintained towards the life that was born and flowed beneath the surface, which could sprout in unexpected bursts: the Paris of 1968 , the Chile of 73, the feminist demand in France, the trade union movement in the Gdańsk shipyards. He did it with humility; at least all the humility that one might ask in the French intellectual environment of a “Mandarin” educated at the École Normale Superior.
Unlike, for example, Bourdieu – his anti-brother – Touraine opposed the sociologist, who relied on his conceptual tools and assumed the role of interpreter of the social actor in order to uncover the meaning of his actions. This vision, he said, typical of Marxism, is useful to a political activist, not a sociologist. He asked him to listen to the actors’ voices and give them a space in which to discover the origin and projection of their collective behavior. He called this method “sociological intervention”. We used it in Chile during the dictatorship together with Francois Dubet and a group of colleagues from SUR. Our goal was to understand the movement of the settlers and, with it, the possibility of continuing to dream of a way out of the popular uprising-type dictatorship.
Touraine had a special affinity with Chile. He first came in 1956 at the invitation of the Universidad del Chile to study the Lota miners. His wife Adriana Arenas, whom he always admired greatly because she gave him an emotional anchor in the world, was a proud Chilean. He was here in the last months of Allende, which he used to write a sociological diary, which he later published as Vida y muerte del Chile Popular, a book that became a classic about the catastrophe that the departure from the political will leads (in this case revolutionary) with the movements that shake up society (in this case especially the middle class).
Although Chilean students are already a luminary in the French intellectual firmament, they always find a source of support in Touraine. He ran a laboratory (the Center for Sociological Intervention) around which we all revolved, but there was never that sectarian spirit so traditional in the French academy around him. On the contrary: he always had great respect for the freedom of thought of his students.
I give an example. Under his tutelage, I became obsessed with Durkheim, whose ideas eventually became the leitmotif of my PhD thesis on the sociology of Pinochetism. He didn’t particularly like the Bordeaux thinker: Touraine was motivated by conflict, not order like Durkheim. I remember like yesterday the time he sat in front of him in his little office and looked at me and said. “I understand that you like Durkheim. He comes from Chile, from a society torn apart by conflict. It seems natural to me that she is looking for a basis for building an order that will make it possible to restore peace and coexistence. If you find him in Durkheim, keep going. I did it like this. As a result, I became intellectually distant from Touraine (and from him, by the way), although we have always maintained a relationship of great respect and friendship.
Over time, however, I came to understand it better, perhaps because of the course Chilean society took after the democratic transition, when excess order became a pathology. I also began to better appreciate the value of Touraine’s break with what some call sociological Leninism: the notion that sociology is to social action what the vanguard party is to politics: its enlightened interpreter. In fact, I gave up that claim decades ago and viewed the profession of sociologist as one of listening, relating, interacting, and facilitating eventual agreement.
Chile was Alain Touraine’s second home. It was here that his affection for Adriana developed, which he passed on to his children and grandchildren. For the same reason, his ideas and his personality will continue to be present because they helped shape Chile today.
Eugenio Tironi He has a doctorate in sociology and is the author of The impatient society (Ariel, 2023).