André Gorz

André Gorz (Vienna, 1923 – Vosnon, 2007), born Gerhart Hirsch, was an Austrian-born French philosopher and journalist. His work moves between philosophy, political theory and social criticism. He began as a follower of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist Marxism and ended as one of the leading voices of political ecology and of the debate about work. He matters because he shaped the European New Left of the second half of the twentieth century and much of the ecological thought that followed.

He was the son of a Jewish merchant and a Catholic mother. Growing up amid rising anti-Semitism, he saw his father convert to Catholicism. In 1939 he was sent to Switzerland to avoid being called up into the German army, and there he trained as a chemical engineer at Lausanne. In those years he became interested in phenomenology and, in 1946, met Sartre, whose existentialism left a lasting mark on him. He settled in Paris in 1949 and began a journalistic career under the pen name Michel Bosquet, first at L'Express and then, in 1964, as co-founder with Jean Daniel of Le Nouvel Observateur. His early books explored alienation and individual autonomy, arguing that personal liberation is a precondition for social transformation. After May 1968 he turned to political ecology. In works such as Écologie et politique (1975) and Adieux au prolétariat (1980) he questioned whether the working class could remain the sole revolutionary subject. He also argued for a guaranteed basic income independent of employment. His ideas influenced ecologism, degrowth and the alter-globalisation movement, and he maintained a close intellectual relationship with Ivan Illich.