Lucien Sève

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Lucien Sève (born December 9, 1926 in Chambéry ; † March 23, 2020 in Paris ) was a French philosopher , communist and political activist .

Life

Sève's parents ran a children's book publisher. He studied at the Lycée de Chambéry and the Lycée du Parc and entered the École normal supérieure in 1945 , where he completed his studies in philosophy in 1949. He became a philosophy teacher at a Lycée in Brussels and later had to give up this activity due to his Marxist beliefs. From 1952 to 1953 Sève did his military service in Algeria . After his military service he worked at the Lycée Saint-Charles in Marseille .

From 1950 to 2010 he was an active member of the French Communist Party (PCF). His 1969 work on topics of Marxism and personality theory, entitled Marxism and Theory of Personality , has been translated into 25 different languages.

In 1952 Sève married Françoise Guille in Gap and they had two children, one of whom died in 2011.

Sève died as a result of COVID-19 .

Political activity

Sève supported the views of the French Marxist philosophers Louis Althusser and Roger Garaudy , arguing that the PCF should follow some humanistic aspects of Marxist philosophy. However, Sève also focused on a scientific, rather than a purely humanistic or non-humanistic, basis for Marxism, something that differed from most of the Western European Marxist ideas of the time. Most of the Western European communist parties, including the French Communist Party, were moving towards social democracy. He also focused on the relationship between Marxism and psychology. He supported a communist regime in which the Communist Party was the dominant force, and as such, his views were compared to the USSR by Joseph Stalin . Nevertheless, after the death of Stalin, Sève supported the de-Stalinization of the USSR. In the 1980s, Sève supported the establishment of the Comité consultatif national d'éthique (CCNE) medical ethics committee. From 1983 to 2000 he was a member of the CCNE committee. He was a proponent of embryo testing, but only on surplus IVF embryos. He viewed embryos as "the potential of a human being" and therefore found it unethical to use them solely for testing. Sève also had very strong views on how a Marxist biography should be written. His works contained very specific, if almost unattainable, criteria that, in his opinion, should be adhered to for all Marxist biographies. He was a founding member of the Grande Édition de Marx et d'Engels project, which aimed to translate and republish all works by Marx and Friedrich Engels . In 2019, on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sève gave an interview in which he said that communism is relevant today and that Karl Marx was centuries ahead of his time.

In 1950 Sève joined the French Communist Party (PCF). He was elected to the Central Committee in 1961 and remained elected until 1994. From 1970 to 1982 he headed the PCF publishing house. He was appointed because the PCF members considered him one of the best intellectuals in the party. In 1970 he took part in a panel discussion organized by Catherine Clément, which was also attended by Serge Leclaire and André Green. In the 1980s, Sève began to distance himself from the PCF after disagreeing with the political leaders. In 1984 he proposed a re-establishment of the PCF because the party had lost its way. Sève withdrew from the party in 2010, citing the party's lack of political support in the 2007 French presidential election and the 2010 French regional election, as well as his dislike of the party's younger movement.

plant

Sève became known in German-speaking countries with his original work Marxism and Theory of Personality , which appeared in the GDR for the first time in 1972 in German, and then enjoyed multiple editions as a licensed edition by the Marxist papers until the 1980s. In 2016 a new edition was published by Argument Verlag.

Publications (selection)

  • Marxism and theory of personality , Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1972 ( Marxisme et théorie de la personalité , Paris 1969).
  • About the materialistic dialectic , Verlag Marxistische Blätter, Frankfurt am Main 1976, ISBN 978-3-88012-374-8 .
  • Marxist analysis of alienation , Verlag Marxistische Blätter, Frankfurt am Main 1978, ISBN 978-3-88012-542-1 .
  • Change the world - change your life. New edition of the classic "Marxism and Theory of Personality" , Argument Verlag, Hamburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-86754-107-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ La mort du philosophe marxiste Lucien Sève. In: Le Monde. March 24, 2020, accessed March 30, 2020 (French).
  2. ↑ Lucien Sève: son œuvre restera une contribution majeure. In: Gauchebdo. March 24, 2020, accessed March 30, 2020 (French).
  3. ↑ La critique n'est pas le reniement: homage to Lucien Sève. In: www.marianne.net. March 24, 2020, accessed March 30, 2020 (French).
personal data
SURNAME Sève, Lucien
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French philosopher, communist and political activist
DATE OF BIRTH December 9, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Chambery
DATE OF DEATH March 23, 2020
Place of death Paris