French philosopher Andre Gluck-smann, a former Maoist who veered to the right after condemning the crimes of communism, has died at the age of 78, his son said Tuesday.
French philosopher Andre Gluck-smann, a former Maoist who veered to the right after condemning the crimes of communism, has died at the age of 78, his son said Tuesday.
The passionately political thinker rose to prominence in the 1970s alongside Bernard-Henri Levy as one of the France’s “New Philosophers”, who broke with Marxism after street protests brought the country to the brink of revolution in 1968. “My first and best friend is no more,” wrote Raphael Glucksmann on Facebook, describing his father as “a good and excellent man”.
Strongly influenced by the Russian dissident Alexa-nder Solzhenitsyn’s account of his time as a political prisoner in The Gulag Archipelago, Glucksmann railed against Soviet totalitarianism in his book The Cook and the Cannibal (1975), setting him on a collision course with leftwing existentialist intellectuals led by Jean-Paul Sartre.
But despite their differences, Glucksmann managed to persuade Sartre to join with France’s then leading rightwing thinker Raymond Aron in campaigning for the Vietnamese “boat people” as they fled its communist regime in their thousands in 1979. His friend, the writer and phil-osopher Pascal Bruckner, who has followed a similar path from left to right, told French radio that Glucks-mann would be remembered for “delivering the staggering blow against communist thinking in France.
Having survived as a Jewish child in Nazi-occupied France — a trauma which he recounted in his 2006 book A Child’s Rage — Glucksmann became an advocate of international military invention, accusing the West of often “deliberate blindness” to the evils around it.
