André Gorz

Origins and early life

André Gorz was born Gerhart Hirsch on 9 February 1923 in Vienna, the son of a Jewish timber merchant and a Catholic mother.

Work and career

As antisemitism rose, his father converted to Catholicism in 1930 and changed the family name — the facts are set out in Willy Gianinazzi's reference biography — and Gorz would later describe himself as an 'inauthentic half-breed', a phrase that says how the divided inheritance shaped him; he figures in this directory by his documented Jewish father, and this fiche states the conversion plainly. Sent to school in Switzerland, he studied chemical engineering in Lausanne, met Sartre, and became a philosopher and a journalist in Paris, where he was one of the founders of Le Nouvel Observateur in 1964.

Under his own name and the pen name Michel Bosquet he wrote the books that made him the theorist of political ecology and of the critique of work — Ecology as Politics, Farewell to the Working Class (1980), Critique of Economic Reason — arguing decades ahead of the debate that growth without limit was neither possible nor desirable. His last book, Letter to D., was a love letter to his wife Dorine, ill and inseparable from him; on 22 September 2007, in their house at Vosnon, the two chose to die together.