Claude Riveline

Origins and early life

Claude Riveline was born in the third arrondissement of Paris on 16 September 1936, into a Jewish family from Lithuania; his parents Léon and Esther Riveline were shoe merchants, and he was a descendant of the Gaon of Vilna.

Work and career

He came out of the École polytechnique in 1956, entered the Corps des mines and reached the rank of ingénieur général in 1987. From 1967 to 2006 he taught management at the École des mines in Paris and founded there the Centre de gestion scientifique, teaching a sociology of organisations deliberately removed from mathematical modelling: his students learned to look at what people in an organisation actually do and actually fear, rather than at the figures.

One of his formulations became a proverb of French management teaching — the cost of a good does not exist, only the cost of a decision exists. From the 1960s he took a full part in French-speaking Jewish intellectual life, alongside Emmanuel Levinas and Vladimir Jankélévitch, and he applied to the reading of Jewish texts the same attention to what men do with rules that he applied to firms. The chief rabbi conferred on him the title of haver in 1980. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine on 9 December 2024.