Lucien Goldmann facts for kids

Lucien Goldmann (born July 20, 1913 – died October 8, 1970) was a smart French thinker. He was a philosopher, which means he studied big ideas about life and knowledge. He was also a sociologist, someone who studies how societies work.

Goldmann was born in Romania but later became a French citizen. He taught at a famous school in Paris called the EHESS. He was known for his ideas about Marxism, a way of thinking about society and economics.

Biography: Lucien Goldmann's Life Story

Lucien Goldmann was born in Bucharest, Romania. He grew up in a town called Botoşani. He first studied law at the University of Bucharest and the University of Vienna. One of his teachers was Max Adler, who was a Marxist thinker from Austria.

In 1934, Goldmann moved to Paris, France. There, he studied many subjects like economics, literature, and philosophy. During World War II, in November 1942, he went to Switzerland to escape the war. He stayed in a refugee camp for a short time.

Later, a famous psychologist named Jean Piaget helped him. Piaget arranged for Goldmann to get a scholarship at the University of Zurich. In 1945, Goldmann earned his PhD in philosophy there. His main project was about the ideas of a very important philosopher named Immanuel Kant.

Philosophy: Goldmann's Big Ideas

In the 1950s and 1960s, many thinkers in Paris believed that Marxism was a perfect "science." But Lucien Goldmann thought differently. He believed that Marxism was facing big problems and needed new ideas to survive.

He didn't agree with the old Marxist ideas about the working class, called the proletariat. He also disagreed with a popular movement called Structural Marxism. Because of these differences, his own work was sometimes overlooked. However, important thinkers like Jean Piaget and Alasdair MacIntyre admired him. MacIntyre even called him "the finest and most intelligent Marxist of the age."

Thinking About the Future

Goldmann didn't see humanity's future as something that would just happen automatically. Instead, he saw it as a "wager" or a gamble. This idea was similar to the philosopher Blaise Pascal's idea about believing in God.

Goldmann wrote that life involves "risk." This means there's a chance of failure, but also hope for success. He believed that combining these ideas into a kind of "faith" or "wager" is a key part of being human. He described his own work as "dialectical" (meaning it looked at opposing ideas to find truth) and "humanist" (meaning it focused on human values and potential).

Genetic Structuralism

In the 1960s, Goldmann created a theory called genetic structuralism. This theory tried to combine the ideas of Jean Piaget (who studied how knowledge develops) with the Marxist ideas of György Lukács.

Goldmann was a "humanist socialist." This means he believed in a society where people work together for the good of everyone, with a focus on human dignity. He was also very well-known for how he used sociology to study literature. Later in his life, he became an important critic of structuralism, which was another way of thinking that looked at the underlying structures of language and culture.

See also

In Spanish: Lucien Goldmann para niños