Lucien Sève facts for kids

Lucien Sève ([ly.sjɛ̃ sɛv]; born December 9, 1926 – died March 23, 2020) was a French thinker, a member of the Communist Party, and an activist. He was an active part of the French Communist Party from 1950 to 2010. His book from 1969, Marxisme et théorie de la personnalité (which means Marxism and the theory of personality), has been translated into 25 different languages. Sève passed away on March 23, 2020, due to COVID-19.

Lucien Sève's Life and Career

Lucien Sève was born in 1926 in a French town called Chambéry. His parents ran a company that published books for children. He went to school at the Lycée de Chambéry and the Lycée du Parc. In 1945, Sève started studying at the École normale supérieure, which is a very famous school in Paris. He earned a special degree in philosophy called agrégation in 1949.

After finishing his studies, he became a philosophy teacher at a high school (called a lycée) in Brussels. However, he later lost this job because of his strong beliefs in Marxism. Marxism is a way of thinking about society, economics, and politics, based on the ideas of Karl Marx.

From 1952 to 1953, Sève served in the military in Algeria. After his military service, he worked at the Lycée Saint-Charles [fr] in Marseille.

In 1952, Sève married Françoise Guille in Gap, Hautes-Alpes. They had two children together. Françoise passed away in 2011. Lucien Sève died on March 23, 2020, at the age of 93, from COVID-19.

Political Ideas and Activities

Lucien Sève was a strong supporter of Marxist ideas. He believed in the views of other French Marxist thinkers like Louis Althusser. Sève thought that the French Communist Party should include some ideas about humanism in their Marxist philosophy. Humanism focuses on human values and concerns.

However, Sève also wanted Marxism to be based on science, not just on human feelings. This was a bit different from what many other Communist parties in Western Europe were thinking at the time. Many of these parties, including the French Communist Party, were moving towards social democracy, which is a political system that mixes some socialist ideas with a capitalist economy.

Sève was also very interested in how Marxism connected with psychology, which is the study of the mind and behavior. He supported a Communist system where the Communist Party was the main power. Some people compared his ideas to the way the Soviet Union was run under Joseph Stalin. But after Stalin died, Sève supported the idea of De-Stalinization, which meant moving away from Stalin's harsh policies.

In the 1980s, Sève helped create a committee for medical ethics called the Comité consultatif national d'éthique (CCNE). This committee discusses right and wrong in medicine. He was a member of this committee from 1983 to 2000. He supported testing on embryos, but only if they were extra embryos from IVF (a way to help people have babies). He saw embryos as "the potential of a human being," so he thought it was wrong to use them just for testing.

Sève also had strong ideas about how a biography (a life story) of a Marxist should be written. He believed in very specific rules for these biographies. He also helped start a big project called the Grande Édition de Marx et d'Engels [fr], which aimed to translate and publish all the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In 2019, he said in an interview that Communism is still important today, and that Karl Marx was far ahead of his time.

In 1950, Sève joined the French Communist Party (PCF). He became a member of their Central Committee in 1961 and stayed on it until 1994. From 1970 to 1982, he was in charge of the PCF's publishing house. He was chosen for this role because party members thought he was one of their smartest thinkers.

In the 1980s, Sève started to disagree with the PCF's leaders. In 1984, he suggested that the party needed to be completely remade because he felt it had lost its way. Sève left the party in 2010. He said he left because the party didn't have much public support in recent elections, and he didn't like the party's youth group.

Lucien Sève's Writings

In 1969, Lucien Sève wrote an important book called Marxisme et théorie de la personnalité (Marxism and theory of personality). This book has been translated into 25 different languages around the world.

His 1978 book, Man in Marxist theory and the psychology of personality, looked at how a person's personality is shaped by their social relationships. This idea was very different from the views of some other psychologists, like Hans Eysenck, who thought personality was mostly about a mix of genes and things learned over time.

In 1990, he wrote Communisme : quel second souffle? (Communism: what a second wind?). From 2004 to 2019, he worked on a large four-volume series called Penser avec Marx aujourd’hui (Thinking with Marx today). In these books, Sève wanted to point out what he saw as problems with different ways of understanding Marxism. This included ideas from Joseph Stalin, and theories from other thinkers like Louis Althusser and Gilles Deleuze that Sève believed did not fit with true Marxism. The first book in this series was called Marx et nous (Marx and us), and the second, published in 2008, was titled L'homme? (The Person?). In 2008, he received an award from the Union rationaliste.

See also

In Spanish: Lucien Sève para niños