French political philosopher Andre Glucksmann, who began his career as a Marxist and later rejected communism and criticized Russia, has died.
Glucksmann, the son of Jewish immigrants from Hungary, died Tuesday, Nov. 10 in Paris at 78. He had battled cancer for several years.
His 1975 book, La Cuisinière et le Mangeur d’Hommes, criticized Marxism, which Glucksmann said leads to totalitarianism. It also drew parallels between Nazism and communism. He became known as a “New Philosopher,” part of a group of philosophers who broke with Marxism in the early 1970s.
He advocated Western intervention in global conflicts, such as supporting NATO’s bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999, the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Western military intervention in Libya.
His experience during World War II as a Jewish child in France during the Nazi occupation, which he wrote about in his 2006 autobiography A Child’s Rage, shaped his view of international intervention in such conflicts.
The French-Jewish intellectual Bernard- Henri Levy said of Glucksmann, “He was the only one of my contemporaries with whom I had the feeling of sharing the same fears about the world.” (JTA)