FRIEDMANN, GEORGES

FRIEDMANN, GEORGES (1902–1977), French sociologist, born in Paris, educated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the University of Paris. During World War II he organized the resistance movement in the Toulouse region. Friedmann, an expert in vocational education and the sociology of work and industry, was appointed inspector general of technical education in France in 1945 and participated in the work of the commission for educational reform. Friedmann became professor for the history of labor at the Conservatoire des Arts et des Métiers in 1946 and director of studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes at the Sorbonne in 1948; he was administrator of the Centre d'Etudes Sociologiques, 1949–51. In 1956 he was president of the International Sociological Association. His position in industrial sociology is that the psycho-physiological problems of labor in industry must be considered notonly within the individual enterprise, but also in the context of the larger social structure and cannot be solved without comprehensive changes in the social order. Among his major works are Problémes du machinisme en U.R.S.S. et dans les pays capitalistes (1934), La crise du progrès: Esquisse d'histoire des idées (1895–1935) (1936), De la Sainte Russie à l'U.R.S.S. (1938), Leibniz et Spinoza (1946), Les problèmes humains du machinisme industriel (1946), Humanisme du travail et humanités (1950), Où va le travail humain? (1951), and Le travail en miettes; spécialisation et loisirs (1956). Friedmann was editor and coeditor of L'Homme et la machine and of Annales des Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations and author of numerous articles on human and technological problems in industrial development. Several of his works were translated into English and German. In 1965, after an extended stay in Israel, Friedmann published La Fin du peuple Juif? (1965; The End of the Jewish People?, 1967). In this book he dealt with the present problems and future prospects of the State of Israel and the Jewish people. He held that the decline of religious orthodoxy, the growth of cultural assimilation in Israel and elsewhere, and the rise of a secular Israel nationalism will endanger the continued existence of the Jewish people in the Diaspora, as well as the Jewishness of Israelis. (Werner J. Cahnman)