Bøger af André Gorz

A classic study of labour and unemployment in the post-industrial world

In this major new book, AndreGorz expands on the political implications of his prescient and influential Paths to Paradise and Critique of Economic Reason. Against the background of technological developments which have transformed the nature of work and the structure of the workforce, Gorz explores the new political agendas facing both left and right. Each is in disarray: the right, torn between the demands of capital and the ';traditional values' of its supporters, can only offer illusory solutions, while the left either capitulates to these or remains tempted by regressive, ';fundamentalist' projects inappropriate to complex modern societies. Identifying the grave risks posed by a dual society with a hyperactive minority of full-time workers confronting a silenced majority who are, at best, precariously employed, Gorz proposes a new definition of a key social conflict within Western societies in terms of the distribution of work and the form and content of non-working time.Taking into account changing cultural attitudes to work, he re-examines socialism's historical projectwhich, he contends, has always properly been to lay down the rules and limits within which economic raitonality may be permitted to function, not to create some statist, productivist countersystem. Above all, he offers a vital fresh perspective for the left, whose objective, in his view, must be to extend the sphere to autonomous human activity, and increase the possibilities for individual self-fulfilment.

A meditation on life in a post-capitalist society

Major French thinkers shows how the discourse of economics warps thought.

Autobiography, philosophical inquiry, confession—The Traitor is an unclassifiable and unforgettable book from one of France’s most inspiring social critics. Written when André Gorz was 32 and rising to prominence in the Parisian existentialist milieu, The Traitor starts from an acute personal crisis, “a state of absolute subjective misery,” rooted in social and political alienation. Using psychoanalysis and Marxism, Gorz explores the origins and symptoms of this crisis and struggles towards a resolution which he finds at last in political commitment and self-affirmation.Few personal documents have ever been so rigorously analytical; few philosophical texts so vividly illuminated by the honest recall of painful experience. Gorz’s father was Jewish, his mother Catholic: his tormented childhood in Austria during the Anschluss, when he took refuge first in religious asceticism, then in a self-destructive identification with Nazism, is scrupulously recorded. So, too, is his adolescent exile in Switzerland, his early encounters with Sartre—who, as “Morel”, is a constant reference point—and the conflicts of his first love affairs.Sartre called The Traitor “an invitation to life.” It remains the most intimate and profound book to emerge from the existentialist movement, while providing remarkable insights into André Gorz’s subsequent work.

'You're 82 years old. You've shrunk six centimetres, you only weigh 45 kilos yet you're still beautiful, graceful and desirable' -- so begins Andre Gorz's 'open love letter' to the woman he has lived with for 58 years and who lies dying next to him.

Critical examination of unsustainable capitalist growth, the ecological limitations and the radical ways of development that benefit society as a whole

aeo A major new work by one of the leading social and political thinkers of our time. aeo Offers a fundamental reassessment of the future of work, at a time when the role of work in our lives is being transformed by profound economic and technological changes.