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"Machinism", Marxism, humanism: Georges Friedmann

before and after WWII

Article  in  Sociologie du Travail · March 2007

DOI: 10.1016/j.soctra.2007.01.002

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 Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e16–e33
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“Machinisme”1, Marxism, humanism:

☆
Georges Friedmann before and after WW II
François Vatin
Institutions et dynamiques historiques de l’économie (IDHE), CNRS–université Paris-X, maison Max-Weber,
200, avenue de la République, 92000 Nanterre, France

Abstract
Georges Friedmann (1902–1977) is known for the humanist sociology of work he founded after
World War II. Before the war he was a Marxist intellectual, close to the French Communist Party and
an admirer of the young Soviet Union. The effect of this political and ideological itinerary on his sociol-
ogy of work has never been analyzed systematically. Here the question is handled by following the pre-
sence of a central concept in his work, “machinisme” [see note1]. This concept does not come from
Marx’s thinking but from that of the Romantic historian Jules Michelet, whose writings Friedmann was
fully familiar with. A key term in Friedmann’s early writings, it was abandoned after World War II in
favor of the “natural milieu/technical milieu” conceptual pair. This terminological change went together
with a radical change in Friedmann’s point of view.
© 2007 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Georges Friedmann; Humanism; Machinisme; Marx; Marxism; Michelet; Sociology of work; France

☆
“This article was published originally in French and appeared in Sociologie du Travail 46 (Sociol. Trav.) 2004,
205–223. It has been translated by Amy Jacobs”.
E-mail address: vatin@u-paris10.fr (F. Vatin).
1
[Machinisme is the term Friedmann used. The meaning of this French word seems very close to that of the English
“mechanization” and refers to precisely that historical industrial development, though as an –ism it also connotes a po-
sitive valuing of machines and systematic use of them. Because much of this article’s analysis of Friedmann’s writ-
ings and thought bears directly on the term machinisme itself, it seems reasonable to leave the word in French
throughout the translation. - Trans].

0038-0296/$ - see front matter © 2007 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.soctra.2007.01.002
 F. Vatin / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e16–e33 e17

1. Introduction

For Georges Friedmann as for many intellectuals of his generation, World War II led to a
serious personal ideological and moral crisis2. It was in this context that the young philoso-
pher, a “fellow traveler” of the French Communist Party, came to found his humanist sociol-
ogy of work. While the main components of the story are known3, there has been little attempt
to understand its effect on the thought categories Friedmann used. The present text seeks to
shed light on this question by focusing particularly on the notion of “machinisme” [see
note 1]. The concept proves more complex than it might seem. Its Marxist connotation is due
to a mistranslation in the first French edition of Capital. Machinisme is in fact rooted in an
earlier intellectual tradition, that of Jules Michelet’s Romantic conception of history, which
Friedmann knew well. Machinisme was a category in Friedmann’s first, prewar works; after
the war, the concept was replaced by his “natural milieu/technical milieu” conceptual pair. Fol-
lowing out the avatars of the notion of machinisme and the way Friedmann used it enables us
to grasp the theoretical and ideological tension running through a body of work that has left a
lasting mark on French sociology of work.

2. Machinisme: Karl Marx and Jules Michelet

In the common understanding of French readers, machinisme ineluctably evokes Marx. “Le
machinisme et la grande industrie” is the French title of a well-known chapter in Capital. In
fact, the title is part of the first French edition of Book 1, translated by Joseph Roy and revised
and approved by Marx himself; published in installments from 1872 to 1875 (Marx, 1975)4.
Roy translated as machinisme Marx’s term Maschinerie, a German transposition of the English
“machinery” that had been used by Charles Babbage (Babbage, 1833) and Andrew Ure (Ure,
1836), authors whom Marx comments at length in the chapter. The word has a strictly techno-
logical meaning in English—composite machine or complex of machines—and can be readily
translated into French as machinerie.
In other words, it was Marx’s French translator who, deliberately or not, “sociologized” this
technological concept. Roy may not have been trying for (aimed at) this semantic effect. If he
was, was his only purpose to avoid the moral connotation of the word machinerie? However
that may be, Roy’s translation had the effect of creating a key concept in 20th-century French
Marxian historiography and sociology. It was probably Paul Mantoux who “set the tone” of
interpretation in the following comment on Marx’s categories from his well-known 1906 the-
sis, La révolution industrielle du XVIIIe siècle: “How could manufacturing, which already
represents such an advanced level of economic evolution , be distinguished from big modern
industry? For Marx as for most thinkers on the question, the distinctive character of big indus-

2
My thanks to Michel Lallement, Marie-France Piguet and Philippe Steiner for reading an earlier version of this
text, which also benefited from close collaboration with Gwenaële Rot, with whom I wrote a second article on the
subject: (Rot and Vatin, 2003).
3
See among others Georges Ribeill (1999). The author’s point of view in that work is largely convergent with my
own.
4
A recent French translation of Capital, edited by Jean-Pierre Lefebvre (Marx, 1993) restores “machinerie” as the
correct translation of the German term coined by Marx, Maschinerie. The term machinisme does appear twice in the
new version, but only as a translation for Maschinenwesens, Marx’s expression, not listed in MEGA, the authoritative
German edition of his works (MEGA 2, 1975).
e18 F. Vatin / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e16–e33

try was use of machines. Marx called the chapter that follows ’Division du travail et la
manufacture’ ’Machinisme et grande industrie.’ In it he developed at length his thinking on
machines and their economic role” (Mantoux, 1906: 15)5.
Mantoux’s reference to what we have seen to be an inaccurate translation of Marx’s title led
him to claim that the notion of machinisme was central to the history of the industrial revolution:
“The very words seem to attest to this fundamental identification between grande industrie and
machinisme. The English expression that most effectively translates our term grande industrie is
“factory system.” (…) If machine use is essentially what distinguishes the fabrique from the
manufacture, if it is what characterizes the new type of production compared to all earlier ones,
should not we prefer the term machinisme over grande industrie? It has the advantage of being
brief and meaningful, and of precluding confusion, which is so often due to words rather than
things” (Mantoux, 1906: 16–17). Still, the author expresses the following reservation: “Might it
not misleadingly simplify the muddled variety of the facts? First of all, machines did not appear
all at once. Where does a machine begin and a tool end?” (ibid.). However, in the body of the
thesis he affirms: “Though the term machinisme is not enough to define or explain the industrial
revolution, it is nonetheless the capital phenomenon around which all others are grouped, the
one which ultimately dominates them all and dictates its law” (ibid., 179). And a few pages
further, he makes a semantic connection between machinisme and capitalism: “The development
of industrial capitalism went together with that of machinisme.”
This semantic linkage is probably what explains the success of the machinisme notion in
French Marxism. Once again, Roy himself may not have intended it. He may have simply
drawn without thinking on the labor vocabulary of his time, just as he drew on financial vo-
cabulary for the notion of “plus-value” (“surplus value”), which, as Jean-Pierre Lefebvre
points out, is a problematic translation of Mehrwert6. Roy neither invented a neologism—
the word machinisme existed in French with a philosophic meaning in the 18th century7—
nor introduced it into the language of the social sciences. It is likely that the term comes to
us from Michelet, who devoted an entire chapter of his 1846 work, Le Peuple (The People),
to describing “the servitude of the worker dependent on machines”; that is, the petit peuple
d’hommes-machines working in the Rouen textile factories he visited in 1842 (Michelet,
1992 [1846]: 93–105)8. In a note Michelet mentions “the extension of [use of the term] ma-

5
Friedmann cites this work in his 1936 work La crise du progrès (Friedmann, 1936: 255n). For France he cites
Charles Ballot, L’introduction du machinisme dans l’industrie française (Ballot, 1923), a posthumously published
work compiled from various articles and notes left by the author, who was killed in Verdun in 1917. Ballot did not
use the machinisme concept in his writings and it is unlikely that he chose the title of the book.
6
On the concept of Roy’s French translation survaleur, see Lefebvre’s introduction to his 1983 French translation
of Capital (Marx, 1993: XLIII–XLVI) showing how the Mehrwert concept is part of a semantic chaine including
Mehrarbeit, which Roy translated “surtravail.”
7
The term is employed in the expression “aveugle machinisme” (blind machinism) in two articles of Diderot and
d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia (1751–1772): “Pouls” [pulse] and “Tenesme” (constipation). In both it refers to mechanis-
tic physiological understanding, such as William Harvey’s theory on blood circulation, the inspiration for Offroy de la
Mettrie’s 1748 work, L’homme-machine (La Mettrie, 1981). [Machine man and other writings, translated and edited
by Ann Thomson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996].
8
The expression “homme-machine” thus refers to La Mettrie’s renowned work. But Michelet also implicitly evokes
a text by Pierre-Edouard Lemontey often cited in his day, “Influence morale de la division du travail, considérée sous
le rapport de la conservation du gouvernement et de la stabilité des institutions sociales” (1801), which uses the
expression “l’ouvrier-machine” [the machine worker] (Lemontey, 1829: 201).
 F. Vatin / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e16–e33 e19

chinisme” to “designate that system [the English factory system] in a single word” (ibid.,
p. 96)9.
Michelet had already used the expression in 1843 in a work against the Jesuits written
with Edgar Quinet (Michelet and Quinet, 1843)10. For him its meaning was both extremely
strong and quite general. It designated a modern mode of socialization that morally distanced
people from each other while uniting them mechanically: “The machine rolls along, im-
mense, majestic, indifferent, without being the least aware that its own little gears, so harshly
used, are living men. These living wheels functioning in response to a single impetus, do
they even know each other? Does their necessary cooperative relation produce a moral rela-
tion? … In no way. This is the strange mystery of the age: at the time people are acting in
closest concert, their hearts are perhaps also the least united. Never have the collective means
by which thoughts are joined to one another, by which thought is made to circulate and
spread, been so great, and yet never has isolation been so deep. The mystery remains inex-
plicable for those who do not observe historically how the system that produced it has devel-
oped. That system I will name with the word Machinisme” (Michelet, 1992: 143)11.
Michelet described machinisme in industry in strains similar to those of Marx (who for his
part took his inspiration from Ure’s, 1835 descriptions of early English factories in The Phi-
losophy of the Manufactures): “The marvel of Machinisme would seem to be doing without
people: let us look for forces which, once set in motion by us, can then act without us, like
clockwork. Set in motion by us? But that once again is men—a defect. Let nature provide
not only the components of the machine but the engine … That was how we created workers
out of iron that comb, spin, weave, work in all ways with their hundred thousand arms and
as many teeth; taking strength, like Antheus, at the breast of their mother, nature; taking it
from the elements, from falling water or water held captive, distended into steam that anima-
tes, lifts them with its puissant sigh”12.
But for Michelet the factory was only one manifestation of machinisme, a concept that for
him had above all a moral meaning. With Edgar Quinet in their book against the Jesuits he
had written of “machinisme moral,” where the word designates the mechanistic reduction of
the spirit that Michelet saw at work in the Jesuits’“mechanization of faith”—in contrast to
the shimmering religiosity of the Middle Ages (Michelet, 1992: 34)13—similar to what he
saw as the “intellectual machines” of his own time: dictionaries, encyclopedias and other
synopses “that come to our aid by permitting us to dispense with study and thought” (Miche-
let and Quinet, 1843: 31). It was this understanding he applied when he located the origin of

9
Like many French observers, Michelet was convinced that the British factory system could not become dominant
in France. To avoid overly retrospective judgment, it must be admitted that his analysis was relevant at the time.
10
The “first lesson” in this work is entitled “Machinisme moderne. Du machinisme moral.” Moreover, in 1843
Proudhon noted that “in the course he gave this year, the scholar Michelet ⋯ purported to separate the organism from
the mechanism in society” (Proudhon, 2001, vol. 2: 153). It is not clear whether Proudhon was referring to Michelet’s
course on the Jesuits at the Collège de France in the second semester 1843 (Viallaneix, 1974: 23).
11
“In addition to all their advantages, machines (and I am not excluding the most beautiful, industrial, administra-
tive among them) have given men an unfortunate faculty, that of uniting forces without needing to unite hearts, of co-
operating without love, of acting and living together without knowing each other. The moral strength of association
has lost all that has been gained by mechanical concentration” (Michelet, 1992: 145).
12
Michelet may have been implicitly citing Ure, who made the following statement in the opening pages of his Phi-
losophy of the Manufacturers: “The principle of the factory system, then, is to substitute mechanical science for hand
skill. (see too Sismondi, J.C. Simonde de, 1819).”
13
“Admirable mechanics this—where man is nothing more than a spring made to spring into place at will” (Miche-
let, 1992: 32).
e20 F. Vatin / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e16–e33

“machinisme” in the instatement of the bureaucratic monarchy in France’s classical age (17th
century). To conceive of the social order in technical terms was, as he saw it, to give up the
hope of a thousand years of Christianity during which man’s primary undertaking, for better
or worse, had been to found society on love: “So be it, we shall not love! Enough of this
thousand-year experiment. Let us seek order and strength in the uniting of forces. We shall
find machines that will hold those forces together without love, frame and compress men,
nail, screw, rivet them to one another so well that even while hating each other they will
act in concert” (Michelet, 1992: 144).
Well before the French translation of Marx’s Capital, then, a version of the machinisme
concept, part of the Romantic critique of industrial civilization, had been integrated into the
French tradition of labor analysis. There is every reason to believe that Marx’s French trans-
lator Roy was thinking of Michelet, especially given that Le Peuple had just been repub-
lished in 1966 and Roy was familiar with and keenly interested in French social reform
thinking (Lefebvre, 1993: XIV–XV). The fact is that Georges Friedmann was also very
familiar with Michelet’s text, which he analyzed at some length in 1936 in the appendix to
La crise du progrès, entitled “Sur quelques avatars des idées de progrès du XVIIIe à la fin du
XIXe siècle” (Friedmann, 1936: 244–245)14—a mixed review in which may be discerned the
tension that runs through Friedmann’s own work: “Michelet wrote magnificent pages on the
people he called ’worker-machines.’… His description of the condition of the first unskilled
is full of intelligence and pity. Michelet’s remarks were often intuitively far ahead of the
experimental analyses of modern psychologists (on day-dreaming and the rhythm of the
weaving looms, for example). But there are also points where intuition cannot replace patient
research. The bird’s-eye view of the historical origins of what Michelet calls Machinisme
(which includes “administrative machines,” “industrial machines,” “thought machines” and
state philosophies) is a stupefying fantasy. But there again, what a heart we hear beating!”
(ibid., p. 244).
Let there be no confusion here: while in 1936 Friedmann was sensitive to Michelet’s lyri-
cism, to his sensitivity to the miseries of the working class, “servant of machines,” Michelet
could not for all that be considered a theoretical ally in the fight against the regressive cri-
tiques of progress that, in Friedmann’s opinion, dominated the decadent bourgeoisie intelli-
gentsia of post-war Europe. Michelet’s presence in Friedmann’s writings serves the later
author’s purpose of demonstrating that modern scoffers at progress were only clumsily
repeating ideas that had already been around a long while: “In the indignant pages of Le
Peuple we may discern many traits analogous to those that post-World War [I] spiritualist
writers used again Americanism. By the middle of the last century, America was already
becoming the scapegoat of the progressive era” (ibid., 145). Fifteen years after writing those
lines, after the disaster of the war and the disillusions it brought in its wake, Friedmann
adopted a new, resolutely “humanist” philosophical posture, similar, ultimately, to Miche-
let’s.
The Friedmann that history has preserved is not the Marxist critic of the “crisis of pro-
gress” but the humanist critic of “le travail en miettes” [“the anatomy of work,” the title of
Friedmann’s 1956 work, Friedmann, 1956]. The move from the “first” to the “second” Fried-
mann required a full-fledged “conversion”—that conversion is the focus of this text. Still,
while toward the close of his life Friedmann expressed regrets for the naiveté of his political

14
Hyacinthe Dubreuil (1929: 182ff) had already cited Michelet in his 1929 work, discussed below.
 F. Vatin / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e16–e33 e21

commitments of his youth, he never really disowned his first works or explained his theore-
tical itinerary, and this makes his work less transparent than might by thought by a reader
borne along by the felicitous ease of his writing15. The relative opacity of his thinking and
how it evolved has made his legacy somewhat ambiguous. The first, “Marxist” Friedmann
has surely been hidden from view by the second, “humanist” thinker. But the question is
more complex. The “young” Friedmann was in all likelihood less “Marxist” than he himself
thought, while the “old” Friedmann is less “humanist” than he has often been presented16.

3. Georges Friedmann, from machinisme to humanism

The term machinisme is clearly fundamental in Friedmann’s work. It figures in the title of
his first work, published in 1934: Problèmes du machinisme en URSS et dans les pays capi-
talistes [Problems of mechanization in the USSR and capitalist countries]17. And it reappears
in the title of his thesis, published in 1946: Problèmes humains du machinisme industriel,
presented on the flyleaf as the keystone of a trilogy entitled “Machine et humanisme” [The
machine and humanism]18 of which the first work was La crise du progrès, published in
1936, and the third “Essai sur la civilisation technicienne,” claimed to be “in progress” in
1946 and in all later works but never published19. The term and concept “machinisme” thus
appears in Friedmann’s analysis of modern labor as the counterpart to the concept of
“humanism”. But while the idea of “humanism” remains at the center of all works published
after 1946, machinisme disappears20. In Où va le travail humain? (Friedmann, 1950a), Le
travail en miettes (1956) and 7 études sur l’homme et la technique (1966)21, the expression
is no longer present in either book or chapter titles and is only rarely used in the texts them-

15
Friedmann assessed his ideological itinerary in La puissance et la sagesse (1970). For his relation to Marxism and
the USSR, see pp. 153ff, 271ff, 361–362. For a brief but more analytical self-critique of his labor sociology see pp.
114–115. He also expressed his desire to have his first works republished (p. 275). His former assistant Marie-
Thérèse Basse confirmed that contracts to that effect had been signed with the [prestigious] Gallimard publishing
house (Basse, 1987)—a plan that came to an end with the author’s death.
16
It should be added that Marx himself can be seen as humanist if we consider the works of his youth, an interpre-
tation that Friedmann developed during his own conversion. It would perhaps be within the bounds of reason to inter-
pret the move from the “young” to “old” Friedmann as a move from the “old” to “young” Marx (see below).
17
The Editions Sociales Internationales (ESI) was a publishing house with close ties to the Communist Party. This
work of Friedmann’s was published in a series entitled “Problèmes: Essais de critique marxiste sur les principales
questions contemporaines”; Friedmann himself helped determine editorial policy for the series until his break with
the French Communist Party in 1938 (see below).
18
This became the title of an article Friedmann published in Europe, July 15, 1935, in which he summarized the ar-
gument of La Crise du progrès, already scheduled for publication (Friedmann, 1935).
19
Friedmann mentions this point in rather ambiguous fashion in the foreword to La puissance et la sagesse (1970:
10), seeming to affirm that that work presents part of the content of the earlier project.
20
See among others Pour l’unité de l’enseignement : Humanisme du travail et humanités (Friedmann, 1950b), a
work in which Friedmann called for giving technical training a “supplement of humanity”—an explicit reference to
Henri Bergson’s expression “supplement of soul” (Bergson, 1932): “Technical culture needs to be broadly and pro-
foundly humanist” (p. 44); “’Humanism at work’ can be in harmony with ’the humanities’” (ibid., p. 53). On this
theme see also pt. 3, ch. 4 of Où va le travail humain (Friedmann, 1950a), entitled “Humanisme du travail et huma-
nités” (pp. 265–311), with another reference to Bergson, an author who had been one of his main targets of criticism
in philosophical terms in the 1930s (see below). In 1970, however, he expressed the opinion that “humanist labor”
was a “superseded dream” (Friedmann, 1970: 429–432).
21
Each of these works should be examined attentively to follow how Friedmann’s thinking was evolving. They are
all compilations of articles, some written quite early and already published in different form elsewhere. And in some
cases changes were made from one edition to the next of the same work.
e22 F. Vatin / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e16–e33

selves. Friedmann at that time began to replace machinisme with the more neutral term
“technique”, namely through the concept of “technical milieu”, first used in 195022.
This concept is central in Où va le travail humain? [Where is human labor headed?]
(what is human labor headed for) In this work it takes the place of machinisme, as in the
title of the second part: “Aspects of the technical milieu in the United States”]. But in 1951
in a paper to the second “sociological week,” held during his tenure as director of the Centre
d’Etudes Sociologiques, Friedmann defined the concept, or rather the conceptual pair “natur-
al milieu/technical milieu,” more clearly: “I call natural milieu the milieu of pre-mechanized
civilizations or communities, in which man reacted to stimulations coming for the most part
from natural elements—the land, water, plants, the seasons—or from other living beings,
animals or people. … I call technical milieu the milieu that has been developing in industria-
lized societies and communities since the start of the age of the industrial revolution; that is,
since the late 18th century for UK and the early 19th century for continental Europe” (Fried-
mann, 1953: 401–403)23.
The “natural milieu/technical milieu” pair thus seems to have taken the place of the “ma-
chinisme/humanisme” one as an analytic structuring device in Friedmann’s work. Yet as he
himself pointed out, this opposition is highly problematic: “It is clear that from the early
Paleolithic age, man in natural milieus has been a homo faber, as is seen in André Leroi-
Gourhan’s archeology and ethnology of prehistoric times, for example. I would therefore
stress that this is in no way a ’pure’ natural milieu, since every natural milieu is more or less
humanized and technical”24. Why, then, did he discard what, under the circumstances, was
the less problematic expression, “machinisme”? This is where it is important to return to
Friedmann’s ideological–political trajectory and to the complex history of his use of the
machinisme notion.
When Friedmann used the expression machinisme for the first time in 1934 he did not
conceptualize it. There is no definition of the term in this first work. Two works may have
served as sources for him, published, respectively, in 1929 and 1931. The first is Standards,
the former unionist Hyacinthe Dubreuil’s account of his experience in American factories
(Dubreuil, 1929), a plea in favor of Taylorism prefaced by Henry Le Chatelier. Chapter 3
of the book is called “En face du machinisme” [Facing machinisme]. Curiously, however,
Friedmann did not cite Dubreuil’s work until 1946, though he had probably read it before
then.25 What he does cite (quote)—and criticizes sharply—is La rançon du machinisme
[The price of machinisme] by Gina Lombroso (1872–1944), daughter of the criminologist
Cesare Lombroso and wife of the antifascist historian Guglielmo Ferrero (1871–1943). This
work, prefaced by Ferrero, is an anti-technicist philosophical tract written in the context of

22
Friedmann first used the notion of “milieu” in 1945 in his tribute to Marc Bloch, historian of the French country-
side, written together with his friends at the Annales (Friedmann, 1945; republished in Friedmann, 1950a, 1966). He
dated his text 1939, but may have revised it before it was published. In fact, in 1945 the term he used to designate
the opposite of “natural milieu” was “new milieu.” Only in the 1950 version of this article did he replace that expres-
sion with “technical milieu.”
23
A modified version of this text is found in Friedmann 1966: 96–98.
24
The same idea is formulated differently in ibid., p. 98.
25
The book was something of a bestseller. Friedmann, 1946 made abundant use of it in his 1946 book and contin-
ued to cite it afterward.
 F. Vatin / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e16–e33 e23

the Great Depression and the rise of totalitarianism (Lombroso, 1931)26. Adopting a Marxist
stance, Friedmann intended to demonstrate, citing the Soviet experience, that the “problems
of machinisme” were on the contrary problems particular to “capitalism.”27 The argument
was that the critique of technical–economic progress originated with the decadent bourgeoi-
sie, which had betrayed what was its strength and historical mission: “Faced with its own
armies of unemployed, its closed factories and failed progress, the bourgeoisie, through the
voice of its most glorious thinkers, goes so far as to disown what it has itself created and
constructed, what was the core of its strength and grandeur in the period of its ascendance,
what remains its primary accomplishment in the record of history: the development of
science and applications of science to industry, the development of productive forces”
(Friedmann, 1934: 9–10).
Applying fairly cursory Marxist dialectic, Friedmann presented the Soviet experience as
the new framework for pursuing the progress set in motion already centuries earlier, whereas
in capitalist countries that progress was hindered by the “contradictions” of that particular
type of social and economic organization: “It is necessary to speak out even now on the ef-
fort being accomplished in the Soviet Union thanks to the new social forms of society and
labor—an immense effort to control technology, which goes much further than we can even
see or say, and in any case has already moved far beyond the contradictions that capitalism
is caught up in this area as in so many others” (Friedmann, 1934: 13). This commentary
makes it much easier to understand Friedmann’s paradoxical affection for the great captain
of industry Henry Ford, who in the 1930s was doing vigorous business with the Soviet
Union: “Ford is one of the last great bourgeois doctrinarians of the progress attained through
applying science to industry. He is inhabited by an intense dynamism, a kind of lyrical con-
fidence in the machine and the necessity of incessant technical improvement. Certain of
Ford’s ideas on automation, changing working procedures in factory shops, training multi-
specialized “quality” workers foreshadowed those of Soviet technicians. We know that with-
in its irremediable contradictions, capitalism contains the first lineaments of socialist forms
of labor” (Friedmann, 1934: 15)28.
In Friedmann’s early understanding and writing, then, machinisme is opposed to human-
ism, at least to the spiritualist, Romantic form of humanism characterizing the critique of
progress and incarnated by Gina Lombroso, Georges Duhamel and Henri Bergson29. The
point was to denounce a reactionary social critique that, in mistaking the true enemy; i.e.

26
For his critique of this work see Friedmann 1934: 93–99; 1936: 183–184. He also criticized Bergson and Georges
Duhamel for “having made much of the book” (in Bergson, 1932; Duhamel, 1933) (Friedmann, 1934: 15). See also
Friedmann 1936: 276–277n.
27
Friedmann traveled three times to the USSR between the wars: in September–October 1932 and 1933 on official
missions for the scientific committee of the Cercle de la Russie Neuve, to which he belonged, and again in 1936. The
experience of the first two trips was used in the 1934 work, and the later trip provided the material for De la sainte
Russie à l’URSS [From Holy Russia to the USSR] (Friedman 1938).
28
See Friedmann’s January 1931 commentary of Ford’s last work, Progress (Ford, 1930) (Friedmann, 1934: 103–
114): “I admit that Ford’s attitude toward these problems [relations between man and the machine] seems infinitely
more interesting than the sentimental anathema uttered by European intellectuals back from America” (p. 108).
29
See Friedmann (1934): 15–16 and especially Friedmann 1936: 45–51: “critique of the science of Bergsonism.” In
this last work, Friedmann analyzed the doctrine of a “crafts utopia” developed by the Confédération Générale de
l’Artisanat Français, underlining ironically the reference to Bergson made during that organization’s Ninth Congress:
“We find the inevitable reference to Bergson and his Deux sources de la morale et de la religion even in the Congrès
Artisanal report: ’the machine must be humanized’” (Friedmann, 1936: 188). French anti-technicist thinking in the
1930s and Friedmann’s critique of it have been studied by Michela Nacci (1987); Ribeill (1999).
e24 F. Vatin / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e16–e33

attacking “productivism” and “this material, mechanized [“machinique”] civilization” rather

than capitalism, could only bolster fascism: “The critique of revolutionary Russia (whose
’quantitative’ accomplishments can no longer be denied) has receded, but only so that, in
what they think an agile move, another critique may be developed in ’qualitative’ terms in
both the major bourgeois press and intellectual circles, where the ’theory’ of French
national-socialism is simmering away under the lid of a plea for the primacy of the Human
and Spiritual” (Friedman, 1934: 11). Clearly the young Friedmann, persuaded as he was then
of the validity of the Marxist prophecy, was more than reluctant to accept the humanism
inherent in the “bourgeois” philosophy of his time. It is highly probable that his Problèmes
du machinisme was a kind of political–ideological tract, written as it was for a publishing
house linked to the French Communist Party. However, La Crise du progrès, published
2 years later by Gallimard, makes the same argument in greater depth and enriches it with
many references.
In fact, the issue appears already to have been more complex in 1934. Like the 1936
work, Problèmes du machinisme en URSS et dans les pays capitalistes was first written
against the Romantic critique of progress that Friedmann could see flowering at the time of
the Great Depression: “Let us exclude Medieval or Romantic attitudes toward machines as
they are clearly of no real interest. The only possible solutions are to be discerned in the ef-
forts of science—revolutionary solutions to the problems of mechanization. The machine,
that adventure that humans have been thrown into by technical progress, is now a decided
given of all civilizations. This means that in the domain of production a certain form of ra-
tionalization will be required from now on in every society” (Friedmann, 1934: 11). For
Friedmann the solution inhered in collective appropriation of the means of production, the
only type of appropriation capable of restoring “human values” to production: “Against ca-
pitalist rationalization, grossly wasteful of workforces, whom it sees from a purely utilitarian
standpoint; respectful of things as it crushes lives, let us oppose socialist rationalization, in
which human values remain primary, subjecting technology and the machine to those values
and building factories that, instead of destroying workers, will become not only centers of
production thanks to a linking of the laboratory and the factory shop, but also genuine radiat-
ing centers of research and culture” (Friedmann, 1934: 131).
The preceding excerpt is quite remarkable because, if we are willing to leave aside the
naive apology for the USSR that fuels it, we clearly see that it expresses the general under-
standing of work in industrial society that Friedmann developed throughout his work, at least
until La puissance et la sagesse; namely, that “rationalization” is a necessity and that it can
be a fundamental source of material progress for humanity, on condition that it be guided by
sustained attention to human values: machinisme must be tempered by humanism30. But as
he specified in 1936, this was to be renewed humanism, rid of all flashy shreds of Hellenism
and medieval Christianity, and incarnated in Marxism: “Many precious humanist contribu-

30
In “La grande aventure” (Friedmann, 1962a), republished in Friedmann (1966): 174–202, the author goes against
his 1934 and 1936 assertions, putting forward the idea of a fundamental convergence between the socialist and capi-
talist systems, the very expression of “technician civilization.” But while he is concerned about the “discontent” in
this civilization due to the “absence of aims and values that would allow man in societies of plenty to fill the void
… that he senses in his new milieu” (p. 202), he remains fundamentally optimistic about the ability of the sciences,
both natural and social, to resolve this malaise: “We now know that the future can be magnificent thanks to science,
plenty, education. It is in our hands” (ibid.). La puissance et la sagesse (1970) marks a radical break with this under-
standing (see below).
 F. Vatin / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e16–e33 e25

tions from this inheritance come together in Marxism31. This is not to say that all their tradi-
tions are integrated into Marxism. Or that Marxism has not taken a combative attitude to-
ward several of them: the opposition between the economic (technical) and spiritual, so clear
in Greek thinking and reworked in medieval theology, gives precisely an image of society
divided into classes, where manual labor remains servile, thought is exercised within and
for a narrow luminous fringe of society, and the vast majority of people are maintained be-
low a human level” (Friedmann, 1936: 216–217)32.
A few years later, in highly particular historical circumstances, the theme of “humanism”
became central in Friedmann’s philosophy of labor. In 1938 he published De la sainte Rus-
sie à l’URSS [From Holy Russia to the USSR], a work that he thought of as a reasoned
defense of the Soviet experiment and that led to a heated polemic with André Gide, who
had just published his Retour de l’URSS (Gide, 1936, 1937; Return from the USSR)33. To
his astonishment, this work was virulently criticized by the Party’s sanctioned authors, first
among them his close friend Georges Politzer34. A year later the “drôle de guerre” began.
Mobilized by the Army health services, Friedmann learned of the German–Soviet pact, the
German–Soviet collaboration in Finland and Poland, etc. This led to a serious crisis of con-
science, attested in his Journal de guerre, published posthumously (Friedmann, 1987).
The crucial question that returns repeatedly in the journal is the relation between Marxism
and “morality” understood in the fully Kantian sense of the term. Clearly Friedmann be-
lieved that ends could justify means in revolutionary action. Throughout the work, he ex-
presses his conviction (or seeks to convince himself) of Marxism’s intrinsic morality, under-
stood to have been corrupted by Stalin’s Real-Politik: “The great themes of this examination
should be: moral values have been flouted in a movement that, though ’materialist,’ can only
proceed by maintaining and exalting those values. All who have made direct, serious contact
with Marxism know that it is in no way an immoralist doctrine; that together with a social
analysis of the material conditions of social change, it conceals deep within it a moral thrust
in the direction of a juster, more dignified, happier future. Even if in Marx and Engels’ writ-
ings this moral thrust has at times been hidden by the necessities of the daily struggle, it

31
Reference is to Lenin’s famous remark: “The Marxist doctrine … is the legitimate successor to the best that man
produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French
socialism” (Lénine, 1933: 53–54/Collected Works, vol. 19: 21–22; see Marxists Internet Archive
[marxists.org/archive/lenin]; quoted in French in Friedmann 1936: 216).
32
This passage is taken from a chapter segment entitled “Le marxisme et l’héritage humaniste” (pp. 214–219) rife
with references to the works of the “young Marx”: The Holy Family, already in French translation (Marx, 1928), as
well as excerpts from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts de 1844, The German Ideology and the Theses on
Feuerbach, which Friedmann cited from a compilation of selected passages that his friends Paul Nizan and Jean Dur-
et had just published (Marx, 1934).
33
See “André Gide et l’URSS” (Friedmann, 1938: 241–266). Two years earlier, Freidmann had praised Gide for an
excellent expression used in Les nourritures terrestres, “which implicitly corroborates the Marxist notion of human
flexibility” and which he paraphrased in the title of his last chapter segment: “L’homme peut donner d’avantage”
(“Man can give more”) (Friedmann 1936: 224, 229).
34
For an in-depth study on this point see Melnik-Duhamel (1985). The French Communist Party’s reaction is
indeed astonishing given how pro-Stalin Friedmann’s work appears today—in its support for the Moscow trials, for
example. One sentence of many suffices to demonstrate his attitude: “Anti-Stalinists abroad (I have taken the trouble
to read what they have published on the subject) give absolutely no plausible explanation of the declarations made by
the accused themselves” (p. 232). But Friedmann did vaguely sense the “leaden cover” that was being clapped down
on the Russian intelligentsia, and while attributing “the failings of the present-day Soviet Union …to survivals from a
world that has not yet disappeared (that of Holy Russia),” he was worried about the here and now.
e26 F. Vatin / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e16–e33

must be taken out of its straitjacket and kept at the forefront of all action” (Friedmann, 1987:
65)35. Like many authors of his generation, the writer at that time found support in just
(newly)-published translations of the young Marx36: “Here in fact is the center of Marxist
socialism: concern for man, his physical and moral liberation, his gratifying development in
a society where the well-being of all has attained the same level as technology. It can never
be said often enough—and it is true: I appeal in this to all who have read The German Ideol-
ogy, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the Theses on Feuerbach—that
humanist concern was the fundamental wellspring (source) of the thought and action of Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels” (Friedmann, 1987: 73)37.
He developed this theme with particular clarity in his discussion of an article by Julien
Benda: “For Julien Benda, the question has been decided: there is no absolute moral princi-
ple to be found in Marxism. A moral principle, in his own views, respects certain values
which transcend particular interests of time and place, such as ’Hellenist–Christian’ or more
exactly ’Socratic–Christian’ morality. These are extremely general views of the history of
ideas, too vast to be examined here. I strongly doubt that all humanism necessarily derives
from Hellenic or Christian sources. Does not socialist humanism, the product of a significant
segment of Western thought from the 16th century onward, imply values that transcend par-
ticular interests? We may rightly consider from this angle the work of Marx and Engels: the
fervor of the early works, the critique of man’s ’alienation,’ the denunciation of the demor-
alizing role of money, capital, business—did they not require the first foundations of a new
type of humanism, transcending the interests of this or that social group? Do they not imply
a type of man, and behavior, that is liberated, dis-alienated, superior? Morality within an
entirely recast society? Is it not on this ideal that true Marxist communists should train their
eyes, and in its terms that they should be moved to act? As early as the Manifesto of 1848,
the class struggle is posited as the main ’motor of history,’ but we are led to understand that
with the beginnings of a classless society there will be a move from ’need to freedom.’ Is not
that already the morality of this period, which above and beyond the contradictions and
necessities of capitalist society, inspires reformers and authentic revolutionaries? This, it
seems to me, is the intersection that must be found between Marxist socialism’s moral rela-
tivism and universal humanism. Without a doubt there are extremely brutal affirmations of
moral relativism in Marx and Engels. But the revolutionary, the man of progress, is also
the bearer of principles and values that can only flourish in a society from which contradic-
tions (and thus moral relativism) will have disappeared”38.
It is in this new ideological context that the notion of machinisme assumes a negative
connotation for Friedmann. Without being aware of it, he seems to have adopted the critique
of progress that he had earlier denounced so virulently. What is more, he develops an

35
This passage is dated October 1939. On January 5, 1940, Friedmann noted: “Marx and Engels’ Marxism is not
affected by the degradation of the Soviet experience. … The time will come that we will rediscover and respect the
humanism that is at the heart of the greatest doctrine of human liberation that the human brain has ever conceived
(ibid., p. 133). See also pp. 194–195 (entry for March 24, 1940).
36
He took up this theme again in La puissance et la sagesse (1970: 254–259). What had been published in German
of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 was translated into French in 1937, followed in 1938 by a
translation of The German Ideology (Marx 1937, 1938).
37
Passage dated October 16, 1940. See also Friedmann 1970: 254–259.
38
Ibid., pp. 182–183 (February 29, 1940). Benda’s article was published in the Nouvelle Revue Française in Febru-
ary 1940 (pp. 154–155).
 F. Vatin / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e16–e33 e27

apology for the wisdom of the “peasant soul”39, the very entity he had identified 2 years ear-
lier as cause of the difficulties being encountered by Soviet industrialization!40 Reading this
text, one senses how readily and spontaneously a reactionary ideology might emerge from
the national disaster, even in the thinking of persons to whom that ideology might have been
assumed utterly foreign: “The patience, profound sense of the real, sound judgment, natural
wisdom of the French peasant will be for me one of the most enduring experiences of this
war (when those experiences become clear), one that once again sheds light (even amid the
present cataclysm) on the ravages of machiniste civilization, which turns splendid beings of
the land, full of sense, sixth sense, intuition, into employees, abstract faux savants, hybrids
of cities from which life has fled (neither vital nor rational), serfs to machines and joyless
pleasures, chauffeurs rather than mechanics, semi-skilled manual workers for all manner of
occupation. These are not current problems, they are problems for peacetime, but they are
problems that these peasants force me to think on every day” (Friedmann, 1987: 204)41.
This apology of the peasantry as expression of a venerable, fundamental French root is
recurrent in the Journal de guerre42. It is hard not to think of Michelet’s apology in Le Peu-
ple, where, after denouncing the myopia (short-sightedness) of social thinkers obsessed with
the working class, he points out that in the French people the peasantry is dominant and
represents the “healthiest” part of that people: “And yet the peasants represent not only the
most numerous part of the nation but also the strongest, healthiest and—because character-
ized by a balance between the physical and the moral—altogether the best part” (Michelet,
1992: 89). Like Friedmann a century later, Michelet was sensitive to the peasants’ military
value, rooted in their attachment to the land: “Supposing that from this crowd you draw a
day-laborer who owns a twentieth of an acre. You will not find in him the feelings of a
day-laborer, a mercenary. What you have got is an owner, a soldier (he is already been one
and will be one again tomorrow); his father was in la grande Armée” (ibid., p. 81).
While the reference to Michelet remains implicit and conjectural, Friedmann makes expli-
cit use in the passage cited above of another 19th-century French social thinker, on whom he
comments in La crise du progrès just after mentioning Michelet. That thinker is Augustin
Cournot, whose philosophy of history had strongly impressed him when he learned of it in
a thesis by Raymond Ruyer (1930)43. From that philosophy he drew the idea that humanity

39
Reference is to the title of a work by Dr. Emmanuel Labat which had its moment of glory: L’âme paysanne: la
terre, la race, l’école [The peasant soul: the land, race, the school] (Labat, 1919). This ethnographic description of
the Gascogne peasantry comprises a series of articles published in the Revue des deux mondes between 1910 and
1918, the last of which focus on “the peasant soul during the war.”
40
In De la sainte Russie à l’URSS, Friedmann explained the difficulties of the young Soviet Union as due in large
part to the weight of peasant backwardness.
41
Passage dated April 19, 1940. The expression “serfs to machines” does seem an allusion to Michelet, who had
written of a “population enslaved to machines” (Michelet, 1992: 95).
42
Shorn of illusions, Friedmann returns to the theme in 1970 (p. 27), mentioning the “fine book” of his disciple
Henri Mendras, La fin des paysans (1967) (Mendras, 1967).
43
Friedmann, 1931 reviewed this work in 1931 for Europe, and cites his review in his discussion of Cournot in La
Crise du progrès (Friedmann, 1936: 245–246). He later referred repeatedly to Cournot’s philosophy of history, citing
in particular Considérations sur la marche des idées et des événements dans les temps modernes (Cournot, 1973,1978
[1872]) and Matérialisme, vitalisme, rationalisme (1978 [1875]). See “Le milieu technique: Nouveau mode de sentir
et de penser,” written in 1942 (Friedmann, 1966: 58); “Les technocrates et la civilisation technicienne” (Gurvitch
1949: 46–48); “La grande aventure” (Friedmann, 1962, 196: 200). In La puissance et la sagesse, he repeatedly quotes
Cournot, whom he compares to Max Weber. Curiously he seems never to have read Cournot directly; all his refer-
ences seem to come from Ruyer.
e28 F. Vatin / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e16–e33

had evolved from a primitive “vital” phase to a “mechanical” or “rational” one. Like Miche-
let, Cournot was for Friedmann in 1936 a philosopher marked by the detested spiritualism
yet endowed with true insight: “Despite the wholly scientific neutrality of his writings, one
senses what side Cournot’s preferences fell on: that he was fundamentally spiritualist, fairly
tied to a metaphysics similar to Christianity’s, though he predicted that Christianity would
inevitably wear out” (Friedmann, 1936: 246). In fact, though he considered Cournot as fully
spiritualist, Friedmann did him a signal honor: “It has to be acknowledged that after Marx,
Cournot was one of the most clear-thinking minds of his time” (ibid.)44.
It was therefore Augustin Cournot, a writer from the Franche-Comté deeply attached to
the French countryside45, who helped Friedmann grasp the “peasant soul” and later the limits
that should rightly be set on industrial civilization: “In the room in which I write these lines
enters the excellent A, my aide de camp, a peasant from the Sarthes, a being of perfect sub-
stance: balanced, healthy, sensitive, steadfast, good. Does not that count? ’No,’ you will
answer, not unreasonably, ’He is a peasant. There too the milieu, the type of work, the living
conditions have had their effects.’ Alright. But the point is precisely to prevent those quali-
ties, developed and preserved by certain ways of living, certain social conditions, from being
degraded, spoiled, ruined. Cournot said profound things on gradual degradation of the ’vital’
by what he called the rational. It is not my idea to oppose the rationalization of economic
and social institutions. But regardless of how technically precise its organization may be
and the necessary centralization of its gears and workings, the new regime must maintain
the varied, vital savors of the people (workers and peasants), whom it must raise to full con-
sciousness and to culture. Here again, the automatism of totalitarian institutions, their nega-
tion of moral values, lead to a sort of neutralizing of individuals, their erosion, deprived of
their particular qualities. I know men from the peasantry in France, evolved, cultured, who
have preserved the precious qualities of their origin and of the stretch of country they come
from. Proof that such preservation is not impossible. Tomorrow’s socialism, instituting
rational organization of the economy, endowing human societies with the rational founda-
tions they lack, can and must take into account both the frame and what it frames” (Fried-
mann, 1987: 69–70)46.
It was ultimately the reversal of the value sign attached to the notion of machinisme, as-
sociated with a positive view of rural society, that gave rise in Friedmann’s thought to the
new opposition between “natural milieu” and “technical milieu.” The emergence of this pro-
blematics in the post-war works is clarified by personal notes in the Journal de guerre.
“Machinisme” is a concept used by the “early” Friedmann, admiring observer of Soviet
industrialization who scoffed at “humanist” critiques of progress. His abandonment of this
concept went together with the political, ideological and moral transformation that he experi-
enced during the war and that brought him closer to his former intellectual enemies. There is
no clearer illustration of this turn-about than his 1951 tribute to the writer Georges Duhamel
for the very work he had so harshly reviled in 1934 and 1936: “According to a great writer
who is also a doctor (G. Duhamel, L’humaniste et l’automate, Paris, 1933), doctors used to
be more human (more efficient therefore) because nothing separated the doctor from the man

44
In 1949 Freidmann actually came to consider Cournot superior to Marx in some respects: “In this connection
[analysis of technical civilization], Cournot’s vision is actually broader and shows greater understanding than Marx’s”
(Friedmann, 1949: 48).
45
On Cournot see Vatin (1998).
46
Passage dated October 9, 1940.
 F. Vatin / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e16–e33 e29

who had come to him for recovery and comfort” (Friedmann, 1945: 115). Likewise in 1950
he paraphrased Bergson’s expression, “supplement of soul”—precisely the one that had ear-
lier elicited his sarcasm—in affirming that technique should be provided with a “supplement
of humanity”(Friedmann, 1950b: 44)47.
The central position of the machinisme notion in Friedmann’s doctoral thesis, which he
defended in 1946, thus appears as a kind of legacy of the past. The preface to the work
was written in June 1945 in Toulouse; in it Friedmann explains that his documentation was
destroyed in Paris in March 1942, and indeed the work contains no bibliographic reference
later than 1939. Contrary to appearances, then, this thesis seems to have been written in large
part before the war and is part of the author’s “early” works—more exactly, it is a transi-
tional text between the “early” and “late” Friedmann. This explains its ambiguities, together
with the particular quality of the work, which lends itself to several readings because as we
know, Friedmann’s thinking continued to evolve over following quarter of a century, ulti-
mately leading him to critique industrial society in moral terms. In his prewar understanding,
machinisme, while harmful in a capitalist regime, could realize the promise of liberation in a
socialist one. In his first post-war works, when he had come to be disillusioned by “real soci-
alism,” he became critical of machinisme for its intrinsic harmfulness to human labor48. But
he still saw the biological, psychological and social sciences as capable of furnishing com-
pensatory instruments that would rehumanize work. However, in his last work, published in
1970, he went against all his prior thinking, denouncing the confidence in “science” which
had dominated it: “I granted the biological and social sciences the power to go a great way
toward humanizing work by using external remedies to attack the ills that had arisen from
uncontrolled mechanization, ills endangering the physical and psychic balance of man the
producer. I trusted science to succor the body and mind of man at work, defending him
against the effects of anarchic, rapacious industrialization” (Friedmann, 1970: 114–115)49.
The circle had come full round, then, and Georges Friedmann now willingly identified his
thinking with a kind of “spiritualism,” acknowledging that he had arrived at an understand-
ing diametrically opposed to the convictions of his youth: “After granting nearly exclusive
privilege to ’material’ dimensions during my naive Marxist period, I came to perceive with
increasing clarity the ’spiritual’ dimension that is currently so denigrated” (Friedmann, 1970:

47
On this point the about-face is perceptible as early as his 1941 article on assembly-line work (published in 1948,
Friedmann, 1948), which concludes with a tribute to the “great philosopher” recently deceased: “The body of human-
ity, overenlarged by technique, is waiting for a supplement of soul” (pp. 144); on the history of this text see Rot and
Vatin 2003. In 1946 Friedmann was still expressing a preference for “applied psychology” (as developed by his
friend Henri Wallon) over Bergson’s “pure psychology,” but he acknowledged that Bergson’s thought had “presti-
giously renewed” the “old metaphysical problems” (1946: 40). The explanation for the turn-about in his attitude
toward Bergson is ultimately given in La puissance et la sagesse: there being no further reason to oppose the philoso-
pher on the grounds of theory, Friedmann mentions in a note (1970: 462n) the hidden motive for his aggressivity in
1936: “Many men of my age who had taken up philosophical studies shortly after the First World War were scanda-
lized by Bergson’s bellicose attitude during the war.” Five years later, this motive surely no longer had the same
value; moreover, further on in the note Friedmann mentions their shared Jewish origin.
48
Before the war, and in compliance with the Marxist vulgate, Friedmann believed that the practical conditions of
work in the factory shop were “overdetermined” by economic factors. The thesis of system convergence, which Fried-
mann advanced in “La grande aventure” in 1962 but had largely accepted since 1946, disqualified that argument,
thereby making machinisme a problem in its own terms, that of the “technical milieu” versus the “natural milieu.”
49
See also pp. 406–407 where he opposes the “external remedies indicated by the biological and social sciences of
work,” which can only “limit the damage done,” to “internal remedies … that bring together efforts on the self-
improvement and the benefits of education.”
e30 F. Vatin / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e16–e33

10–11). However, 40 years later the term “spiritual” continued to bother him and he felt the
need to clarify in a note: “The term will be found surprising, shocking perhaps. It rather
bothered me, with its connotations, its association with ’spiritualist’ doctrines or dogmas
quite foreign to me” (ibid., 443n.). This is a strange remark given that an entire section of
the book is devoted to modern society’s possible rediscovery of spiritual resources in Chris-
tianity, Judaism, Hinduism; and given that the author expresses regret for having “unjustly
executed” Nikolai Berdiaev, Henri Bergson and others in 1936 (ibid., pp. 154ff) and cites
in epigraph Karl Jaspers, who had also figured in his 1936 “hunting bag”50. Lastly, in an
explicit criticism of Marx, he sums up his own philosophy thus: “This world cannot be spir-
itualized (saved, in fact) without a return to the individual, an effort focused on the self and
initiated by the inner man” (ibid., p. 355)51.

4. Conclusion

Authors are often presented in homogeneous blocks, as if the work of a lifetime were it-
self endowed with a substantive coherence, as if it were not the product of the tormented
history of human beings and the societies in which they live and act. This approach results
in part from a certain French tradition in history and philosophy; also in part very simply
from teaching practices, which lead to presenting authors in terms of the memory that their
immediate disciples or promoters have of them. The period in which the author’s thinking
was being trained and developed is left in the shadow of the dominant mature figure—when
it is not overtly mythified. Time is surely needed before the meanders, hesitations and sharp
intellectual discontinuities in the body of an author’s work can be revisited.
This is what I have attempted to do here around the notion of machinisme in the work of
Georges Friedmann. A path which has led from one surprise to another: the notion of machi-
nisme is not in fact derived from Marxist tradition but rather from Jules Michelet’s Romantic
and humanist approach to history; Friedmann was aware of this approach, because he
focused on this tradition in his prewar work—to criticize it; paradoxically, after the war he
renounced this notion, at the very moment when, having broken with Marxism, he was com-
ing to view that tradition much more positively, and so on. Friedmann’s personal intellectual
history, marked by the life-shattering events of his century; the never resolved tension in his
work between Marxian positivism and Romantic humanism; the occasionally ambiguous use
of notions whose ambivalence he was aware of, have lastingly marked the French tradition
of sociology of work. The permanent though not always explicit reference to Marxism in his
work in fact masked a Romantic critique of progress, which Friedmann alternatively criti-
cized and took up into his own thinking.
Michaël Rose (1987) gave a rich illustration of this in his penetrating analysis of how the
American Maoist Marxist Harry Braverman’s analyses were received in France in the 1970s
(Braverman, 1975). Rose demonstrated why Braverman’s in many ways exaggerated, or
even grotesque analysis of “the degradation of work in the 20th century” (subtitle of Braver-
man’s book) resonated for French labor sociologists whose thinking had been nourished by
Friedmann’s work—work that might pass for “Marxist” when in fact it was infused with a
reactionary critique based on nostalgia for the “the trade and sense of professionalism,”

50
Jaspers is the most frequently cited author in the 1970 work.
51
The chapter itself is entitled “The spiritual revolution.”
 F. Vatin / Sociologie du travail 49 (2007) e16–e33 e31

[“métier”] a critique equivalent to that of Proudhon a century earlier52 in that it drew impli-
citly on a troubling theology of the “fall”: “In English of course, to degrade implies social
demotion, a loss of status, being personally lowered; it is always linked to humiliation.
According to Braverman, the main aim of Capital is to humiliate Work. Capital and Work
are not two socio-economic categories. … They are instead two allegorical figures in a mor-
alizing history: personifications of Good and Evil” (Rose, 1987: 6). Our story’s last turn-
around: the paradoxical, exaggerated synthesis in Braverman’s critique of modern history
may be said to finally unite the “Marxist” sectarianism of the “early” Friedmann and the
moralism infused with Judeo–Christian theology of the old philosopher at the close of his
life.

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