COMUNICACIÓN

The Board of Trustees, the Academy and the staff of the European and Ibero-American Academy of Yuste Foundation mourn the passing of the French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin, member of the European and Ibero-American Academy of Yuste. Morin took up the Jean Monnet chair during the ceremony for the awarding of the Carlos V European Award to Helmut Kohl on 20 June 2006. (31/05/2026)

He was born in 1921 in Paris under the name Edgar Nahoum, into a Greek Sephardic Jewish family of Italian origin. Against this family background, Morin always defended his multiple identity as Spanish, French, Italian and European. After the German occupation, he joined the French Resistance to fight Nazism. At that time, he changed his surname to Morin, referring to one of the characters in Man’s Fate by Malraux. War, totalitarianism and the destruction of Europe shaped his thinking and led him to study human contradictions.

Regarded as one of the great intellectuals shaped by Europe in the first half of the 20th century, Morin was an engaged thinker who never avoided the major issues and challenges of his time. He was the creator of the theory of “complex thinking”, which seeks to understand reality in an integrated way, as an interconnected whole, avoiding reductionism, and interpreting social phenomena through the integration of biology, history, sociology and culture.

Morin leaves behind a substantial body of work comprising more than twenty books on sociology, politics, culture and knowledge.

EDGAR MORIN AND YUSTE

Edgar Morin had a close relationship with the European and Ibero-American Academy of Yuste Foundation. Among other activities, he actively participated in the presentation in Paris of the Carlos V European Award to Helmut Kohl in 2006. He took part in the Declaration of the European Academy of Yuste “The Future of Europe: The Citizens’ and Social Europe”, approved in Yuste. In June 2006 he took up the Jean Monnet chair during the ceremony for the awarding of the Carlos V European Award to Helmut Kohl, delivering the speech on behalf of the new academicians.

The French thinker and humanist Edgar Morin expressed great honour at joining the Academy of Yuste, while also defending “a model of European construction based on deepening integration while continuing to enlarge the European Union, as a solution to the remaining stability problems in some European countries, with particular reference to the situation in the Balkans; while recognising the problems arising from this model of unity in diversity”. He was also a member of the jury of the Carlos V European Award in some editions.