COMUNICATION

The board of trustees and the staff of the European and Ibero-American Academy of Yuste Foundation regret the death of the 97-year-old French sociologist Alain Touraine, member of the European and Ibero-American Academy of Yuste. Touraine assumed the Antonio Lucio Vivaldi Chair of the Academy during the award ceremony of the Carlos V European Award to Jorge Fernando Branco de Sampaio in 2004. (09/06/2023)

Alain Touraine was a well-known sociologist for his research on post-industrial society and 20^th century social movements in Europe and Latin America as well as the crisis of modernity. He studied at the Universities of Columbia, Chicago and Harvard. In 1960 he became a senior researcher at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (currently the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris), where he founded the Centre of Sociological Analysis and Intervention (CADIS). The French intellectual, who was awarded numerous honoris causa doctorates, won the Prince of Asturias Award in 2010.

He was closely involved with the European and Ibero-American Academy of Yuste. In 2004 he gave the admission speech at the European and Ibero-American Academy of Yuste on behalf of the academicians Margarita Salas Falgueras, Hans Küng, Bronislaw Geremek, Willem Frederik Duisenberg and Zsuzsanna Sandorné Ferge. On that occasion he stated that their intention as academicians of Yuste was “to foster exchanges between different individuals and cultures and these exchanges are not possible if we do not find and respect ¾everywhere and at all times¾ these principles that are so simple and so fundamental, namely everyone’s dignity and the respect that everyone deserves, as well as the awareness of the need for a sustainable development without which we all headed towards a catastrophe”.

And with the intention that words be heard more than weapons, of inventing a Europe that is united in its diversity and also able to participate actively in the creation of a new world, Touraine affirmed that “Europeans who are neither dominant nor dominated can open the paths of peace between countries in conflict and war. It is our duty to reject the division of the world between light and shadow and to always find ways of mutual understanding beyond the noise of bombs”.

In addition, Touraine participated in the meeting of the Academy on 19 June 2006 at the Monastery of San Jerónimo de Yuste and in the declarations of the Academy “The Future of Europe: Social Europe and the Europe of the Citizens” (2006) and “What All European Schoolchildren Should Know About Europe” (2008), as well as in Yuste’s Journal Pliegos de Yuste, issue no. 5-6 (2007).