Background
Morin, Edgar was born in 1921.
Morin, Edgar was born in 1921.
Joined the Parti Communiste Français in the spring of 1942 when working for the French Resistance. Expelled in 1950 after he failed to renew his membership. Later his interests changed to popular culture and mass communication.
Various research posts in the social sciences. Editor-in-chief of a Paris newspaper in the 1960s.
Main publications:(1951) L'Homme et la mort dans l'histoire, Paris: Correa
revised edition, L'Homme et la mort, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970.(1959) Autocritique, Paris: Juillard.(1969) Introduction à une politique de l’homme, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.(1969) La Rumeur d’Orléans, Paris: Éditions du Seuil (English translation, Rumour in Orleans, London: Anthony Blond, 1971).(1975) L'Esprit du temps: Essai sur la culture de masse, Paris: Grasset.Secondary literature:Caute, D. (1964) Communism and the French Intellectuals, London: Deutsch.
Morin joined the PCF during the same period as many other French intellectuals, partly because he thought that communism was the best vehicle for the fight against fascism and colonialism. He advocated the use of violence in the overthrow of both ideologies, and saw comradeship and political action as two of the primary virtues ot the communist cause.,
He acknowledged the influence of Andre Malraux, who in his opinion had fused the romantic with the realist and rationalist aspects of the communist movement, and regarded the sufferings of the Russian people at Stalingrad as a concrete symbol of the romantic element ot communism.
Even after his expulsion from the PCF Morin still identified the communist cause too closely with events in the USSR under the Stalinist regime, and saw the USA, with its policies ol economic and cultural colonialism, as the main antagonist of communism and the intemationa solidarity of the proletariat.
When, under Kruschev, evidence of the Stalinist atrocitieS became common knowledge in the West, Morin s position changed to one of believing that true communism had a progressive and self-correcting nature.
Morin was against the attempt, backed by Stalin’s cultural commissar Zhdanov, to imp°se socialist realism on revolutionary art and litera ture outside the USSR. He thought that Frenc political and cultural conditions were not suiteo to the constraints of realist orthodoxy, but inste could incorporate the more flexible and adven turous approach of anti-realist Marxist aesthetics-
Morin’sautobiography Autocritique (1959) >s useful source for his own thought and the posing11 of other French communist intellectuals front 1940s onwards.,
Morin’s later interest in mass culture incluo ^ a critique of contemporary sociological metn dology. He regarded the abstractions of statist1 and social models as being of secondary ¡mP^ tance, and the concrete event or crisis as primary object of study.
The historical dimensi of any crisis, and its capacity to change socie >• should not be ignored.