Lucien Sève


Lucien Sève was a French philosopher, communist and political activist. He was an active member of the French Communist Party from 1950 to 2010. His 1969 work Marxisme et théorie de la personnalité has been translated into 25 different languages. Sève died on 23 March 2020 of COVID-19.

Family, career and death

Sève was born in 1926 in Chambéry. His parents ran a publishing house for children's books. He studied at the Lycée de Chambéry, and the Lycée du Parc. Sève entered the École normale supérieure in 1945, where he earned agrégation of philosophy in 1949. He became a philosophy teacher at a lycée in Brussels, although he was later removed from the post due to his Marxist beliefs. Sève performed military service in Algeria, from 1952 to 1953. After his military service, he worked at the in Marseille.
In 1952, Sève married Françoise Guille in Gap, Hautes-Alpes, and they had two children. Guille died in 2011. Sève died on 23 March 2020 of COVID-19 at the age of 93.

Political life

Sève was an avid Politzerian. He supported the views of fellow French Marxist philosophers Louis Althusser and Roger Garaudy, arguing that the PCF should follow some humanist aspects of the Marxist philosophy. However, Sève also focused on a scientific, rather than a purely humanist or non-humanist, basis for Marxism, something that was different from most Western European Marxist ideas of the time. Most Western Communist parties, including the French Communist Party, were moving towards social democracy. He also focused upon the relationship between Marxism and psychology. He supported a Communist regime where the Communist Party was the dominant force, and as such his views have been compared to Joseph Stalin's USSR. Nevertheless, after the death of Stalin, Sève supported the De-Stalinization of the USSR. In the 1980s, Sève supported the creation of the medical ethics committee Comité consultatif national d'éthique. He was a member of the CCNE committee from 1983 to 2000. He was a supporter of embryo testing, but only from excess IVF embryos. He saw embryos as "the potential of a human being", so considered using them solely for testing as unethical. Sève also had very strong opinions on how a Marxist biography should be written. His works included very specific, albeit almost unachievable, criteria that he believed should be adhered to for all Marxist biographies. He was a founding member of the project, which aimed to translate and republish all of Marx's and Friedrich Engels' works. In 2019, on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sève gave an interview in which he said that Communism is relevant today, and that Karl Marx was centuries ahead of his time.
In 1950, Sève joined the French Communist Party. He was elected as a member of the Central Committee in 1961, and remained a member of it until 1994. From 1970 to 1982, he ran the PCF publishing house. He was appointed to this role because members of the PCF considered him one of the best intellectuals in the party. In 1970, he attended a panel discussion organised by Catherine Clément, which also included Serge Leclaire and André Green. During the 1980s, Sève began to distance himself from the PCF after disagreements with the political leaders. In 1984, he proposed a refounding of the PCF, arguing that the party had lost its way. Sève resigned from the party in 2010, citing a lack of public support for the party at the 2007 French presidential election and 2010 French regional elections, as well as a distaste for the youth wing of the party.

Works

In 1969, he authored the work Marxisme et théorie de la personnalité. The work has been translated into 25 different languages. His 1978 work Man in Marxist theory and the psychology of personality focused on how personality was a "product of social relations". This strongly opposed Hans Eysenck's view that personality was a mixture of genetics and learned behaviours. In 1990, he authored Communisme : quel second souffle?, and from 2004 to 2019, he worked on four volumes of Penser avec Marx aujourd’hui The works aimed to highlight Sève's perceived problems with various interpretations of Marxism, including Stalinism, ideological mistreatment by Luc Ferry, and theories from Louis Althusser and Gilles Deleuze that Sève believed incompatible with Marxism. The first of the four volumes was entitled Marx et nous, and the second volume, published in 2008, was entitled L'homme?. In 2008, he was awarded a prize by the.

List

Source: