Lucien Sève

Lucien Sève (; 9 December 1926 – 23 March 2020) 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 (Marxism and theory of personality) has been translated into 25 different languages. Sève died on 23 March 2020 of Coronavirus disease 2019 (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. where he earned agrégation of philosophy in 1949. He became a philosophy teacher at a lycée in Brussels, Sève performed military service in Algeria, After his military service, he worked at the in Marseille.

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. In the 1980s, Sève supported the creation of the medical ethics committee Comité consultatif national d'éthique (CCNE). 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. He was a founding member of the project, which aimed to translate and republish all of Marx's and Friedrich Engels' works.

In 1950, Sève joined the French Communist Party (PCF). and remained a member of it until 1994. In 1970, he attended a panel discussion organised by Catherine Clément, which also included Serge Leclaire and André Green.

Works

In 1969, he authored the work Marxisme et théorie de la personnalité (Marxism and theory of personality). The work has been translated into 25 different languages. In 1990, he authored Communisme : quel second souffle? (Communism: what a second wind?), and from 2004 to 2019, he worked on four volumes of Penser avec Marx aujourd’hui (Thinking with Marx today.) The first of the four volumes was entitled Marx et nous (Marx and us), and the second volume, published in 2008, was entitled L'homme? (The Person).

List Sève, L. (1954), La Science (The science), Les Éditions scolaires Sève, L. (1969), Marxisme et théorie de la personalité (Marxism and theory of personality), Éditions sociales. Sève, L. (1974), Textes sur la méthode de la science économique (Texts on the method of economics), Éditions sociales Sève, L. (1975), Marxism and the theory of human personality, Lawrence & Wishart Sève, L., & Clément, C. (1977). Pour une critique marxiste de la théorie psychanalytique (For a Marxist critique of psychoanalytic theory), Éditions sociales Sève, L. (1978), Man in Marxist theory and the psychology of personality, Hassocks: Harvester Press Sève, L. (1980), Une introduction à la philosophie marxiste: Suivie d’un vocabulaire philosophique (An introduction to Marxist philosophy: Followed by a philosophical vocabulary), Éditions sociales Sève, L. (1984), Structuralisme et dialectique (Structuralism and dialectics), Messidor/Editions sociales Sève, L. (1994), Pour une critique de la raison bioéthique (For a critique of bioethical reason), Odile Jacob Sève, L. (1998), Sciences et dialectiques de la nature (Natural sciences and dialectics), La Dispute Sève, L. (1999), Commencer par les fins: La nouvelle question communiste (Start with the Ends: The New Communist Question), La Dispute Sève, L. (2001), Sciences de l’homme et de la société: La responsabilité des scientifiques (Human and social sciences: The responsibility of scientists), L’Harmattan Sève, L. (2004), Marx et nous (Marx and us), La Dispute Sève, L. (2005), Émergence, complexité et dialectique: Sur les systèmes dynamiques non linéaires (Emergence, complexity and dialectics: On nonlinear dynamical systems), Odile Jacob Sève, L. (2006), Qu’est-ce que la personne humaine? (What is the human person?), La Dispute Sève, L. (2008), L’homme? (The Person), La Dispute Sève, L. (2008), Dialectics of emergence. In: Ollman, B. & Smith, T. (Eds.) (2008), Dialectics for the new century, Palgrave Macmillan https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230583818_6

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