FORERUNNERS :

Günther Anders (1902-1992), this german philosopher was Hanna Arendt’s first husband. His most famous book, “L’obsolescence de l’homme”, is an analysis of human alienation by the technology he has created. He strongly criticized machins’ effects, as well as the role played by nuclear weapon.

Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975), this former pupil of Heidegger and Jaspers went into exil in France from 1933 to 1940 before she left for the U.S. to teach. She wrote many books, like Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, or Responsibility and Judgment.

Augusto Boal (1931 –). Expelled from Brazil in 1971, il went into exil in Argentine, Peru and France, where he remained until 1991. He wrote books on dramatic art and theoretical manuals, and he is still active in training programs all around the world. During the 60’s, Augusto Boal invented a theatre method called “theatre of the oppressed”. He first developed it in Brazil, in Europe and then in the entire world. Theatre is used as a language, a way of knowledge and a way to transform the reality of consciousness, the reality of society. This theatre makes the public active and aims at transforming situations of conflict, feeling of oppression…

Aimé Césaire (1913 –), Martinican politician and poet homme. He has been influenced by surrealism. Champion of the « negritude », he tries to get out of occidental culture so as to find his initial identity, which is the identity of an exiled African. He published in 1950 in the magazine « Presence Africaine » (Africaine presence) his « Discours sur le colonialisme », which is one of his most violent texts.

Bernard Charbonneau (1910 – 1996), "professeur agrégé " (professor who has passed the aggregation examination) of History and Geography, he was one of the first thinkers to question economical development based upon material goods accumulation, industrialization and urbanization.

Pierre Clastres (1934 – 1977), anthropologist and ethnologist, specialized in American Indians. He published « La société contre l’Etat »
(Society against the State) in 1974. The last chapter of this book is memorable for pacifist and anarchist critic of state power.

Josué de Castro (1908 – 1973). He was the first important author who, as far back as the Second World War, not only raised the public attention on the question of starvation as an urging problem to solve, but devoted his life to this question. So he can be considered as the first of a large generation of great active researchers like René DUMONT, Louis-Joseph LEBRET, Suzan GEORGE, Frances MOORE-LAPPE. His writings are translated in 24 languages, and are frequently reedited.

Louis Dumont (1911 – 1998). French Anthropologist. After having been interested in provencal folklore, he studied the castes system of India (Homo hierarchicus, 1966), before to analyse the occidental society (homo aequalis, 1977-1991).

Jacques Ellul (1912 – 1994). He was known for his criticism of the technician society and of modernity. Historian and sociologist, he was also activist and theologist of hope. He was professor of the University of Bordeaux, and wrote more than 40 books and hundreds of articles. The main object of his writings was to underline the threat of new technologies for the Christian fait hand for human freedom.

Paulo Freire (1921 – 1997) Brazilian educationalist. After his studies of law in university of Recife, he devoted himself to popular education in Brazil and led the national alphabetization campaign. His method, called « conscious-making », aims at making the people couscious of its own situation by using education. He was jailed in 1964, and then was exiled and worked as an educationalist for Bolivian and Chilean governments, and for the education division of the Churches ecumenical council. He published “Pédagogie des opprimés” (1969) and « Lettres à la Guinée-Bissau sur l'alphabétisation » (1978).

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869 – 1948), also called the Mahatma ( the Great Soul), he called on the Indians to civil disobedience against British colonial authorities as far back as the end of the 19th century. He was the leader of the fight for political independence and economical autonomy of India. He used the weapon of boycott and asked to each Indian to spin his own cotton. His “active non-violent” methods (ahimsa) are still an example for many activists.

Nicholas Georgescu Roegen (1906 – 1994), Romanian statistician ( he passed his doctorate in La Sorbonne), he moved into the U.S. after the war. He has been professor in the universities of Bucarest and Nashville in the U.S. (also in Strasbourg for a short while). Georgescu-Roegen was the first thinker to present deGrowth as an unavoidable consequence of the limits imposed by nature. He showed that in the one hand it’s not possible to ignore natural resources ( replacing them by capital produced by the humankind), and that in the other hand the technological progress as a
whole does not imply a reduction of the impacts on the ecosystem, but on the opposite an increasing of the absolute consumption of resources.

Frantz Fanon (1925 – 1961). French writer and psychoanalyst, hero of the resistance against nazis and one of the leaders of the fight against colonialism, Frantz Fanon was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique. He had been the pupil of Aimé Cesaire in the Schoelcher lycée, and joined.
Resistance in Dominique. He was wounded and jailed in Germany. After medical studies and a specialization in psychiatry, he left for Algeria to join the FLN (National Liberation Front). In 1960, during the redaction of great book, “Les Damnés de la Terre” (The Wretched of the World), the most beautiful anticolonial manifesto, he was convinced of the inescapability of the independence for which he had fought so much.

Ivan Illich (1926 – 2002). Center for Intercultural Documentation’s (CIDOC) co-founder, in Cuernavaca, Mexico. He started in 1964 to organize seminars on the thematic of “institutional alternatives in a technological society”, focusing on South America; It was characterized by a radical criticism of capitalistic order and its social institutions, especially school. Illich was from the south as much as from the north, firmly rooted in occident and used to the orient, he fully disserved to be called a humanist. His writings about school, health, conviviality, or energy had a universal influence, creating many debates across the world.

Joseph Ki Zerbo (1922 –) in Burkina Faso. He is the first African « agrégé d’histoire » in La Sorbonne. As an historian he published many books about endogenous development. He was the scientist director of the two volumes General History of Africa, published by UNESCO. He was a member of the executive council of UNESCO and was a professor of Ouagadougou university. Strong militant of the development concept, Joseph Ki-Zerbo always pleaded for local cultures integration into technological development, only way to develop the rural world. In 1980, he created the Study Center for African Development (CEDA). He gained the Alternative Nobel Price in 1997.

Martin Luther King (1929 – 1968). Murdered in 1968, Civil Rights Movement’s leader, and advocate of non-violence, Martin Luther King was a Baptist minister, born in Atlanta, Georgia. Marked for life in his childhood by the inequality between blacks and whites, he was a minister in Montgomery, Alabama, when he saw a black woman under arrest because she had refused to sit in the coloured people special space. He then started a movement of boycott of the public transports which encountered a large success. Despite death threats, he carried on the movement and the Supreme Court finally abolished racial barriers in public institutions in 1956. He fought all his life against segregation and for social justice, giving a decisive impulse to Civil Right Movement.

Marcel Mauss (1872 – 1950). Famous anthropologist known for his thoughts about the role of the gift in traditional societies. He calls these societies “gift’s societies” in his famous essay on the gift. In such societies, humans are bound by obligations like “to give, to receive and to give back” where the value of what is exchanged cannot be reduced to a commodity; on the opposite, the gift is mainly a social function, like creating a social link. Whereas human exchanges in industrial societies are mainly determined by personal profit.

François Partant (1926 – 1987). French economist, who first worked as a development banker. After having realized, at the end of the 60’s, that development was a deadlock, he then devoted his life to convince local populations, especially in the middle-east and in Africa, to refuse the occidental imposed model. He is the author of “La fin du developpement (the end of development).

Karl Polanyi (1886 – 1964). Professor in the university of Columbia. He published many essays, like the famous “Great Transformation”. In this book, the author describes and explains the apparition of economical liberalism in occidental societies. For Polanyi, economy in the traditional societies is set in social relations, whereas it becomes autonomous in modern societies.

Jaya Prakash Narayan (1902 – 1979). Indian political leader. Founding member of the Congress Socialist Party (1934) and of the Indian Socialist Party (1952). He is the instigator of the Janata Party’s coalition which won the elections of 1977 against the outgoing prime minister Indira Gandhi and her Congress Party (1977).

Marshall Sahlins (1930- ), american anthropologist, who published « Age de pierre, age d’abondance » (Stone Age Economics), Gallimard 1976. He always worked to show that hunters and gatherers’ economy was the first and the only society of abundance that ever existed on earth.

Seattle (1786 – 1866). Indian chief of the Squamish tribe, spokesman during negociations with american authorities (started in 1854) and signatory, with other indian chiefs, of Point Elliot - Mukilteo peace treaty (1855) that transfered 2.5 millions acres to the american government and created the limits of a reservation for Squamish.

Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862), American essayiste, philosopher and poet, born and dead in Concord, Massachussets. This disciple of Ralph Waldo Emerson was considered as the first environmentalist. He is famous for the two years he spent alone in the forest (1845-1847), and for his writings advocating civil disobedience as a duty for each citizen when the authority comes to a guilty position. He inspired people like Tolstoï, Martin Luther King or Gandhi.

Gordian Troeller (1917 – 2003) and Marie-Claude Deffarge. Gordian Troller began his life as an adventurer. He was successively fighter in the Spanish war, secret agent for the allies, correspondent for the canadian army. After the war, he founded a newspaper in Luxembourg, quicly muffled by the authorities. He then met Marie-Claude Deffarge, with whom he worked until her death in 1984. They started to work as reporter for the press. In 1970, they decides to do film reports. Their first films, about the national liberation movements, are broadcast in french T.V. programs like « Cinq colonnes à la une ». Their career is suddenly stopped in France when they denounce in a film about Madagascar the means used by the frenchs to destroy populations’ natural resources, comparing it with the American defoliant in Vietnam. From 1974 to 1984, they direct and produce the series “In the name of progress”: 22 films where they firmly criticize progress and development in the North as much as in the South.