PERSON
André Gorz
Austrian-French social philosopher (1923–2007) whose four-decade elaboration of autonomous versus heteronomous labor produced the most consequential framework for analyzing technology, work, and human freedom in the second half of the twentieth century.
Born Gerhart Hirsch in Vienna in 1923, André Gorz emigrated to France, where he co-founded Le Nouvel Observateur and became one of the most influential social theorists of post-industrial capitalism. Deeply shaped by existentialism and his intellectual friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre, Gorz turned in the 1960s toward political economy, producing landmark works including Farewell to the Working Class (1980), Critique of Economic Reason (1988), Reclaiming Work (1999), and L'Immatériel (2003). His central contribution was the distinction between autonomous labor (self-directed, purposeful) and heteronomous labor (externally directed) and his insistence that technological progress should be converted into expanded human freedom through guaranteed basic income, radical work-time reduction, and democratic governance of productive tools.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Gorz's intellectual trajectory moved from existentialism through Marxism toward what he called political ecology — a framework that emphasized the material and temporal conditions of human freedom over purely economic categories. His early book The Traitor (1958) received a celebrated preface by Sartre and