André Glucksmann

André Glucksmann (19 June 1937 – 10 November 2015) was a French philosopher, activist and writer. He was a leading figure of the new philosophers.

Glucksmann began his career as a Marxist, but went on to reject communism in the popular book La Cuisinière et le Mangeur d'Hommes (1975), and later became an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russian foreign policy. He was a strong supporter of human rights. In later years he opposed the claim that Islamic terrorism is the product of the clash of civilizations between Islam and the West.

André Glucksmann was born in 1937 in Boulogne-Billancourt, the son of Ashkenazi Jewish parents from Austria-Hungary. His father was from Czernowitz in northern Bukovina, which later became part of Romania and is now in Ukraine, and his mother from Prague, which later became the capital of Czechoslovakia.

Glucksmann's father was killed in World War II, and his mother and sister were active in the French Resistance. The family "narrowly escaped deportation to the camps" during the Holocaust, which influenced Glucksmann's developing ideas of "the state as the ultimate source of barbarism".

He studied at the Lycée la Martinière in Lyon, and later enrolled at École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud. His first book, Le Discours de la Guerre, was published in 1968.