About André Glucksmann
André Glucksmann (French: [ɡlyksman]; 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, who went on to reject Marxism–Leninism and "real-existing socialism" in the popular book La Cuisinière et le Mangeur d'Hommes (1975), and later positioned himself on the Chinese side of the Sino-Soviet split, becoming 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 Western world. == Early years == 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, Rubin, was a Soviet spy, arrested for espionage on 17 May 1940, and sent to a camp near London. He died on 2 July 1940, in the sinking of the SS Arandora Star, which was taking him to Canada to be interned as an “enemy agent.” 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".
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