Georges Politzer

Georges Politzer (3 May 1903 – 23 May 1942) was a French philosopher and Marxist theoretician of Hungarian Jewish origin, affectionately referred to by some as the "red-headed philosopher" (philosophe roux).

He was a native of Oradea, a city in present-day Romania (then Nagyvárad, Hungary).

He was murdered in the Holocaust.

Politzer had already been a militant by the time of his involvement in the Hungarian insurrection of 1919 when he was 17 and by joining the Hungarian Communist Party during the Hungarian Soviet Republic, led by Béla Kun.

He went into exile during the White Terror that preceded the establishment of a right-wing government under the regency of Admiral Miklós Horthy.

After meeting Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi in Vienna, he settled in Paris in 1921.

He joined the French Communist Party between 1929 and 1931.

During the early 1930s, the party founded the Workers' University of Paris (Université Ouvrière de Paris) which lasted until its dissolution by German occupation in 1939.

During his tenure at the university, Politzer was entrusted with and given charge of a course on dialectical materialism.

Meanwhile, he occupied the post of professor of philosophy at Lycée Marcelin Berthelot in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés.

Mobilized to Paris in 1940, he remained on the side of the French Communist Party's secret command.

Demobilized in July 1940, he oversaw the edition of a clandestine bulletin.

After his comrade and friend Paul Langevin, a physicist of world renown, was arrested in October 1940, Politzer published the first edition of The Free University (L'Université Libre), which told of the imprisonment of scholars and denounced the extortions committed by invading fascists during World War II.

He worked with other writers like Jacques Decour, Jacques Solomon and Valentin Feldman.

All were executed by the Nazis in 1942.

In February 1942, Politzer's operations were stopped; he was arrested along with his wife Mai, who was also a Communist and a Resistant, for violating the law banning the Communist Party.

He underwent torture, was turned over to the Nazis on 20 March 1942 and underwent execution by firing squad at their hands on 23 May of that year just after he had secretly published a French academic journal.

His wife was transported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered in March 1943.

A disciple of Marx and Lenin, Politzer was interested in psychology, preaching aspects of it and considered traditional psychology as abstract.

He also took a interest in nascent Freudian theory and its uses before eventually distancing himself from it.

His posthumous work, Elementary Principles of Philosophy (Principes Élémentaires de Philosophie) based on notes taken by his followers, was the first work banned by the military regime established in Turkey in 1980.

Supporters posit that all that was new, upsetting the house of Politzer, has been repudiated, ridiculed; and all of that was not upsetting to the official dominant philosophy has been favored.