The Coruscating Moral Vision of André Glucksmann

André Glucksmann, who died on Monday night, in Paris, was one of the great figures, and master thinkers, of contemporary French life, with the irony that much of his greatness depended on his passionate dismantling of the idea of “great men” and “master thinkers,” which he thought had disfigured European life for far too long. His death, at age seventy-eight, is more than painful; it is disconcerting and disorienting. If you were lucky enough to know him, it was always still possible to imagine taking one more Métro trip to his large, book-filled bohemian apartment in the north of Paris, and, with his brilliant wife, Fanfan, engaged alongside—in an atmosphere always somehow more Chekhovian than French—taking tea and talking about the world.