ABSTRACT
Sociologie du travail originated in a series of seminars on the nature and evolution of the labour process under modern conditions that was inaugurated in 1946 by George Friedmann, and continued until the mid-fifties. Every investigator who by the early sixties had made a name for himself, and several of the figures who dominate French Sociology as a whole, participated at some point or another in these meetings. The intense humanism that governed Friedmann outlook led therefore towards a comprehensive protest against the effects of modern science and technology of a type familiar, despite differences of vocabulary and minus any political populism, in the writings of Herbert Marcuse. Human work—'human' in Friedmann's dual sense of humane and humanising—was becoming the victim of the degenerative forces of technical civilisation. Friedmann's work can be related, albeit marginally, to one of the most venerable traditions in French social philosophy.
