Georges Gurvitch

Georges Gurvitch (1894 to 1965) was a Russian-born French sociologist and jurist, born in Novorossiysk and died in Paris. One of the leading sociologists of his time and a specialist in the sociology of knowledge, he founded the journal Cahiers internationaux de Sociologie in 1944 and held a chair in sociology at the Sorbonne. He is an important figure in the development of the sociology of law. Like other legal sociologists he insisted that law is not merely the rules and decisions that state agencies produce and enforce, because groups and communities of many kinds produce regulation for themselves and others; his legal pluralism, more radical than most, locates a great variety of types of law in the different kinds of social interaction he distinguished. He stressed social law and social rights against what he called individual law, and at the end of the Second World War drafted a Bill of Social Rights as a blueprint for a postwar legal framework. His books include Sociology of Law of 1942 and The Bill of Social Rights of 1945. An outspoken advocate of Algerian decolonization, he and his wife were victims of an OAS bomb attack on their apartment in 1962.