George Politzer

* Trsztena, 3 May 1903 – † Paris, 23/25 May 1942 / philosopher ; ; His father was a district physician in Trsztena, but they moved to Nagyvárad and later to Budapest when he was still young. He attended high school in Szeged, then from February 1919 he joined the left-wing student movement, fighting as a soldier during the Commune. He finally passed his matriculation examination at a high school in Budapest. In Vienna he met two prominent representatives of psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Sándor Ferenczi (1873–1933), and this influenced his further career. In 1921 he settled in Paris, where he studied philosophy and psychology at the Sorbonne University. In 1923 he founded the journal Revue de psychologie concrète. After graduating, he taught philosophy in Cherbourg, Evreux, and finally in Paris. In 1929, he became a member of the French Communist Party and later joined the French Resistance. In the early 1930s, he founded the Workers' University (l'Université Ouvrière de Paris) with the communist writer Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) and the Nobel Prize-winning writer Romain Rolland (1866–1944), where he taught Marxist philosophy. He was executed by the Germans. He founded the school of thought called "concrete psychology" based on psychoanalysis. His theory, according to which people are not abstract beings, but each experiences his own constant drama and series of conflicts, became one of the founders of the existentialism of the French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre (1905– ; 1980). Some of his works written in French have also been published in Hungarian. ; ; His main works: ; Critique des fondements de la psychologie. La Psychologie, la Psychoanalyse, 1928, ; Fin d'une parade philosophique. Le Bergsonisme, 1928, ; Revolution et contre-révolution au XXe siècle. Reponse a „Or et sang” de M. Rosenberg, 1941, ; Principes élémantaires de philosophie (published in Hungarian in 1949 as A filozófia alapelemei c.), ; La crise de la psychologie contemporaine, 1947, ; La philosophie et les mythes. Les fondements de la psychologie, 1969, ; A filozófia és a mítoszok (studies, selected by László Mátrai), 1972.