Who is Edgar Morin really? The philosopher and father of complex thought and transdisciplinarity? The sociologist who was the precursor of mass culture? Or perhaps the keen observer of adolescents, of ecology, of the Earth-fatherland, not to mention the undisciplined thinker of a politics of civilization or of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? All this and much more.

This biography follows the exceptional journey of this nonconformist French thinker: his childhood in Paris, within the community of Jewish immigrants in Salonica; the brutal disappearance of his mother, when he was barely ten years old; the exodus and the chaos—from which his commitment to the Resistance was born—; his Stalinization and his subsequent break with the Communist Party; his unusual enlistment in the Algerian war; the beginnings of sociology; his love of cinema; his total rethinking in the hippie and countercultural California of the 1960s; his commitment to ecology and the transmission of knowledge... In short, his life has witnessed some of the most important milestones of the 20th century.

With first-hand documents, testimonies from his intimates and rigorous research, this work restores all the complexity of an attractive and still very unknown character, while allowing us to better understand why Edgar Morin is such a necessary thinker in these dark and chaotic times.