Arghiri Emmanuel

Arghiri Emmanuel was born in Patras, Greece, in 1911. He spent considerable time in the Belgian Congo in connection with a family textile firm. In 1942 he volunteered for the Greek Liberation Forces in the Middle East and was active in the April 1944 uprising against the Greek government­in-exile in Cairo. The uprising was crushed by British troops and Emmanuel was condemned to death by a Greek court-martial in Alexandria. He was granted amnesty at the end of 1945 and freed in March 1946. After the war, and after a period in which he again worked in the Congo, he settled in Paris where he studied socialist planning. He received his doctorate in sociology from the Sorbonne. He was director of economic studies at the University of Paris VII.