Joseph Gabel

Who was Joseph Gabel?

Joseph Gabel was a French Hungarian-born sociologist and philosopher. His work was always strongly influenced by Marxism but he was against Stalinism and critical of the work of Louis Althusser.

He first studied Psychopathology with Eugène Minkowski, then he turned to Sociology. He taught at the Mohammed-V University of Rabat from 1965 to 1971, and at Amiens University from 1971 to 1980.

In 1962, he published his most important work: False Consciousness: An Essay on Reification. From the standpoint of psychopathology, this study works to synthesize Marxist notions of "False Consciousness" and reification with the study of Schizophrenia. In the following years, Gabel's works stressed the analysis of ideologies and marxist theory of alienation. Gabel also wrote the articles "Utopia" and "Ideology" in the Encyclopedia Universalis and he was one of the only French specialists on Karl Mannheim.