Daniel Cohen was able to discuss Roger Federer's tennis career, Africa's debt crisis and the future of our prosperous yet unhappy civilization with equal passion and brilliance. France's great contemporary intellectual passed away of a blood disease on Sunday, August 20 at the age of 70 at the Necker Hospital in Paris. He leaves behind an exceptional generation of students, including a Nobel Prize winner, as well as a prolific body of thought contained in more than 15 books.

Cohen was one of France's most respected economists, famous among the general public for his books that were both educational and enlightening. "Daniel Cohen was a teacher, a man of ideals and pedagogy, a man of debate and commitment. We lose a great intellectual, an economist who made French research shine, a sincere humanist," wrote French President Emmanuel Macron on X (formerly Twitter).

Born on June 16, 1953 in Tunis, Cohen spent his childhood in Paris, pampered by his mother, a pharmacist, and his father, a doctor. He was 15 at the time of the May 68 student revolts, his first political awakening. He excelled at math and his father hoped to see him attend France's elite engineering university, École Polytechnique, in Paris. He passed the entrance exam, but chose instead the École Normale Supérieure, achieving the prestigious agrégation teaching certification in mathematics in 1976. Despite his focus on math, the oil crisis of 1973, which signaled the end of the post-war boom, intrigued him enough for him to focus on the analysis of this fundamental shift, which would result in inflation, unemployment and deindustrialization a few years later. It was the end of one era in global economics and the beginning of another.

"We shared the same passion for the novels of Kundera, García Márquez and Vargas Llosa, where politics and literature intertwined," said historian and philosopher Michel Marian, whom he befriended at the École Normale. At the time, economics courses turned their attention to the slow decomposition of Marxism. The gifted mathematician never neglected the study of politics, culture and economics as necessary dimensions to understand and explain the world.

His first book for the general public published in 1994, The Misfortunes of Prosperity, opens with an analogy between the disappearance of growth and that of Mademoiselle Albertine, who causes Proust much suffering in his In Search of Lost Time. From the early 1990s, Cohen diagnosed the changing world in a style that was also highly literary.

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