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Few of us hope to be politically active in our second century. But to the end of his life, the French sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin, who has died aged 104, continued to speak out against populism, totalitarianism, nationalism, colonialism, the hegemony of profit, inequality, hate and that ubiquitous monster, stupidity.

Only two years ago, the former resistance fighter wrote in France’s leading leftwing newspaper Libération: “The time for a new resistance has come! [We must resist] the lies, the illusions, the collective hysterias of the extreme right.”

But Morin was more than an old man who kept his wits about him. Too little known in the anglophone world, he was above all an intellectual oracle whose prophetic tenor was particularly to French taste. He was multiple by temperament and gadfly by nature. He called himself a “humanologist” who fused elements of philosophy, psychology, ethnography and biology to try to understand the nature of humanity.

Although he lived through what the Parisian philosopher Alain Badiou called the “adventure of French philosophy”, from Sartre and de Beauvoirto Derrida, Debord, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, Barthes, Baudrillard, Kristeva and Cixous, Morin was a free spirit. He was no follower of any “ism”, be it existentialism, surrealism, situationism, poststructuralism or postmodernism. Rather, he developed a holistic, transdisciplinary approach to the big questions of our time.

Morin thus became known as the founder of “transdisciplinarity”, spawning many research institutes, including one he established in Paris with Roland Barthes in 1960, originally called the Centre d’Études de Communications de Masse (Centre for the Study of Mass Communications), now simply the Centre Edgar-Morin.

Two concepts lie at the heart of his prophetic philosophy – polycrisis and complexity. The former, set out in his six-volume masterpiece La Méthode (The Method, 1977-2004), contended that crises, be they environmental, political, social or economic, interact dynamically, creating feedback loops so that one crisis can worsen another.

He opposed the growing specialisation of academic life, arguing that the prevailing philosophy of reductionism in universities was inadequate to deal with our increasingly complex world. His notion of complexity counselled a kind of Socratic dialogical thinking whereby, for instance, deniers of climate crisis might fruitfully converse with those who call urgently for more sustainable lifestyles.

All this may seem abstruse, but Morin also applied his ideas to practical policy. He believed education was unfit for purpose and should be reformed to foster interdisciplinary knowledge and critical thinking – a philosophy inimical to our target-driven, examination-fixated school culture. “What does it mean to be human? What is globalisation? What is life? These questions require us to connect knowledge that is currently scattered across fields of research,” he told the TV channel TV5 Monde in 2020.

One might add to these two concepts a third, namely reliance – the human capacity to create and maintain meaningful connections, to develop solidarity in a globalised world. For all that Morin often felt an outsider, he maintained this vision of reliance as bulwark against the forces of fragmentation and individualisation. Last year he published the latest of 120 books, Y a-t-il des Leçons de l’Histoire? (Are There Lessons from History?), committed to understanding the forces behind historical dynamics.

All that said, Morin is perhaps best known outside France as a film-maker, in particular for his contribution to so-called cinéma verité thanks to his 1961 documentary with the film-maker Jean Rouch, Chronique d’un Été (Chronicle of a Summer), in which a simple question posed to young Parisians, “Are you happy?” provoked unscripted discussions about class, race and colonialism. “I am not of those who have a career, but of those who have a life,” he wrote in Mes Démons (My Demons, 1994).

He was born Edgar Nahoum in Paris to a secular Jewish family from Thessalonika in Greece. His mother, Luna (nee Beressi), had hidden from her husband, Vidal, who worked in the textile trade, that she had been advised by doctors not to have children due to a heart condition caused by the Spanish flu. She died of a heart attack when Edgar was nine, and he felt her death as an “inner Hiroshima”, he later wrote.

From that moment, he resolved to “live by death, die by life”. By 1936, during the Spanish civil war, the then 15-year-old was a member of the socialist organisation Solidarité Internationale Antifascist and two years later he joined the anti-fascist and pacifist Partie Frontiste. By 1940, though, he was a member of the French resistance, having left occupied Paris to study at Capitole University in Toulouse.

It was there that he became known as Edgar Morin, reportedly because of a miscommunication during a meeting of resistance fighters in Toulouse, where he introduced himself as Edgar Manin, in reference to Malraux’s character in La Condition Humaine. Fellow fighters misheard him as “Morin” and the name stuck.

He graduated with degrees in history/geography and law in Toulouse, before studying philosophy, sociology and psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1946, he served as head of propaganda in the French military government in Germany. His first book was L’An Zéro de l’Allemagne (Germany’s Year Zero, 1946), in which he described the defeated people of Germany as being in a state of “somnambulism” – an abiding theme in his work.

In 1950, he joined the French national research institute, CNRS. During the late 1940s and early 50s, he also worked as a journalist, and in 1956 co-founded a Marxist philosophical review called Arguments, devised in part to be a revisionist counterblast to the Stalinism of the French Communist party, which had expelled him in 1951 for not toeing the party line.

This was a painful event that left him wary of herd-like thinking and indoctrination. Indeed, his 1959 book Autocritique, akin to the notion of self-critique in Mao’s Little Red Book of two years earlier, was predicated on the idea that one should constantly question one’s own views and especially root out those one blindly accepts on the basis of bogus authorities. His early pacifism was just one of the views he came to see he had mistakenly held.

Morin had throughout his life a vexed relationship with his Jewish identity. He declined to be defined by his Jewishness, insisting that he was also “French, Mediterranean and a citizen of the world”. And yet he was acute about French antisemitism. In 1969 he published one of his best sociological studies, La Rumeur d’Orléans (Rumour in Orléans), in which he and a team of researchers investigated how baseless, antisemitic claims of women being abducted in Jewish-owned clothing stores spread so rapidly throughout the city during that decade.

But he was also denounced by fellow Jews for writing critically of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. In 2002, he co-wrote, with Sami Naïr and Danièle Sallenave, an article for Le Monde headlined “Israël-Palestine: le Cancer”. The authors were sued for “racial defamation and apology for terrorist acts” by France-Israël and Avocats Sans Frontières but were ultimately acquitted at France’s highest appeal court, the court of cassation, on the grounds of freedom of expression.

Morin was married four times. His first marriage, to Violette Chapellaubeau in 1945, ended in divorce in 1970. He then married Johanne Harrelle, and they divorced in 1980. He and Edwige Lannegrace were married in 1982, and remained together until her death in 2008. He is survived by his fourth wife, the sociologist Sabah Abouessalam, whom he married in 2012, and the two daughters, Irène and Véronique, of his first marriage.

He remained until the end an elegant figure, sporting a silk scarf and hat; more appealingly yet, he was undimmed by negativity and never bored by life. He told one interviewer: “In Paris or in Marrakech, I have never ceased to be curious about the world of which I am an atom.”

• Edgar Morin, sociologist, philosopher and film-maker, born 8 July 1921; died 29 May 2026