In Memoriam: Dr. Guy Rocher
In memoriam: Guy Rocher (1924-2025), sociologist and public intellectual
Article submission shared by Simon Langlois, Département de sociologie, Université Laval
Rocher anglais 28 sept 2025 révisé
Guy Rocher, who died in Montreal at the age of 101 on September 3, 2025, was one of Canada's and Quebec's most important sociologists. His life spanned a century of social transformation that Canada experienced midway through his personal journey, as an attentive witness, a renowned analyst, and a committed participant in the profound social changes that transformed the country. Guy Rocher was a valued professor and had a reputation as an engaging teacher, first at Laval University in 1952 and then at the University of Montreal from 1960 onward. His students, graduates, colleagues, and collaborators were unanimous in emphasizing his kindness and his gentle, respectful demeanor toward his interlocutors, not to mention his openness to debate and the firmness of his principles. He was driven by the ethic of conviction and responsibility dear to Max Weber, an author whose importance in sociology he repeatedly emphasized and who was a source of inspiration for him.
Guy Rocher defended his ideas and convictions during his presidency of the Jeunesse Étudiante Catholique du Canada (JEC) when he was young and throughout his career as a professor: advocacy for social justice, the need for equal opportunity in education, promotion of the French language, advocacy for the autonomy and sovereignty of the Quebec nation, and defense of secularism in the public sphere. He never raised his voice, and his words commanded attention in private, in public, and in the media. His mastery of both French and English fueled his reputation as an excellent communicator. His thinking was articulate, and he expressed himself without jargon while putting forward well-founded arguments.
Three aspects of his long career deserve our attention: first, his scientific work, which was a significant source of inspiration for generations of students and researchers in the social sciences; second, his contributions to public life and institutions (member of the Commission of Inquiry on Education, Deputy Minister in Camile Laurin's cabinet, etc.); and finally, his ideas and intellectual commitments, the latter trait having earned him the justifiable title of "quiet revolutionary" in several testimonies published following his death The last two aspects are better known (I will group them together in the following lines), and I will focus primarily on the work of the sociologist.
Guy Rocher's Scientific Work
At the very beginning of his career, Guy Rocher was a pioneer in the analysis of social stratification in former French Canada. While a professor at Laval University, he developed the "Rocher Code," an original typology of social strata inspired by contemporary American sociology in the 1950s. His empirical research focused on a comparative analysis of the social mobility of Francophones and Anglophones in Quebec, the results of which were published in his first article, co-authored with Y. de Jocas (1957). This initial contribution paved the way for his work focused on social change, a constant in his work, but it also fueled his desire to act to end the economic inferiority of French Canadians, the major social issue at the beginning of his career.
For many years, Guy Rocher taught the course Introduction to Sociology to thousands of students (classes were large at the time), and from it he produced an original work (initially published in three volumes in French 1969-1972), A General Introduction to Sociology : A Theoretical Perspective, his "magnum opus" selected as one of the twenty best books in the social sciences published in English in Canada by the Canadian Federation of the Social Sciences in 1990. The book's structure was highly original, and, unlike its American counterparts, it focused on major questions requiring answers in sociology: how individuals develop attachment to society, how social frameworks are structured, and how social change occurs. The first volume focuses on social action (with a clear exposition of Talcott Parsons's thinking and references to French and German sociologists), the second volume considers social organization, and the third addresses social change and the evolution of societies. Rocher presents classic concepts and theories in sociology, "far from dogmatism and ideological filters," as many commentators have pointed out. The book has aged well and was included on the curriculum for years in many sociology departments, not only in the French-speaking world but also in several other countries, having been translated into more than a dozen languages (the number remains to be determined).
Guy Rocher had completed his doctorate in sociology at Harvard University under the supervision of Talcott Parsons, then the most influential American sociologist and an unanimously considered "difficult to read" author. In his book Talcott Parsons et la Sociologie Américaine, published in Paris in 1972, Rocher set himself the goal of making the American sociologist's thought known and synthesizing it in a clear and accessible manner, two qualities that were highlighted by his colleagues. He criticized the sociology of Talcott Parsons for the scant space given to social change in his theoretical construction. British sociologist Anthony Giddens called the work "clearer than those of Parsons himself" (!) in a 1976 review for the British Journal of Sociology. The work has been translated into five languages. Rocher did not consider himself a disciple of Parsons or a "structural-functionalist", but rather advocated an analysis of social action inspired by Max Weber, which guided the writing of his Introduction to Sociology. He always gave great importance to the individual in a social situation, as demonstrated by his keen interest in the study of social change, while recognizing the importance of social structures, fueled by his reading of Émile Durkheim.
Guy Rocher is responsible for numerous analyses of the changes in Quebec society, of which he was a well-informed observer while himself being involved in the actions that guided these same social changes, as we shall see later. Gérard Bouchard sums up his contribution well. "Remarkably, he [Guy Rocher] was one of the first to formulate most of the founding ideas from which scientists of my generation have thought about Quebec for decades" (G. Bouchard 2006: 326). His book Le Québec en mutation (1973) brings together eleven illuminating essays on the North American Francophonie, Canada, education, the cultural revolution, ideologies, the decline and revival of religion, and the profession of sociologist. The themes addressed, numerous and touching on several spheres of society, testify to the breadth of his fields of interest. From this work, I retain that it revealed "the gap that has occurred in Quebec in the evolution of social structures and culture" (p. 15). Economic structures, class structures, and family structures changed more rapidly at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries than the cultural universe (religion and ideologies in particular).
In the last twenty-five years of his career, Guy Rocher focused on the sociology of law. He "belonged to a family established in the law" (Guy Rocher 1974: 243) and in his youth he had briefly studied at the Faculty of Law of the University of Montreal, without forgetting that he repeatedly recalled the importance of law for the first sociologists. During his time at the Executive Council of the Government of Quebec between 1976 and 1981, he noted how "the law was the arm of the State." "To be interested in reforms, one had to be interested in the State first, because the State is one of the places where many reforms end up. (...) and one must also be interested in the law, but this is not the case for sociologists" (G. Rocher in response to F. Rocher 2010: 68-69).
To address this lack of interest in the law among his colleagues, Rocher initiated this research interest by joining the Centre de recherche en droit public (CRDP) at the Université de Montréal at an age when others were considering retirement from active life. Guy Rocher's contribution to the sociology of law remains to be studied and deserves to be better known (see Rocher 1996). Due to space constraints, I will highlight a few elements of his work. The sociologist always distinguished between the role of the State and the role of the legislator. He challenged the stereotype that the law lags reality, and he distinguished between the effectiveness and efficiency of the law. Effectiveness refers to the legislator's intention, but effectiveness evokes sociological and even moral dimensions. Thus, the smoking ban or the obligation to wear seatbelts in cars needed to be accepted by norms and social control to become largely effective. Conversely, the acceptance of laws on the French language or on secularism is more difficult for reasons he explained. He also endeavored to identify the mythical dimensions of law, giving the example of Bill 101 on the French language, which largely contributed to the redefinition of Quebec society. The same is true for the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, which has acquired the great symbolic and identity value that we know in Canada. Another contribution consisted in analyzing the relationship between objective law and subjective law. He put forward the idea that the invocation of subjective rights had opened the door to objective law to the extent that the State was forced to respond to a growing demand. The categorization of subjective rights (of children, minorities, immigrants, etc.) has contributed to the proliferation of law in a circular and dialectical relationship between subjective rights and objective law. Rocher also focused on the study of the paradoxes between freedom and the constraint imposed by law. “Freedom constantly needs to be redefined by law at the same time as the law multiplies the constraints and sets the limits of this freedom” (G. Rocher in response to F. Rocher, 2010, p. 219).
Guy Rocher, public intellectual
Guy Rocher was a man of action, deeply involved in guiding many of the social changes that took place within Quebec society (and in Canada) during his active career. He defined himself as a reformist, driven by a desire for social change, one of the major thrusts of sociology, which he theorized and analyzed extensively in his work, at a time (the 1960s and 1970s in particular) when many of his younger colleagues in the social sciences were leaning more toward revolutionary change. The primary characteristic of a reform is that it is a planned change based first and foremost on a project, as he stated in his Itinéraire (1974). Rocher shared with other researchers and intellectuals of his generation—I am thinking of John Porter, University of Toronto, or Gérald Fortin, his sociologist colleague in the sociology department at Laval University—this perspective inspired by what one might call the ideology of planning that relies heavily on the state. He is part of the generation of intellectuals and technocrats who led the Quebec state to move away from a defensive pole (protecting the traditions, faith, and language of French Canadians) in favor of an active pole leading to the modernization of institutions and interventions in economic development such as the nationalization of hydroelectric companies or incentives to bring “Quebec Inc.” into the business world. Guy Rocher's thinking and actions were influential in three spheres of Quebec public life: reform of the education system, defense of the French language, and support for secularism in the public sphere. I will briefly summarize his contribution in these three areas.
Rocher spent five years as an influential member of the Commission of Inquiry on Education (Parent Commission) in the early 1960s, and his ideas were instrumental in the directions proposed by the commissioners with the aim of modernizing Quebec's education system according to several testimonies. He advocated for the application of empirical knowledge on education and teaching in developing the Parent Commission's recommendations and was a major proponent of the creation of CEGEPs to replace traditional colleges, as well as the creation of the Université du Québec à Montréal. "When, in the 1960s, we reformed the education system in Quebec, we made a reform so radical that, metaphorically, we call it a revolution" (G. Rocher in response to F. Rocher 2010, p. 70). Subsequently, the sociologist never abandoned his initial concerns for the reform of the education system, and he repeatedly criticized the instrumentalization of education and the unequal relationships he observed there, occasionally questioning the drift towards elitism. He campaigned for free education within the school system in all levels of education up to university, as shown by his support for the student movement of 2012 given at an advanced age.
The promotion of the French language in Quebec was Rocher's second area of commitment. Called by Camille Laurin to serve as Deputy Minister for Cultural Development in René Lévesque's first government (1970-1979), he contributed to the drafting of the Charter of the French Language with Fernand Dumont and Henri Laberge and to the development of Bill 101 on the French language, not to mention his collaboration in the drafting of the white paper on cultural development, which had a major influence on Quebec's public policies. The sociologist later explained "his transition from the identity of French Canadian to that of Quebecer" as well as his commitment to Quebec independence. The observation of the anglicization of immigrant children in the Montreal school system was decisive in the evolution of his thinking. "The adjective 'French-Canadian' symbolized our minority status in a multicultural Canada, a country where the French-Canadian minority was reduced in 1971 to the same level as all other minorities. This awareness strongly contributed to my becoming a separatist" (G. Rocher in response to F. Rocher 2010: 56).
Later in his long career, the sociologist Rocher became involved as a public intellectual in his support of secularism (laïcité in French). He supported the republican ideal, advocating for state neutrality by prohibiting religious symbols for teachers, judges, and police to maintain public confidence. In his public speeches, Rocher argued that secularism was not a principle hostile to religions but rather an essential condition for all beliefs, spiritual or not, to coexist in the same society. According to him, secularism makes possible the diversity of beliefs while ensuring the unity of society and aims to prevent religious affiliations from becoming factors of discrimination or division.
Throughout his active life—and even at a very advanced age—Guy Rocher appeared in the media to comment and critically analyze numerous social issues. I will mention only one example of his public engagement, a little distant in memory but very important: his challenge to the War Measures Act adopted in 1970 by the federal government of Pierre Elliot Trudeau during the October Crisis. He then chaired the "Committee of Eight" made up of intellectuals - including Fernand Dumont (Laval University), Charles Taylor (McGill University), two journalists (Claude Ryan and Father Vincent Harvey) and three union leaders - all involved in challenging this law limiting individual freedoms in a highly emotional social context. His position earned him lengthy interrogation by the police (the RCMP) in his office at the Université de Montréal.
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Guy Rocher received numerous awards in recognition of his exceptional contribution to sociology and to public action. He was a member of the Royal Society of Canada (1974), a Companion of the Order of Canada (1971), Knight of the National Order of Quebec (1991), and Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1973). He received the Outstanding Award for his contribution to Sociology from the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association (1989), among other prestigious awards.
With the passing of Guy Rocher, Canada and Quebec have lost a brilliant intellectual and a man of action, dedicated and committed to promoting social justice. He was closely involved in numerous social changes inspired by his reformist perspective, which at times had a near-revolutionary connotation. He was an important pioneer who leaves a fundamental and precious legacy to sociology, as a scientific discipline, to which he was so devoted.
References
To learn more about the man and his work, one can refer first to Rocher's autobiographical text, "Itinéraire sociologique" (1974), two autobiographical works (2005, 2006), and to the two volumes of the excellent biography of the sociologist written by Pierre Duchesne (2019 and 2021). Two books of interviews with Guy Rocher have been published, one with George Khal (1989) and the other with François Rocher (2010). Finally, the liber amicorum prepared by Céline St-Pierre and Jean-Philippe Warren (2006), published after the professor's retirement, contains a short autobiographical text. Guy Rocher has written numerous articles and book chapters and has edited many books, either alone or in collaboration with others.
Bouchard, Gérard
« L’homme, le savant, le citoyen…et les autres » in Céline Saint-Pierre and Jean-Philippe Warren (dir.) 2006, p. 325-328.
Duchesne, Pierre
Guy Rocher. Voir, juger, agir. Tome I (1924-1963), Montréal, Québec Amérique, 2019.
Guy Rocher. Le sociologue du Québec. Tome II (1963-2021), Montréal, Québec Amérique, 2021.
Rocher, Guy
(with Yves de Jocas) «Inter-generation occupational mobility in the province of Quebec», Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 1, 1957: 57-68.
« Itinéraire sociologique », Recherches sociographiques, volume XV, numéros 2-3, mai-août 1974 : 243-248.
Introduction à la sociologie générale, tomes I, II et III, Montréal, HMH, 1969-1972.
Talcott Parsons et la sociologie américaine, Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1972.
Le Québec en mutation, Montréal, Hurtubise HMH, 1973.
Entre les rêves et l’histoire. Entretiens avec Georges Khal, Montréal, VLB éditeur, coll. Études québécoises, 1989.
Études de sociologie du droit et de l’éthique, Montréal, Les éditions Thémis, 1996, 327p.
« Le ‘polythéisme’ des modes d’explication du social », dans Daniel Mercure (dir.), L’analyse du social. Les modes d’explication, Québec, Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005 : 21-45.
« Être sociologue-citoyen », published in Céline Saint-Pierre and Jean-Philippe Warren (2006 : 8-17).
Rocher, François
Guy Rocher. Entretiens, Montréal, Boréal, 2010.
Saint-Pierre, Céline and Jean-Philippe Warren (dir.)
Sociologie et société québécoise. Présences de Guy Rocher, Montréal, Les presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2006.
Simon Langlois
Professeur émérite
Département de sociologie, Université Laval
Simon.langlois@soc.ulaval.ca