He is the son of the resistance fighter Léopold Rabinovitch (1922-2009) who was a member of the FTP-MOI group, Compagnie Carmagnole-Liberté, deported as a Résistant to Dachau in 1944,[1] and of Anna née Portnoï, who was a hidden child in France during WWII.
Gérard Rabinovitch situates his work and writings in the Weberian tradition and in consonance with political philosophy of the Frankfurt School and its related thinkers including Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Siegfried Kracauer.
In his book, De la destructivité humaine, fragments sur le Béhémoth (On Human Destructiveness: figures of the Behemoth) Gérard Rabinovitch reconsiders and criticizes the limited viewpoint of political, sociological and philosophical thinkers who have understood Nazism through the Hobbesian metaphor of the Leviathan.
Using his notion of "destructiveness", Gérard Rabinovitch discusses and criticizes the central thesis of Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust,[3] and suggests that we must go beyond the categories of instrumental reason and action.
Through his research which seeks to articulate radical psychoanalytical anthropology with the recurring problems of classical political philosophy as posed by thinkers like Leo Strauss and Claude Lefort, Rabinovitch sets out new epistemological and ethical bases for us to assume our responsibilities as human subjects in the world.