After a brief period studying industrial chemistry, Friedmann prepared for the philosophy agrégation at the prestigious Lycée Henri IV in Paris.
[3] After taking his family to Toulouse, Friedmann joined the French Resistance during World War II, when he was hunted by the Nazi Gestapo due to his Communist activities.
But even his moderate criticisms of the U.S.S.R. and Stalin caused bitter conflict with members of the French Communist Party and began Friedmann's move away from political activism.
[8] Friedmann's doctoral thesis, published after the end of the war in 1946, examined the "human problems" of automation and mechanization European industrial production.
Friedmann argued that while these efforts were an improvement on the "technicist ideology" of management engineering, social science would not lead to significant changes in labor practices without class conflict and the transformation of the capitalist economic system.
[10][11] His influential students included Alain Touraine, Michel Crozier, Jean-Daniel Reynaud, and Jean-René Tréanton, who conducted some of the first empirical work in industrial sociology in France.
[14] Friedmann continued to travel extensively around the world, observing and publishing on labor practices and industrial models in the United States, Israel, and South America.