Jean-Louis Le Moigne (in French mwaɲ/; 22 March 1931 – 16 November 2022) was a French specialist in systems theory and constructivist epistemology. He was an alumnus from École Centrale Paris. Le Moigne died in Paris on 16 November 2022, at the age of 91.[1]
Jean-Louis Le Moigne was born on 22 March 1931 in Casablanca, French Morocco. He is married to Maguy Le Moigne, and they have 3 children.
The biography that follows was realized from discussions that Jean-Louis Le Moigne granted during the year 1998 as part of the preparation for the publication of its "Mix" (a collective work realized in his honor, to which important authors contributed — among which are: Herbert Simon, Edgar Morin, Ernst von Glasersfeld, P. Tabatoni, H. Bartoli — that was published under the title Between Systemic & Complexity: Trailblazing, to the P. U. F. in 1999).
Jean-Louis Le Moigne was born on 22 March 1931 in Casablanca; he is the eldest child of three children. His father, Emile Le Moigne, had embraced a career in engineering that led him to move to Morocco for a few years to contribute thereby building a hydraulic barrier that made him famous in the area and that was inaugurated after 1940. Emile was himself the son of a French police officer, of Breton origin and from the countryside, that had benefited from the "social promotion" that was authorized by the institutions of the Third Republic after the war of 1870—and who probably gave the name Emile to his son about Émile Zola.
Like a lot of military officers' sons, Emile Le Moigne would be schooled in a military secondary school, La Flèche, before entering the Naval school and would serve during the war of 1914–1918 as a young naval officer. The war caused him some health problems that forced him to return then to civilian life: The army granted him a scholarship to Supélec (engineering school), and it was as an electrical engineer that he was called to contribute to the electric industrialization of Morocco.
Émile would meet the mother of Jean-Louis, the daughter of an officer, who participated during that time in the construction of the railroads of Morocco. Note to the reader: this maternal grandfather marked the early childhood of Jean-Louis: he was the seventh boy of a family of nine children—that had emigrated from la Creuse (where his father was a mason) towards the Nièvre where there seemed to be more work... –