My friend Jean-Pierre Worms, who has died aged 85, was an integral part of the postwar French sociology movement that dominated global understanding of social sciences.

He also had a lengthy and successful political career, including as a member of the French National Assembly for more than a decade up to 1991. A protege of Pierre Mendès France, he was particularly active in the era of François Mitterrand’s flourishing Socialist party. He worked as an adviser to Michel Rocard, François Hollande and Ségolène Royal, and was a leading figure in driving the decentralisation of power in France from the state to the regions, departments and municipalities.

Born in Courbevoie, near Paris, Jean-Pierre came to the UK for the first time at the end of the second world war to continue his secondary education at the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle in London. His family had been offered sanctuary by the British government following the death of his father, Jean Worms, a Jewish resistance fighter who had been a British Special Operations Executive agent and had been executed by the Nazis at Flossenbürg concentration camp in 1945.

It was in London that Jean-Pierre met his future wife, Miriam, who worked in publishing. Originally from Hamburg, most of her family had died in concentration camps and she had also become a refugee, arriving in Britain on the Kindertransport. Jean-Pierre had great affection for Britain, which he associated with tolerance, acceptance and humanity, and London remained his spiritual home. However, after marrying in 1955, he and Miriam decided to make their life together in Paris.

He studied sociology at the Sorbonne and at the University of Liverpool, and in the 1960s worked as a sociologist alongside Michel Crozier at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, where he established the novel theory of organisations and their impact on society.

He also understood the power of protest, living through, and chronicling, the student protests at Berkeley in California in 1964 (when he was seconded to the University of California) and in Paris in 1968.

At the tail-end of his political career he joined the Council of Europe (1988-93) as a member of the committee on legal affairs, becoming the driving force behind the council’s 1995 Framework Convention on National Minorities. From the 90s onwards he devoted himself to civil society, and co-founded in 1989 a successful NGO, Initiative France, which nurtures entrepreneurship.

He remained all his life wonderfully engaged and optimistic, and as a passionate European was determined to put his intelligence and commitment to the service of others.

Miriam died in 2009.