Contenu du sommaire

Under the pressure of ecological contestation, French legislation concerning the environment has been greatly widened and deeply changea since the end of the 60s. Procedures for participation (public hearings, right of objection, possibilities of legal recourse) have been built into the regulatory process. Moreover, the rapidity of technological evolution, which imposes the flexibility of certain regulations, has brought about a proliferation of fuzzy legal terms open to contradictory interpretation. These new regulations have substituted a complex game of strategie interactions between developers, various governmental agencies and many other intervening parties to a bargaining situation between the developer and the government. The resulting conflicts give rise to numerous alliances which bring together each governmental agency and its clientele and privileged experts but which diminish the internal cohesion of the administrative machinery as a whole.

This study aims at describing the permanence and the renewal of the Systems of social-cultural attitudes and of the ideological preferences frorn one generation to another in various French social contexts. It shows the absence of a specifie socialization pattern depending on the social context, but the presence of processes of formation and acquisition depending on the nature of the dimensions. The progression of attitudes favorable to liberalization within the salaried middled classes is due to other mechanisms : their liberalism can be explained by the general transformation of their ways of life and by the rise in their educational level. In a way, it is acquired. As for the rise in the preference for the left, it is linked to the maintenance or the arrival in the middle salaried classes of members who have inherited such preference.

The values specifie to the artisan class are specified, after a picture of values common to the traditional middle classes has been sketched and the difficulty which the sociologist has in differentiating their various components has been recalled. Thèse are professional values with their roots in more or less rich traditions which are transmitted from one generation to the next through apprenticeship and which legitimize the belief in individual advancement through access to the status of artisan. The pattern of social-professional advancement in which the process of the mate's qualification leads him to practicing his skill independently still acts as a standard, in spite of the internal separations within the artisan class and the inequality of opportunities to accede to the status of artisan. The fact that artisans and mates adhere to common values can be explained by the relative proximity of their origins, the specifie mode of professional training and the characteristics of the artisan's division of labor. The result is that mates have attitudes and political behavior midway between those of artisans and of other workers.

response to three questions can be found in the survey's results : are there Systems of linked values? Do values depend on the personal characteristics of local politiciens, and/or the local context? The answers to these quetions vary according to the values studied, but on the whole, correlation analysis shows that certain values are linked, but that they are rather independent of individual and contextual variables.

The sociology of political behavior was influenced for a long time by the work done at the University of Michigan, to such an extent that there were references to the domination of the Michigan paradigm. Recent works ? particularly those of Norman Nie, Sidney Verba, and John Petrocik ? show that the American voter has changed, that his behavior no longer corresponds to the portrait sketched by the dominant paradigm with reference to his level of political competence, and to thé way his electoral choices are mode and to his party identification. These authors come to the conclusion that the work of the Michigan group is out dated; that it was valid for only one specifie period of American history. But the old and the new results are not necessarily contradictory and can be integrated into a model taking into account both the individual characteristics of the social agents and the working of the political field.

Some thoughts on the sources and methods concerning Mr. Rupnik's thesis on the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Research into Trotsky's exile papers at Harvard would have enabled the author to follow Guttman's group, Spartacus, in ils fight to set straight the Czechoslovak Communist Party, and then its significant merger with the Trotskyites. The Trotskyites'place ? in the form of leftist opposition and then independent organizations ? is greater than claimed by official history.