Contenu du sommaire

Annie Kriegel : Making good use of the crisis. «La Nouvelle Histoire», (meaning «The New History») ? which came out in France in the early 30's around the periodical Annales ? had tried, in an enriching approach, to put in parentheses the process (event or accident) in order to explore more easily the structure. Today it is time to give up, even as a temporary method, this reduction of the historical to the logical. The event and even more so the advent or the « event in all its majesty » (crisis or revolution) is a set made of: 1) punctual traumatism; 2) the breaking down of the earlier structure; 3) the selective process leading to a lasting reconstitution of a new order. It then follows that the specificity of history lies in the chronological, the short-term, the political and the factual. Thus is reached the « happy core » of leninism, i.e., the understanding of the « good use » of the crisis.

Jean Millet : Gabriel Tarde and social psychology. G. Tarde (1843-1904) is one of the founders of French sociology. His observations are based upon surveys on criminals. His main belief rests upon social life as an inter-psychology. In his famous work, Les Lois de l'Imitation (The Laws of Imitation) (1890), he shows that social life is made of the interaction of psychological factors: the Desires of some men and the Inventions imagined for their satisfaction, form the subject of imitations. These imitations spread as waves through social groups, according to specific laws of expansion. These phenomena of imitation (as well as those of opposition and of adaptation which follow them) make up the social network and thus, social life itself. Social life is not led by blind collective factors (as Durkheim believed), but by psychological factors. From these principles, G. Tarde defines the elements of a general sociology, an economic sociology and a philosophy of history. His work deserves to be rediscovered, because it allows to prepare the way for a fertile link between sociology and contemporary psychoanalysis. It legitimates beforehand the current attempts to cast the means of psychoanalysis on social psychology and thus on sociology.

Mark Kesselman: The recruitment of the members of the French political parties. The data of this study on the recruitment of the members of the U.D.R. and of the Socialist Party come from a poll made in 1969-70 in 6 départements. In each one, 20 leaders and 20 militants of each party have been interviewed, i.e. more than 400 interviews. This article provides social and economic data comparing first the two parties, then the militants and leaders in each party; the data on factors of politicization (partisanship of the father, age of the first political option...) and on motivation. It points out the differences between the process of recruitment in the two parties and in the functions of leadership and membership.

Joseph Nguyen Van Phong : An Essay of construction and utilization of a religious conversion model: the example of Constantin the Great. The point is to built a dynamic model to understand the success or failure of the conversion of a national political leader, offered to leave aside the major religion (for example paganism) in order to embrace or at least tolerate a minoritary usually forbidden religion (for example Catholicism). In order to account for the action or interaction patterns of the mechanisms of decision, a system of continuous dynamic model was chosen, with 4 equations, linking together 4 endogeneous variables and 1 exogeneous. The endogeneous ones are: P, or the sum of pressures exerted on the subject by the partisans of traditional religions; I, the influence of the community of the new religion; E, the evaluation made by the subject of the value or superiority of the new religion; D, or the determination of the subject to assume such or such attitude towards the minoritary religion. Finally, C, is the exogenous variable measuring all the situational, social, political, economic, religious, military factors of the former system which may create variations in the 4 endogeneous variables relations.

Michel Loriaux : Causal analysis versus interaction effects ; reexamination of Raymond Boudon's dependance method. According to the author, the concept of generalized correlation used by R. Boudon in his dependance analysis to measure variable interaction effects structures in terms of causal influences is hardly justified and the corresponding equations used for dichotomous variables are non-valid. He shows then, that the origin of these errors lies in an inadequate representation of interaction variables and that the basic correlation coefficient is the adequate tool for dépendance analysis even in case of non-additive models. In addition, letters between R. Boudon and the author.