Contenu du sommaire

Antoine Stoetzel: How to Assert the Common Will. The majority rule can be misleading when the number of candidates or issues offered to the choice of the voters exceed two. It may happen that the winner be actually the least liked ; it may even happen that the outcome remains undecisive, because the social preference happen to be non transitive. Condorcet was the first to call attention to this fact at the close of the XVIIIth Century. In 1951, Kenneth J. Arrow gave a mathematical demonstration, which is outlined here. This paper was read at the University of Beirut in April 1975 by the author, who was later killed in a plane accident

Ivan Szelenyi : Regional Management and Social Class : The Case of Eastern Europe. This article concerns urbanization problems in Eastern Europe and the accompanying social conflicts. The social history of this process completes the binary typology proposed by Max Weber (who contrasted Western and Asiatic modes of urban and regional administration) by setting up Eastern Europe as an autonomous and intermediate type which is marked by underurbanization, the partial maintenance of industrial manpower in the countryside and the concentration in the state of the power to redistribute surpluses for investment in the infrastructure. The Russian revolution and the installation of socialist regimes have only continued and often reinforced these historical tendencies. Founding his argument on a series of empirical surveys that he made in Hungary during the last ten years, the author shows how the socialist administration of localities and regions engenders new social inequalities at the expense of underprivileged classes, localities and regions. These inequalities are measured by the unequal chances for getting housing or by variations of investments in the infrastructure ; they contribute toward forming a « new working class » with half-rural, half- industrialties.

Louis Lévy-Garboua : Student Demands or the Contradictions of a Mass University. This article interprets the appearance of the mass university and aspects of the phenomenon which affected student conditions and behavior. Taking as its basis a precise analysis of student demands, it goes beyond the traditional economic interpretation of the demand for education, which is founded on the profitability of studies, and adds thereto some sociological considerations about the eligibility for student status and for high social positions. This theory brings to light the mass university's contradictions which actors tend to resolve individually or collectivity. We show that students' individual adaptations to the deterioration that they observe in the labor market have dominated other events in the last few years. These adaptations lead to the decline of the institution which tends to transform itself from a place for apprenticeship into a pure means for selection. The chances of collective action are also examined.

François de Singly : The Conjugal Struggle for Domestic Power. A struggle between spouses within the domestic circle takes place over the appropriation of authority, power delegated by civil society for the socialization of the child in the family. Multiple social arms are at each mate's disposal. This article considers the combined intervention of the social definition of the sexes and of the symbolic capital which each spouse has in rivalries over power sharing. Moral education is the privileged field for confrontations since it concerns that moral good which is, by far, most precious to the family : the child. A new methodology throws light upon the conjugal struggle in this very field. It thus reveals one of the specific forms of the domestic struggle between the sexes ? the compromise ? and one of the effects of this conflict on the child ? the double bind.

François Chazel : Elements in Political Alienation. After having pointed out and denounced certain reminiscences of an ethical ? and fundamentally presociological ? mode of thought, the author distinguishes two major varieties of political alienation. The first consists of a lax relationship between the actors' « requirements » and the functioning of the political system; this is represented by ? without thus being reduced to ? typical « responses », all of which belong to the generic category of a feeling of powerlessness. Depending on the level and nature of expectations, these responses are capable of assuming three very differentiated forms : a feeling of radical dependence, a consciousness of noncontrol and a consciousness of nondirection. The second variety of political alienation is characterized by a somewhat « exploded » relationship between the actors and the political system; it shows up in more or less charged and generalized expressions of uncertainty. Although the search for consensus on the theme of alienation be in vain, the author recalls various conditions which the elaboration of this concept, if it is to be sociologically relevant, must satisfy.