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At present, philosophers of science are taking very little interest in the human sciences. Of course this indifference is understandable. The achievements and applications of the natural sciences are incomparably more spectacular than the conquests of the human sciences. The former give the impression of a continuous development, although historians of science show us that the growth or decline of certain branches of even the most rigorous of these disciplines — mathematics — is bound up with events of an anecdotal nature and is determined by the structure of the occupational context. Despite this, it is difficult not to gain the impression that the history of the natural sciences is guided as if by internal necessity.

The following analysis brings to light a structure of interdependence that is both akin to and distinct from the famous prisoner’s-dilemma structure. It is similar to the prisoner’s dilemma because if the players play with some awareness as to what is happening they will achieve a worse result (or at best an equivalent result) to the one they would have got by playing in a non-rational way. The juxtaposition of rational strategies will, in other words, engender a worse result than Pareto’s equilibrium. It is therefore a question here of a typical perverse effect, but some of the players achieve a satisfactory result and it therefore differs structurally from the prisoner’s dilemma. Since each player can hope before the game starts to achieve this satisfactory result himself, it is in no one’s interest (at least, prior to the game) to oppose it. In spite of the perverse effects that it engenders, it would be harder to achieve a consensus as to its suppression than in a game with a prisoner’s-dilemma structure.

The analysis of the relation between institutions and individual behaviours presents sociology with one of its most critical problems. Institutions never determine behaviours but they do affect individuals’ fields of action and of decision-making. As a corollary to this, the analysis of an institutional change’s ‘effects’ invariably entails a study of the modifications in individuals’ fields of action and of decision-making that this change introduced.

The notion of “theory” probably has a more uncertain meaning in the social sciences and sociology in particular than in other disciplines. As far back as the early 1950s, in a passage in Social Theory and Social Structure, R. K. Merton2 pointed out that the word theory was being used by sociologists in seven different ways, only one of which was admissable. These were (1) Methodology; (2) General orientations; (3) Analysis of concepts; (4) Post factum sociological interpretations; (5) Empirical generalisations; (6) Theory; (7) Derivations and Codification.

In 1969, as a result of space technology, three men landed on the moon and, if the fates do not decree otherwise, others are expected to step onto the surface of Mars by about 1985.

The importance of formalisation in sociology is frequently challenged. The most forthright indictment comes from Sorokin,2 whose criticisms are well enough known not to require repetition in detail. To summarise them briefly, formalisation is either simply a shorthand, or unnecessary or absurd. The first charge, though sometimes justified, overlooks the importance which parsimony of explanation and the identifiability of the variables can have in the development of a theory or hypothesis; thus there are certain studies which, despite their incapacity for deductive reasoning beyond the form of syllogism, are sufficiently clear and coherent for a more powerful language to be applied to them eventually. The second charge — that formalisation is unnecessary — is hardly worth dwelling on: once a logical system has been constructed, one can find out whether it is useful or necessary but one cannot determine whether it is useless or unnecessary; a paradox which is not uncommon in the history of science. As for the third charge of absurdity, it derives from the questionable proposition that things are by nature necessarily either qualitative or quantitative.

The crisis in the universities and in society at large which has been affecting the countries of western Europe and North America for a number of years has been accompanied by a general questioning of sociology. Many sociologists have spoken and still speak publicly and privately of the ‘crisis in sociology’ and rightly so in our opinion.

We have lost the habit of reading Tarde, and certainly not just recently. Even very old sociology textbooks include scarcely more on Tarde than a more or less paraphrased version of Durkheim’s critique. The same applies to a recently published work.2 The treatment Tarde gets from these authors is little worse than that accorded to Durkheim himself. They make repeated comments about the “psychologism” of the one and the “sociologism” of the other and endlessly discuss the ontological level at which the “conscience collective” is to be understood; they do get round to a discussion of “imitation”, recognising that the notion is less naive and therefore more inaccessible than is generally believed.

The reader of this Philosophie des sciences sociales should not expect to find a comprehensive selection of Lazarsfeld’s works. A collection of readings presupposes that every aspect of an author’s output is taken into account. In the present volume, an entire portion of the output has been deliberately excluded, naturally with the author’s permission. Even so, the reader may well be surprised that there are no extracts from The People’s Choice, Voting, Personal Influence or the Academic Mind. We have chosen not to include any extracts from these major sociological studies of consumption, electoral behaviour and the sociology of education although they have achieved wide recognition among social science specialists, not to mention a general audience, for they have been widely translated, but not unfortunately into French.

There is no shortage of books, articles and other publications on the May–June 1968 university crisis. Quite the contrary, they can be numbered in tens if not hundreds. Yet the striking thing about them is that, even among those written by sociologists, there are scarcely any which make systematic reference to information about the functioning of the university system whether the course of this information is sociological research itself or studies carried out in an administrative context.

This text, theoretical in nature, is intended as a contribution to a particular debate. This debate is concerned with the paradox in there being a relation between both inequality and satisfaction and material plenty and satisfaction. In fact classical sociology is full of paradoxical statements of this sort. For Tocqueville greater equality tends to produce envious comparisons: as they become more equal individuals find their inequality harder and harder to bear. C. Wright Mills has also taken up this theme. For Durkheim individual happiness does not increase in direct ratio to the quantity of available goods. The relation between happiness and goods has the form of a reversed U-shaped curve: on this side of and beyond a particular optimum satisfaction decreases. Again, for Tocqueville, dissatisfaction and frustration may grow when each person’s opportunities begin to open out and improve. In Marienthal, Lazarsfeld observes the converse of Tocqueville’s theorem: when an individual’s future is blocked, recriminations against the social system may well be weak. Stouffer’s works show that individuals may well grow more discontented with the social system to which they belong as it offers them what are, on average, better opportunities for success and promotion.

From its handling of social change it might appear that sociology had come out of the nineteenth century backwards. For some the class struggle is still the dominant factor in an evolutionary process conceived as necessary. For others technological ‘progress’ leads inevitably to a global social transformation. Development of the means of mass communication, advances in molecular biology, the proliferation of multi-nationals, the intellectuals and holders of knowledge: one or other of these, according to one’s preference, is proposed as the bearer of what Hegel had called Geschichtlichkeit, historicity.

Economists are familiar with perverse effects. In a period of inflation it is in my interest to buy a product that will only be of use to me in the coming month, for I am almost certain that its price will then be higher. In doing this I help to perpetuate inflation. My behaviour has only an infinitesimal influence in this respect, but the logic of the situation dictates that many people should behave just as I do. Together these infinitesimal individual influences generate a social effect.

In this note, we are proposing neither to perpetuate the lengthy debate which had developed around the notions of structure and function nor even to give a detailed analysis of the notion of structural-functionalism. The reader will be familiar with Hempel’s2 and Davis’s3 famous articles on functionalism which seek to demonstrate the tautological character of the supposed functionalist method. And so much has been written about the notion of structure that we could not possibly review it here.

Contemporary sociology may often take the form of a sociology without a subject. Homo sociologicus is either described as if he were programmed by ‘social structures’ or as if he were determined by his social origins and his social position.

Those who reflect on the nature of industrial society constantly refer to what I shall here call programmed Utopias. The pessimist version has it that societies are vast organisations in which individual behaviours would inevitably be programmed. The optimistic version (see, for instance, the American sociologist Etzioni’s book The Active Society) has it that industrial societies have to be corrected by improving their programming, i.e., by researching into better means of circulating information and by perfecting the retroactive mechanisms that link the different poles of a society (considered as an organisation) together.