Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

The place of the sciences of man in the system of sciences 5
applied by the historian himself, acting as a sociologist or economist, etc., these
methods being quite different from those of mere observation or reconstitution
already referred to and providing the only means of carrying out the necessary
verifications. In this connexion we should draw attention to a broad contem-
porary trend to consider history as a science based on quantification and struc-
tures (F. Braudel, J. Kruithof, J. Craebeckx, 0. Lebran, etc.)? an idea which
opens up many interesting possibilities, but which would today turn history
into the diachronic side of sociology and economics, although it might in the fu-
ture transform the historical disciplines in such a way as to make their main
purpose that of working out a synthesis of the diachronic dimensions of all the
human sciences.
In addition, many branches of history are of course closely concerned with
the study of more or less autonomous developments in the sense defined above.
The history of the sciences provides one example, and the history of mathemat-
ics holds an exceptional place within that framework by virtue of its inherent
characteristics of progressive structuring. It thus meets on a common ground the
central problems of the psychology of intelligence, of the socio-genesis of the
acquisition of knowledge and of scientific epistemology.
III. The legal sciences are set apart by the fact that the norms which, grouped
together, form the laws they are concerned with differ fundamentally from
the more or less general relationships forming the ‘laws’ dealt with by the nomo-
thetic sciences. A norm is not set by the identification of existing relationships.
It belongs to a quite separate category of what might be described as ‘duties”
(solZen). It thus lays down obligations and attributions which remain valid even
if violated or not observed, whereas a natural law is based on causal determinism
or conjectural reasoning and its validity depends exclusively on its agreement
with facts.
Although this is a very clear-cut distinction, a border-line area exists in
which the legal sciences as such and the other sciences meet. The history of
law, in so far as it deals with the history of legal institutions (not to mention
the history of theories) can no longer, of course, be considered as a normative
discipline, but as an analysis of realities which were - and sometimes still are -
recognized as norms by the societies involved, while at the same time consti-
tuting historical facts, for the legal historian among others. This dual point of
view, in which the central fact, whether past or present, is considered as a norm
by the subject and an event by the observer, is even more clearly seen in one
of the truly nomothetic disciplines, legal sociology, in which legal behaviour
is studied from the point of view of social phenomena. The purpose of legal
sociology, unlike legal science, is not to study normative values but, and this is
quite different, to analyse the socia1 phenomena invoIved in the establishment
and the working of such norms. The term ‘normative facts’ has been happily
introduced into the general vocabulary of this discipline by its specialists to
describe that which constitutes a norm for the subject, and at the same time an
object of analysis for the observer engaged in studying both the behaviour of
the subject and the norms he recognizes as objective facts. This concept has