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

502 Jean Piaget
and values as well as in that of structures. But it should also be noted that in the
human sciences as in all others, but in the biological disciplines in particular,
efforts are directed first of all - and rightly so - towards the two extreme ends of
the range of phenomena, for it is the comparison between these extremes which
offers the best chance of understanding the whole range of mechanisms involved.
This pendulum action is particularly evident in economics. After limiting itself
in many cases to micro-economics, economic science - following the intuitions of
Quesnay and especially the conceptions of Marx - struck out on the path of
macro-economics, and the same is true of the differently oriented work of
Keynes. However, with operational research and econometrics there has been
a new trend to re-establish the micro-economic approach. In sociology, where
the degree of precision is naturally much smaller owing to the complexity of the
problems involved, we observe an instructive process of shuttling back and forth
between macro-sociology and micro-sociology. In the sphere of values of
finality it goes without saying that a double approach is needed, since while
global exchanges, etc., show irreducible aspects depending on overall mecha-
nisms, it is only in the sphere of elementary reactions and exchanges that we
may hope to witness the birth of valorizations and in certain cases to determine
their connexions with psycho-biological functioning.
In the sphere of normative values it goes without saying that moral facts are
studied principally from their psychological and micro-sociological angles,
especially as there exists no adequate method at the higher levels except where
societies are of limited dimensions, like those studied in cultural anthropology.
But even in fields where consideration of wholes would appear to be necessary,
as for instance in the sociology of law (since positive law is linked with the life
of the entire State down to its most individualized applications), there exists a
movement which has attempted the study of, as it were, micro-juridical process-
es. Thus, marginally to codified law, or at the point where it begins, Petrazycki
has analysed attributive imperative relations such as that the right of one part-
ner corresponds to an obligation for the other. This relation, which is distin-
guished from the moral relation (although less so than Petrazycki believes,
since while it is true that the moral obligation of a subject B confers no right
upon his ‘neighbour’ C, it nevertheless results from the right which A or C
had to issue instructions to him or to enter into reciprocity with him), is also
clearly distinguished from codified or structured legal order and thus charac-
terizes a kind of spontaneous or deontological juridical view which is interesting
from the viewpoint of mechanisms of valorization.
In the sphere of non-normative qualitative values the writer has attempted to
analyse the mechanism of the exchange which determines valorizations and its
relations with normative cons~lidations.~Q In any relationship between two individuals
A and B, what is done by one of them, say rA, is evaluated by the
other according to a satisfaction sB - positive or negative - which may be
conserved in the form of a kind of debt or psychological gratitude tB, the latter
for that reason constituting a credit or a valorization VA for A (process naturally
following a sequence rB, SA, tA and vB). A large number of circumstances may
of course prevent a balance in the form of equivalences r = s = t = v: over- and