Cette étude pourrait s'appeler : la crise contemporaine de la mort, si ce titre n'avait déjà été donné par Edgar Morin à l'un des chapitres de son livre, L'homme et la mort devant l'histoire (1). Ce sont bien les mêmes mots, et la même chose aussi : ≪ affrontement panique dans un climat d'angoisse, de névrose, de nihilisme ≫, qui prend ≪ figure de véritable crise de l'individualité devant la mort ≫, et sans doute, nous le verrons in fine, de l'individualité tout court.

In recent years, the main meeting ground of the various branches of learning which in some uncertain way make up the social sciences has been the study of the so-called Third World: the forming nations and tottering states of Asia, Africa and Latin America. In this enigmatical setting, anthropology, sociology, political science, history, economics, psychology, as well as that oldest of our disciplines, soothsaying, have found themselves in the unfamiliar position of dealing severally with essentially the same body of data.

Radcliffe-Brown used to define social anthropology as ‘comparative sociology’, yet the school of thought that he engendered has not been much prone to comparison. Indeed, in their revulsion from the ‘comparative method’ of their evolutionist predecessors anthropologists of that tendency have largely avoided formal comparison and left to the “non-comparative” sociologists the duty of comparing. The definition nevertheless still has a certain validity if one recognises that an implied comparison lies behind every ethnographic description and that the anthropologist's comparative range–that is, the range of phenomena regarded as belonging to the class under consideration and therefore relevant to a potential comparison–is wider than the sociologist's, since it includes “other cultures” (i) and traditionally primitive ones, while sociology commonly, if not always, confines itself to civilised society and operates within the framework of the values of its national culture. Social anthropology's claim to be comparative rests upon its awareness of cultural differences and its recognition of their importance in determining the forms which social institutions can take.

When scientists account for changes in a theory or the theory's position within the world of the science, they usually do so in terms of the intellectual content of the theory. For example, the rise of quantum mechanics is attributed to the fact that quantum mechanics was able to solve problems which the preceding theories could not handle. This represents one way of describing occurrences within science and is a major component of the attitudes which scientists possess about their world. Another manner of viewing the changes which take place in science is that of the sociology of knowledge. From this perspective science is viewed as an activity carried on by the men who create the scientific ideas. The history of science is analyzed in terms of the-scientist-who-does-something-within-aparticular-social-context; that is the ideas are viewed as inseparable from the men who put them forward and the social environment in which they occur (1).

Il nous est impossible, dans le cadre de cette étude, d'entreprendre un traité de la structure de la vie quotidienne. Nous voudrions seulement mettre l'accent sur quelques thèmes qui seront utilisés dans des analyses ultérieures.

Looking at the contemporary world, two things are obvious: democracy is doing rather badly, and democracy is doing very well. ‘New states are born free, yet everywhere they are in chains.’ Democracy is doing very badly in that democratic institutions have fallen by the wayside in very many of the newly independent ‘transitional’ societies, and they are precarious elsewhere. Democracy, on the other hand, is doing extremely well in as far as it is almost (though not quite) universally accepted as a valid norm. It is almost as if its success as a norm of legitimacy were inversely related to its success in concrete implementation.

In what follows I shall discuss a philosophical problem arising out of the practice of anthropologists and sociologists which may be stated, in a general and unanalysed form, as follows: when I come across a set of beliefs which appear prima facie irrational, what should be my attitude towards them? Should I adopt a critical attitude, taking it as a fact about the beliefs that they are irrational, and seek to explain how they came to be held, how they manage to survive unprofaned by rational criticism, what their consequences are, etc? Or should I treat such beliefs charitably: should I begin from the assumption that what appears to me to be irrational may be interpreted as rational when fully understood in its context? More briefly, the problem comes down to whether or not there are alternative standards of rationality.

En principe, il n'y a pas de frontières entre la science politique, la sociologie et l'anthropologie; en réalité, les recherches sur le terrain utilisant simultanément les trois disciplines sont rares. En principe, les groupes sociaux n'ont pas d'existence substantielle; en réalité, les chercheurs finissent toujours par oublier qu'ils n'ont d'existence que relationnelle. L'étude de la politique locale dans l'Algérie rurale est un excellent exercice pour désapprendre ces manies universitaires: les conserver condamnerait à manquer l'essentiel.

The anthropologist starts with an empty notebook and it seems that everything he writes in it is discovered empirically. But is it? I shall argue here that the fact that the natives are ‘rational’ in Mr. Lukes first or ‘universal’ sense is not discovered empirically and that this puts Mr. Lukes' philosophical problem in a different light.

All societies are constantly in a process of transition, but when we speak of “transitional societies” we mean thereby those in which the transitional process is particularly intense, entailing the substitution for pre-existing forms of social organisation of forms more adapted to modern, industrial society. The process of transition is relentless and cannot be turned on and off at the will of governmental authorities. In countries where there is no established governing elite the process continues nonetheless (witness Algeria 1954–1962). In other countries so-called modernising elites have managed to get a sometimes-slippery grasp on the social transformations occurring within their borders (Turkey under Attaturk and Egypt under Nasser). In yet other countries, Morocco being one of them, internally-divided political elites, while more or less aware of the immense implications of the transitional process, are incapable of resolving upon or implementing a concerted plan of action for dealing with its problems. In the following pages an attempt will be made to analyse the nature of the Moroccan political elite, and the factors that have driven it to the outer edge of the process of transformation of Moroccan society, a process in which the elite is but a marginal participant, a process over which there is but nominal control.

These comments are intended not as criticism of Steven Lukes' conclusions, with which I mainly agree, but to raise some questions about their further implications and suggest some answers to these questions (1).

The questions arise when we stand back and look at the entire set of positions on the matter of rationality represented by Lukes' five paradigms and his own argument. They fall easily into two groups, composed of the first four and the last two, counting Lukes' position as the sixth. The first group consists of the views of practising anthropologists primarily concerned with understanding and explaining certain quite specific sorts of peculiar beliefs. In approaching their task they make various assumptions about rationality, about the relation of modern scientific thought to primitive magico-religious thought, and about the type of attitude towards these alien forms of mentality which is appropriate to the scientific endeavour. The second group contains the views of philosophers reflecting on the methods and theories of anthropologists, emphasising the philosophical character of the problems they take up out of this reading, and which they treat with the techniques of linguistic or logical analysis. They are less interested in the specific peculiarities of certain primitive beliefs than with the formal criteria by which any different sets of beliefs can be logically classified and compared. And they are less concerned with understanding and explanation than with the assumptions made about the philosophical status of, and typical relations between, different sets and sorts of beliefs when understanding and explanation are seen as problematic. Thus the second group concentrates more exclusively on a higher-order inquiry than that with which the first group was centrally concerned (despite the fact that Lukes has successfully isolated this level of inquiry out of the less focussed methodological reflections of the anthropologists). The question can therefore be raised, how far the positions on rationality are detachable from the various explanatory methods and theories which are associated with them in the first group, and what implications for understanding and explanation, if any, follow from the positions on rationality adopted by the second group.