they belong. Do communities have rights, indeed even an existence, which are not merely the hypostasis of the individual rights and existences collected in them? This conflict is then more striking as it was a conscious decision of the or ganizers of the workshop to focus attention on what might broadly be called liberal democracies: those societies which share a commitment to the princi ples of democratic participation, to the right of equal concern and respect of all members of the community, and to the basic liberties of association, ex pression, and thought. Ours was not the smug premise, however, that every so ciety which proclaims these principles is sufficiently or even truly devoted to them. But we did assume that we would have enough to do if we explored the implications of these widely shared ideals for the topic of linguistic, ethnic, and national minorities as these problems arise in societies where an appeal to them is not an empty gesture. The nations from which our participants were drawn are societies in which appeal to these principles has some point. They are all societies in which the efforts of politicians and the intelligence of schol ars need not be devoted exclusively to the tactical issues of winning some mod icum of respect for basic human rights from unwilling regimes. And yet all these societies have experienced significant difficulty in determining what the concrete meaning in actual situations of these general principles might be."

Serge Moscovici It has recently become commonplace to say that science and its history are one. Nonetheless, in practice things have not changed much. We still behave as ifthe two were not really connected. Or else as if it were hard, not to say impossible, to link them in a single enquiry. In such circumstances the group we constitute and which has undertaken the task of studying the history of social psychology while refor mulating its theories represents an experiment. Whether the experiment succeeds or fails, the three aims we have set ourselves are precise: First, we wish to bring up to date the relation between certain topics of psycho logical research and their historical context. Second, we will include within the discussion itself and consider critically some authors and works that have become our classics due to their undiminished signifi cance and heuristic power. But, in this respect, we also consider that we should depart from the attitude of the physical sciences shared by so many psychologists that past acquisitions have nothing to offer as a basis for research. Only those scholars who have said their say and completed their task indulge in such medita tions; therefore work undertaken in this field is unimportant and even illicit. We, on the other hand, are convinced that social psychology is, after all, a social science and that a study based on orthodox theories is still eminently significant."