Towards an Axiological Sociology

Having proposed a 10-point summary of her book Des valeurs. Une approche sociologique ( Values: A Sociological Approach), Nathalie Heinich responds to the comments of Laurence Kaufmann and Philippe Gonzalez, Danilo Martuccelli, and Louis Quéré, as well as to Hervé Glevarec’s review published in the same issue of Questions de communication. Nine themes are successively addressed: issues of vocabulary, the relevance or irrelevance of certain problems (nature, religion), the issue of emotions, the ontological status of valuation, the epistemological status of an ‘axiological grammar’ and its explanatory or comprehensive purpose, the historicity and contextuality of values, the place of the sociology of power relations, the issue of behaviour and empirical observability, and, finally, the controversy about ‘axiological neutrality’.