pp. 877-897

Change in norms, values and institutions can be made more intelligible by synthesizing some of the fundamental intuitions of Tocqueville, Durkheim and Weber. These intuitions allow for formulating a theory of moral change that is not affected by the difficulties that theories inspired by culturalist and neo-Darwinian evolutionist thinking run into. The conception of rationality operative in these intuitions, namely by way of Weber’s distinction between « value rationality » and « instrumental rationality », is a crucial feature of this theory, a theory that makes it possible to account for a range of qualitative macroscopic information and quantitative survey data while clarifying contemporary discussions on the « clash of civilizations » and the future of cultural diversity.