On paper, the Russians left Communism behind at a single stroke of the pen. But within their walls and inside their heads the great majority of them remain material and mental prisoners of the Soviet period, whose tattered remnants still ensure - albeit with increasing difficulty - everyday life and survival. As for the Chinese, they continue to celebrate the glory of Mao in the most official fashion. But within their walls and deep within themselves, they are now decidedly elsewhere.

‘External memories’ raise a question about context: ‘external to what?’ External memory is a technical term applied to everything that can be memorized in an individual's environment. As a general rule I have decided to retain the technical terms that characterize the area of the topic under discussion. It was Ted Nelson who coined the word hypertext in 1967 to signify non-sequential writing as well as a computer technology that allowed the user to move about freely by means of software links. I shall use the term software to mean computer programs. Electronic publishing started with the Xanadu system developed by Nelson. At the lowest level a hypertext is a system for managing databases that allows the user to connect together information screens using links. It is a collection of texts interconnected by means of interactive switches. This dynamic presentation of non-linear texts could not be printed on a conventional page. Hypertext allows the origin of a piece of information to be traced. In this article traceability is synonymous with explanation: ‘Why was this equipment designed in one way rather than another?’ It is about discovering the route of the design process that led to the eventual idea for the equipment. The necessary explanations are often required long after decisions were made, and this is why traceability is a matter of memory. The term agent is often used to mean those members of a community that act on its behalf. There are agents for a company or public department. There are biological agents. In a non-technological world traceability is ideally carried out by human agents who explain to other human agents. The term agent has been extended into the computer world to mean software to which the user delegates, sometimes unwittingly, tasks of varying complexity. These are then called software agents. In this article I refer to agent in its wider meaning, to be understood as an actor or an entity able to act in a limited context and having a quite specific role and appropriate resources.

The most burning question we are faced with, in our anxiety about the possible dehumanization of the world, concerns the nature of modernity. Today's erasure of and uncertainty about norms relating to the definition of the human only go to confirm this. Indeed this is a typically modern question because it is in this civilization, which is unique in human history and which is replacing heaven with earth in the order of values, that human beings have been able to observe themselves from the outside and think that humanity could be outside itself to the extent that the idea of the ‘death of man’, the ‘end of humanity’ and now even a ‘posthumanity’ can be entertained.

A great deal of thought has been given to the effects of information technology on reading, books and printed material. Its impact on writing, the production of texts, which is, however, the counterpart of reading, has not aroused the same interest. It is true that witnesses to the act of creation are less familiar objects than books or newspapers: in spite of the passion of the media and the educated public for writers’ manuscripts, these remain predominantly the prerogative of researchers and are still rarely taken out of libraries and archive collections. In extremely literate Western societies, reading is an activity practised by large sectors of the population. The same cannot be said about writing as an active producer of texts, for this encompasses a much more limited group of professionals, and is thought, more or less, to require a special gift in its literary form. Written production is rather the hidden face of McLuhan's Gutenberg galaxy, and the commercial businesses which manufacture and distribute writing in its printed form are better known to the public than the mysterious secrets of creation.

The study of the post-Communist towns of East Europe and Russia does not only present the social sciences with the opening of a new field and the attraction of exoticism close at hand. They are a remarkable observatory of the complex relations which unite the material facets of urban life (extension of the built-up area, architectural forms, types of distribution of infrastructures and services) and the social structures (mode of government, nature of the economic initiative, expressions of sociability). In three-quarters of a century for Russia, in fifty years for the countries of East Europe, cities many ages old were to have two changes of system: from liberal industrial capitalism to the controlled Communist economy, from interventionist autarchy to the globalized market. To give the lie to the poet (Baudelaire), towns change no faster than the hearts of mortals but beat to the rhythm of their continuities, their aspirations and their dreams.

The slow construction of the urban civilization: the socio-historic distances in the reading of an urban form.

The post-Soviet city is generally envisioned as a city in transition, on a more or less direct course towards the market city. This observation recalls the reconstitution of the residential property stock through privatizations, the redefinition of the individual in countries shaped by collectivist references, the post-national reconstitution of the economy and the political structures (Dressier, Gatti, and Perez-Agote, 1999). L. Kogan's approach suggests that we need a deeper analysis in the shaping of ‘urban civilization’ and the construction of urban policies, to change the way we look at the construction of urban permanence.

I am quite prepared to admit that modern western thought is shot through with contradictions. For example, it is not coherent to think both that the idea of human nature is an illusion and that eugenics is an out-and-out evil; or to claim to be a democrat and exclude a priori the topic of eugenics from political debate. However, I personally very much doubt that the notions of nature and democracy are themselves in crisis. In my view they simply give rise to semantic confusion and false problems that certain basic twentieth-century discoveries - in the field of physics, anthropology and political science - ought to be able to clear up, if they were better known. We shall just touch on a few thinkers whose work may give us some pointers to a clearer, calmer view of things. First a philosopher, Raymond Ruyer (1902-1987), and an economist, Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), two of whose key ideas this paper will combine: a neo-Aristotelian conception of nature, implying the existence of regulating principles and norms, to which humans and their societies, like everything else, are subject; a procedural conception of democracy that says it is not an end in itself but, under certain conditions, an appropriate means of making political decisions and settling disputes. And in addition some anthropologists, who helped either to put human beings back into a neo-Aristotelian world, or to define more accurately the essence of the political: Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose structuralism gave back its full importance to the notion of formal cause and even to the idea of final cause, and André Leroi-Gourhan, who confirmed that ‘art imitates nature’ by demonstrating that technical skill is a natural extension of life, whose processes and results it mimics; Arthur Maurice Hocart, who demonstrated the ritual origin of all institutions, particularly political ones.

This attempt to interpret Communist society through the total social fact of the gift takes up Mauss's strategy, which attempted to explain social reproduction without written laws or state institutions. It was a culture of chronic revolution (‘revolution’ in the etymological sense), where the rules of the game changed with each party congress, institutions were in a state of permanent reform, science discovered new truths every five years, and yesterday's heroes became the traitors of today. The very concept of living in a transitory society renders every social form temporary and unreal - starting with the proclaimed disappearance of the State, the family, and private property.

My topic will be philosophical and, more precisely still, ontological. If we wish to conceive of what is at stake in the ‘dehumanization of the world’ and if we want to oppose it, we need to widen our perspective and take in not only the destiny of the human but the status of things and beings in general.

The thesis I am going to put forward, which is still quite daring given the current stage of my thinking, is a hunch and a hypothesis that I am trying gradually to clarify. My theory is that there was a kind of originating decision, a primal ontological choice made by the Greco-Latin as well as the Judeo-Christian West about the way of viewing beings in general; a decision in favour of differentiated forms and against the representation of a real, supposed to be composed in the final analysis of a basic single substrate whose differentiated forms were merely states, pure appearances without substance. I am also putting forward the notion that this primal choice, which is or was our choice and remains my own, was not absolutely necessary; it was a contingent free opting in favour of something and against another possible option.

The Russian financial crisis of August 1998, which occurred between the Asian recession and the devaluation of the Brazilian real in January 1999, put a question-mark over many certainties. It demonstrated that the most destructive speculative activities of financial players can only have free rein when there is a collapse of the state. The crisis proved that the markets need a state and cannot replace it. It was also the moment when people became aware of the dynamics of a globalized financial economy (Stiglitz, 1999a; 1999b), leading to a critical rereading of the policies recommended in the 1990s and a direct questioning of the IMF and its actions. In Russia it caused a paradigm shift that could turn out to be salutary. In this regard the August 1998 crisis looks like the endpoint on the route followed since 1992 by the transition in Russia (Sapir, 1999a). We can see in the crisis both elements directly linked to the financial liberalization of 1985-95 and structural elements peculiar to the consequences of the transition and the policies adopted. This is why it suggests a reinterpretation of the entire development of the transition in Russia starting from 1992.

Does the existing order have any better justification than the argument that it is ‘natural’? In most of its guises the ‘nature’ argument in fact arises more often than not from an argument whose authority is questionable, since it has been used to back up many forms of tyranny, oppression and exclusion. In this sense we are quite rightly wary of this notion of human nature as used to explore the democratic ideal. If the democratic ideal is associated with the modern experience of the indeterminate and the ‘dissolution of fixed markers of certainty’ (Lefort), it seems to imply the idea of the plasticity of human nature rather more than the hypothesis of an objective human essence. As the feminist and ecology movements have taught us, the question of nature has to remain open in democracy, and open above all for democratic debate. An insistence that there are characteristics intrinsic to human nature that make humans inclined to a democratic way of life reminds us too much of Plato's ideal city or Hobbes's Leviathan. And if we criticize this type of reasoning in those who seem to us to be democracy's enemies, we can scarcely have the face to use it to justify that kind of regime.

The financial crisis that began on 17 August 1998 confirmed any fears that we might have had as to the robustness of the Russian banking system and more generally its financial system. It also pointed up the organic link between the confidence essential to the working of the banking system and the State's ability to guarantee the legality of it. Although improvements have been seen since then, the fundamental issue remains.

Daniele Hervieu-Léger and Marcel Gauchet explain that today the hold that the religious dimension has always exerted over human societies is, of very recent date but definitely, slackening; that it is becoming ‘hollow’ and ceases to inspire collective action, leaving henceforth wide open the question of knowing in which name we should attempt to take our destiny in our hands and base the norms of collective being. This question at once summons up another, implicitly contained in the latter: is every ethical norm (or moral norm, for we are not making a distinction between the two concepts here) ultimately religious in origin, as is most often supposed, or can one in fact conceive of sketching the outlines of a moral code that is immanent within the social relationship, a moral code that is sufficiently coherent and self-consistent to do without, at least in theory, a religious-type transcendence? Here, I should like to make a case for the second response by emphasizing that religion - whatever meaning one bestows on this notion, still undefined today - does not constitute the primary, irreducible social and historical fact that is most often supposed, but that it should itself be interpreted as the formulation of a more original and more universal formulation: the threefold obligation of giving, receiving, and repaying distinguished by Marcel Mauss in his famous Essay on the Gift. Of course, I shall not claim here to do more than sketch a few possible lines of argument. But even before formulating them, I must call to mind two prejudicial objections that my argument has encountered.

Although, in one respect, the role of popular movements in the collapse of the Soviet system was clear and fundamental, nevertheless that played by the former Communist elites was equally important.

To my mind, the most urgent current task in the social sciences is one in the context of which the unduly cut-and-dried distinctions between positive and normative, between sociology and ethics, between secular pluralism and religious spirituality, and so on, should be abandoned. I would like to reclaim the legacy of a Marxian-type dialectic by stating that the social sciences today (and I would even risk speaking of a single present-day ‘social science’) have the threefold task of (1) thinking through in depth the directions of a desirable social change, (2) asking what are the ‘resources for action’ already available for this end within the totality of social actors and (3) identifying the moral capacities that need to be stimulated and/or created so that the resources for action which are not yet available, but which are desirable under point (1), may be able to take root and flourish. I defy anyone to disentangle clearly and analytically the positive and normative parts of such a task …

If the somewhat acrimonious debate on the status of the gift that I have had with Alain Caillé for the last two years continues to hold my interest and if I have eventually overcome my irritation in the face of what has occasionally seemed to me a failure of understanding linked to the defence of an ‘article of local faith’, it is because our debate is a fundamental part of the worthwhile task of the social sciences. Nevertheless, I shall make it clear straight away that the expression ‘sociological gift’ hardly satisfies me, in the light of the description of this task which I have just supplied.

An oasis of authorized criticism in the 1960s and the 1970s, and a privileged public arena for ‘extreme non-conformist’ intellectuals in the same period, ecology was also the matrix for the national movements which precipitated the end of the decaying party-state at the end of the 1980s and which had been in gestation since the late 1960s. Ideal metaphor for the fall of a system emblematized by the catastrophe at Chernobyl (April 1986), the ecological crisis - the crisis in the relationship between nature and urban space - made it possible to understand the full extent of the post-war upheavals that had taken place at the heart of Soviet society. The rapid, huge-scale industrialization and urbanization of the country had produced a new educated middle class of ‘specialists’ (technicians, engineers, applied research managers, economists and administrators, and so on), which in the early 1960s constituted the hard core of the first generation of Soviets to be a majority of urban-dwellers. If it was not embodied, as in Western countries, in political movements or parties, the ecological cause was no less institutionalized. The horticultural societies (tovariscestva) on the edge of towns (ogorodniki), the ‘nature protection brigades’ which organized reafforestation campaigns (DOP), the Society for the Protection of Nature (VOOP), or local historical and ethnographical societies (kraevedenie) had a considerable number of supporters. It allowed the expression of a very extensive range of individual and collective sentiments, and of reactions both rejecting and adapting to a radically new natural, social and cultural environment - that of the town and a larger community. For a disorientated society, it was a question of re-appropriating its immediate, daily environment, of attempting to impose, individually or collectively, meaning on its existence and its social trajectory. Ecological sentiment was thus intimately bound up with the emergence of an ‘urban civilization’ in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev.

Like many interested in the gift, I have to confess to having always experienced a certain attraction for methodological individualism. Through its way of approaching social actors, methodological individualism introduces the actor's concern: what are the sound principles which account for the behaviour of the actors that are observed? This is the question which individualism compels us constantly to ask. Admittedly, its response is almost always the same: self-interest. As R.H. Frank wrote:

There are at least two ways to dehumanize the world. The world can be dehumanized from the top or from the bottom. From the bottom up would mean letting a barbaric situation develop which would reduce us to an animal state. From the top down would mean striving to achieve and impose a wisdom appropriate to the angels. Two ways of ruining the sense of what is human. Neither angel nor animal, you will recognize there the ‘in-between’ which is the site of humanity and which it is tempting, when it is threatened, to assert, for in this dehumanizing process - whether this is meant from the top or the bottom - we are the losers in both scenarios. We lose what makes humanity itself, in other words moderation, the in-between, finiteness, chance, the propensity to communicate.

On 12 June 2000, the tenth anniversary of Boris Yeltsin's election as head of the reconstituted Russian state, 180 people who had formed an ‘initiative group for a pan-Russian referendum’ launched a campaign to collect the two million signatures required by Russian law to organize a popular initiative referendum which included these three questions:

1. - Are you opposed to the importing of radioactive material from other states to be stored, buried or reprocessed on Russian territory?

2. - Are you in favour of the existence of a federal environmental protection agency which would be independent of those bodies concerned with exploiting and managing natural resources?

3. - Are you in favour of the existence of a legally independent state service for forests in Russia?

I should like to consider both the relationship between the authorities and society in the theme of ecology, and its chronology.

As far as chronology is concerned, it seems to me that concern for the environment started to emerge in the USSR, at least on a large scale, mainly during the Brezhnev years (1964-1982).