ABSTRACT
In his recent interview with Ivana Marková, Serge Moscovici (2000) recalls that in reading Piaget’s child psychology he “had the impression of discovering what social psychology might be”, an impression which was so strong that he describes it also as a “vision” of a social psychology which retains its vitality for him even today, more than forty years after this fi rst encounter. Such an emphatic acknowledgement of the signifi cance of the work of Jean Piaget for the development of his own social psychology might surprise many readers of Moscovici, even those familiar with his œuvre . While one can fi nd many references to Piaget’s work in Moscovici’s own writings, surely the psychology of the developing child is so far removed from the concerns of social psychology as to make the idea of the one providing a vision for the other altogether improbable? Improbable or not, there is little reason to doubt that something decisive for the development of his social psychology emerged from Moscovici’s encounter with Jean Piaget. As he himself expressed it, notwithstanding the differences which might seem to be apparent between developmental and social psychology, there is in fact a deep continuity connecting them, a continuity which fl ows from the sense that both approach questions of the transformations of knowledge. As he puts it, the former explores these transformations through time, the latter through space (Moscovici 1990).
