The first research planning session of the Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council was held on April 5–10, 1957 at the Center for Advanced Study of the Behavior Sciences at Stanford, California. The participants included some of the recipients of SSRC grants for field studies of political groups, as well as a number of other scholars planning field research on these problems. The purpose of the Committee in sponsoring planning sessions among its grantees and other interested scholars is to enhance the cumulative value of research efforts now under way or planned for the near future. As a result of the SSRC program, as well as of a number of other organized and individual efforts, we can anticipate in a few years an extensive monographic literature dealing with political groups and processes in a great many foreign countries and a variety of different culture areas. Systematic information on this scale may not only fill in “areas of ignorance,” but offers an opportunity for significant advances in the general theory of politics.