There are only three distinct temporal relationships between art and theory: either the development of new events precedes theory, or both develop side by side, or theory anticipates the appearance of the new artistic current. This temporal relationship is, to some degree, fundamental in the relationship between both phenomena. If one is dealing with the first case, theories of art serve only to redress a balance. The art-theory introduces nothing in any way new; it serves only to explain an artistic process which has already flowered. At most, largely thanks to critical studies, it helps the public understand the new works unexpectedly arising in the field of art, and plays the role of popularizing these new works, in the best sense of the word.

There is no need to explain the difficulties connected with the scholarly study of Shakespeare in a foreign country. In this respect Soviet scholars are in much the same position as other scholars outside England and the USA, which possess the most source material, books and manuscripts. However, thanks to the rich collections in the public libraries in Moscow—the Lenin Library—and Leningrad—the Saltykov-Schedrin Library—and in the Arts faculties of the universities as well, practically all of world Shakespeareana is available to Soviet students. They also profit by communication with such important centers of scholarship as the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-on-Avon and the Folger Shakespeare Library at Washington.

Man has always been a collector and presumably always will be one. In the dim ages of his beginnings, he collected food, shellfish, berries and nuts and in his tropical and sub-tropical haunts lived fairly securely through the little changing seasons. When he invaded the temperate regions, with their seasonal variations, he learned to his cost the rise and fall of the tides of food supply and, dreading winters’ want, practised a variety of methods to hoard his food gatherings until the season of food a-plenty came round again. It was the same with the hunters, who, whatever their feasting at the close of a successful hunt, could not consume everything and, experiencing shortages and failures, began to put aside food to be kept. Extra supplies probably in time gave rise to barter of one thing for another more desired—the furrier skin, the sharper antler pick, the more beautifully finished hand-axe or adze. He who had reserves could face a famine, a lost pelt and a broken tool, and doubtless gained in stature and status among his fellows. What he had, he had to hold by strength or guile— or both in combination in himself, his family or his tribe. Hunting no doubt led to the elimination of competitors, who would lower the food supplies, and to the proclamation of hunting rights, just as, later on, occupation of land good for grazing or cultivation, would give rise to tribal or chieftain ownership—and to the unending battle for ownership, over other claimants. This is again collecting, though in another form.

We live in a universe infinitely more complex than that which is evoked by the word reality. Only the desire for pragmatic knowledge allows us to believe that things are simply that which they are: the bearers of material qualities by which we distinguish or manipulate them. We give them names, which designate their genre, and make use of them according to our fancy. They are tools or means which refer us to other things to which they have a relation. When knowledge is elevated to a science, in doing away with appearances we discover their structure, and new types of relations, expressed in the language of figures and numbers, beyond which there is only the possibility of other structures and other numbers. The object is explained either by the finiteness of human needs or by the network of scientific relations. It is what it is, nothing more.

Like a great work of literary art, which indeed it is, Alexis de Tocqueville's extraordinary analysis of American society grows more impressive with each exposure to it. Everything has changed and nothing has changed since Democracy in America was published in the 1830’s. Its author grasped with remarkable perception both the mutable and the immutable qualities of man. There could be nothing more salutary for us today than to assimilate his fine sense of what was permanent in a world which, like ours, was undergoing deep convulsions. Committed to the classical economics of Adam Smith, Tocqueville did not share Smith's illusions about the eternal nature of the market. On the contrary, as Albert Salomon has emphasized, his point of view was Heraclitean, the specter of continual change and ceaseless transformation dominating his thought. Surely such a perspective, which antedates both Darwin and Marx, is more appropriate for sociologists in a revolutionary age than elegantly constructed theories of social equilibrium which treat change as a special problem or a deus ex machina.

The notion of resistance to the state has come to be bandied about a great deal, and a great many political movements place themselves under its sign. This intrusion of violence into the realm of the law seems to be spreading since the advocates of insurrection, who accuse the state of betraying its mission, are not those who consider revolt to be the necessary first step towards any kind of affranchisement. Where the partisans of revolution believe that violence is, in Marx's words, “the midwife of every old society that carries a new one within it” and that it is “the instrument by which the social movement sweeps it away and breaks to pieces the political forms that are fixed and dead,” the partisans of the right to resist the state do not share these hopes for political and social upheavals. Marxist theory, which praises revolutionary insurrection, stands opposed to a kind of philosophy that admits of armed opposition to the state, but can nevertheless be called liberal in two respects: formally, from its present perspective, where it appears opposed to Marxist thought, and also historically, in the evolution of political ideas, where it is opposed to absolutist conceptions of the state. For, as R. Derathé remarked, the question of the right to resist “cast light on the chasm that separated the theologians from the legal experts.” The doctrines of divine right left no room for envisaging a limitation on the duty of obedience, without turning such a limitation into the equivalent of a revolt against God. Bossuet, in his Politique tirée des propres paroles de l'Ecriture sainte, asserts that “God has made the kings and the princes his lieutenants on earth so as to render their authority sacred and inviolable.” The result is unconditional obedience to the kings and to all those who hold a parcel of authority: “Declared impiety and even persecution do not exempt the subjects from the obedience they owe to their princes.” The only possible attitude in the face of “the violence of the princes” is to submit “respectful remonstrances, without mutiny and without a murmur, and with prayers for their conversion.” It is also necessary to ban “remonstrances full of bitterness and grumbling” since these “are the beginnings of sedition, which must not be tolerated.”