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THE PROPHETS OF DEPOLITIZATION ARE CONFOUNDED. IN THE last year or so, politics have come back with a vengeance. Indeed, what is characteristic in this new political activity is that, anticapitalistic though it may be, its immediate motives did not spring from urgent economic problems. In France, for instance, trouble erupted out of a blue economic sky.
For those who, convinced that the political conflict is perennial and ubiquitous, regarded the theories of depolitization with due scepticism, this was a ‘new wave’ of political conflict though with a noticeable change in techniques and mentalities. The change was so considerable and so abrupt, the methods so different, that one could not but wonder if they did not herald also the coming of another code of political behaviour. Once more the need to study the modernization of politics, by which is meant broadly the synchronization of the political process with the evolved economic and social processes, seemed even greater.
1 At the International Political Science Association Round Table Conference on the Modernization of Politics of September 1968 where this text was circulated as an interim report of the Rapporteur Général.
2 The following extract from the New York Times of 14 June 1965, is relevant from this point of view. ‘Eight months after his massive election victory, President Johnson is holding much of his support among the American people but his leadership in foreign policy is being sharply questioned in Washington and abroad. The American academic world has made it plain through speeches, teach-ins and countless letters to newspaper editors that it is intellectually and emotionally alienated from the President to whom it gave such strong support in the election. Criticism in official Washington has been muted primarily because members of Congress and administration officials have no wish either to offend Mr. Johnson or to give the world an impression of a divided government. Spot checks in this country by correspondents confirmed the evident loss of support for Mr. Johnson in the academic world. They also disclosed a feeling of frustration among Americans at the difficulty of understanding and getting information on complex foreign situations and the nation’s involvement in them.’