THE MALVINAS WAR HAS BEEN FOR ARGENTINA WHAT CYPRUS was for the Greek colonels. Unfortunately we lack a Karamanlis, and the Junta regime has lost the six years it has been in office without developing a political project of its own. In this sense, our situation is very different from that of Brazil, where the ruling military have had time to ‘open up’ the political system gradually.

To understand the mind of the Argentine armed forces one has to realize that they felt disappointed by the Martinez de Hoz administration (1976–81). Actually, this is putting it mildly. They felt betrayed: it is as though the Argentine economy had been bombed for the past six years. A familiar experience? Possibly, but unlike some European countries, we lack the institutional mechanisms. Besides, the Argentine military felt that while they did their part in stopping the guerrillas, the specialists they put in charge of economic matters did not do their job. The team of economists, headed by José Martínez de Hoz, was a local version of ‘Chicago boys’, backed by international finance and its world economic pundits. A contorted version of ‘liberalism’ invaded our beaches, giving us nineternth-century laissez faire plus a foolish overvaluation of the peso which made Buenos Aires the costliest city in the world, and rendered competition against imports impossible. Quite a few people thought this was necessary because, as the widely displayed sticker on our cars has it, ‘to reduce the state is to strengthen the nation’. The idea is that Argentina would finally be a real part of the Western Christian world and, inspired by European and North American examples, would throw away protectionism and all its trappings, never to look at it again.

BRITAIN HAS BEEN ACTIVELY TRYING TO ALTER THE BUDGETary arrangements of the European Communities in order to reduce the size of its net contributions since the Labour government of Harold Wilson succeeded Edward Heath's Conservative government in February 1974. This effort has been based upon the perception that Britain's net contribution to the budget – the balance of gross contributions and receipts – was excessive compared with that of its partners. Britain has been the largest net contributor, yet has a per capita gross national product which places it with the less prosperous member states.

THE DENIAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN SOCIALIST STATES CAN BE seen as the natural outcome of Marxist praxis: Marxist teaching about the nature of the class struggle and the conditions necessary for the emancipation of the proletariat from bourgeois values is not only theoretically alien to the concept of universal human rights, but its implementation by Marxist revolutionaries in the circumstances expected to prevail is likely to require the denial of such rights to ever-widening sections of the society if political power is to be secured and retained.

AT FIRST SIGHT ONE MIGHT BELIEVE THAT THE REPORT ON THE teaching of social sciences in the world prepared in 1951 by William Robson, at the invitation of UNESCO for the International Political Science Association, is still valid today in what it says about the situation in France. In fact, because of the strong traditions in the French universities, the teaching of and research in political science in France have not made the progress which had been hoped for, in spite of the continuing efforts of successive governments. Nevertheless, since the mid-1960s a major effort has been made. Some 40 chairs and nearly three times as many lectureships and assistant lectureships have been created and several large research centres have been set up, particularly in Paris where, alongside the venerable Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, many teams have been established, notably at Paris I, Paris II and Paris X, comprising lawyears, sociologists and historians.

ONE OF THE EXPLANATIONS FOR THE MUTED UPSURGE OF business creativity in Britain is that the cultural milieu remains largely antipathetic to the entrepreneur and to a lesser degree to business. This anti-entrepreneurial heritage is over a century old and cannot be easily eradicated; it will take probably another decade or so of earnest reconsideration of the British industrial malaise and the application of appropriate remedies to bring about a discernible and measurable revival of the industrial spirit. As entrepreneurial activity can speed up the process of industrial revival, the more entrepreneurs surface to create new, viable businesses the better; thus the task of finding and encouraging the entrepreneur assumes new importance; I propose to illustrate ways of approaching this objective.

IN BRAZIL, THE RISE OF SCIENTISM AS AN IDEOLOGY IN THE 1870s was part and parcel of a changing social setting. The great war with Lόpez's Paraguay, a big financial burden and no easy victory, laid bare several bottlenecks in economy and society. By the end of the conflict, comprehensive claims for modernization had entered the agenda of new political parties, reformist, liberal and republican. In the huge post-bellum tropical Empire (1870–89) a protracted poIitical struggle for the abolition of slavery, mounting pressures from urban groups claiming a number of liberal reforms, and the growth of umilitarynrest (the ‘Military Question’, 1883–86) tended to dovetail, thereby threatening the monarchy. Intellectually as well as politically the halcyon days of peaceful monarchic rule (1845–68) were gone. The liberal-conservative compromise was doomed. Its would-be philosophical expression – the pious eclecticism of Cousin's Brazilian disciples – began to falter under the combined assault of readers of Darwin and Renan, Spencer and Haeckel – and, last but not least, Comte.

I base this enquiry on the simple proposition that the government of a university ought to be collegiate and that authority within an academic community should be diffuse.

Now it is clear – it became very clear at Manchester in 1981–82 – that the structure of control in most British universities is no longer capable of looking after its members in a rational, intelligent manner. Instead of dispersal there is centralization, and in place of collegiate government there is a persistent drift towards administrative control. Moreover, in relation to the title of this journal, universities are marvellously arranged to oppose but ill-equipped to govern. The words may sound harsh but they were amply illustrated in the crisis that descended on the unversity in July 1981.