ANARCHISM AS A DOCTRINE HAS A PECULIAR FASCINATION FOR scholars. It both repels and attracts. It attracts because it embodies rage – the particular rage people have when they see man as an obstacle to his own humaneness. It is the ultimate statement of how outrageous the human condition can be. But it is precisely because man does not live by rage alone, but must master it by discovering proximate means to solving the ordinary problems of daily life, that anarchism repels. It seem a romantic luxury at best – a cry of pain for the future, just as nostalgia is for the past and, like nostalgia, this cannot fail to be attractive.

Perhaps because of this anarchism is not a mere reflection of anger but also a contributing source. It is thus more than a lightning rod for the anger that exists. Anarchism is associated with unreason and bombs, violence and irresponsibility.

CLASSICAL POLITICAL THEORY HAS BEEN PREOCCUPIED WITH TWO over-arching problems; the stability and survivaI of political systems and the rationality of political acts. Rational decisions, it has been assumed, lead to stable and successful government. The first rule of nature is to make peace, Hobbes pointed out, and it is human reason that devises means for doing this.

All the arguments, of course, have hung on the definition of rationality, and more particularly on the question of who, in practice, is to define what is rational or contribute to such a definition. The ultimate objective of the philosophers has been the ‘good of the whole community’, so the question has always resolved itself into establishing criteria for deciding which category or categories of person, under which set of rules or restraints, are most likely to make rational contributions to political decision-making for the good of the whole society. A large vocabulary of concepts – sovereignty, general will, obligation, citizenship, rights and so on – has been developed to provide theoretically satisfactory answers to this question.

THIS ARTICLE IS A TEXTUAL EXAMINATION OF ALMOND'S CONCEPT OF the ‘political system’, as adumbrated in his Politics of the Developing Areas and developed in his latest book, Comparative Politics. It is concerned only with this concept; others, such as his notion of ‘political development’ have been left aside.

There is at least one contribution which Almond has made to which I wish to pay full tribute: that is, his checklist of ‘functions’ which, it is alleged, all governed societies carry out, and by reference to which they can be compared. Almond's ‘functions’ are not logically necessary ones; they are simply a convenient checklist which he has derived from the data. This does not make them any the less useful. I would agree with Professor W. J. M. Mackenzie's estimate, ‘In fact Almond attempted the right thing in possibly the wrong way – but no one has yet improved on his analysis of the elements of the polity’.

A MOOD OF DISILLUSIONMENT APPEARS TO BE SWEEPING THE FIELD of comparative politics and political development. This comes after almost two decades of rather impressive accomplishment, both from a qualitative and quantitative point of view. From small beginnings in the first years after the second world war, there is now a quite impressive literature in this field. Each area of the world has something like a ‘five-foot shelf’ of monographic studies of political processes, patterns and developmental tendencies. Some of these shelves are smaller than others. The Latin American shelf, for example, has lagged in growth but is in process of rapid improvement. The Middle Eastern shelf leaves much to be desired, but even here there are signs of stirring and of potential productivity. In addition to these ‘area shelves’ which show increasing signs of cumulativeness, of drawing on each other for perspective and for hypotheses, there is a ‘super shelf’ of comparative and theoretical studies which draws upon the area shelves and which contributes frameworks, approaches and hypotheses for monographic studies.

EXTRAPARLIAMENTARY OPPOSTION MADE ITS APPEARANCE IN THE midst of the political upheavals of 1968 both as part of a wider phenomenon of social and political life and as the result of a specific combination of factors in certain countries, especially France and the United States. In the wider sense, it resulted from the age-old problem: are established political structures willing (or indeed able) to answer the needs of the larger socio-political communities for whose welfare they have been made responsible? The problems of the technological age—popular participation in governmental processes, the coming of age of the post-war ‘baby boom’ generation, the quality of life in the consumer society, and, perhaps most significantly, the increasing bureaucratization of administration and politics on both sides of the iron curtain—served to stoke the furnaces of scepticism and open rejection of accepted answers. As the year progressed, the collective leadership of the Soviet Union continued to pull back from the de-Stalinization of the Krushchev era, American leaders were assassinated and racial strife continued, hopes for a Middle East settlement faded, and the Vietnam war exploded in the Tet offensive. The atmosphere of hopeful progress which had permeated the early 1960s was shattered for good, and a widespread mood of frustration came to predominate.

‘L'Irlande est une petite contreé sur laquelle se débattent les plus grandes questions de la politique, de la morale, et de l'humanité.’

Gustave de Beaumont, 1839

IT IS MUCH EASIER TO EXPLAIN THE COURSE OF A FULLY LEGITIMATE, a fully repudiated or a fully coercive regime than to explain what goes on in a regime that is persistently divided. Northern Ireland is an excellent case study of a regime that lacks the stability or quasistability of these three familiar types of political authority. The regime there has always been divided, i.e., the constitution is supported by only a portion of the population, and a substantial fraction of its nominal subjects are inclined to disobey basic political 1aws. It is particularly striking that this should happen in a land where the institutions of government are explicitly modelled after the Parliament of the United Kingdom to which it is bound, and the culture permits the easy assimilation of its emigrants to life in Britain and America. To understand why industrialization and urbanization together have not produced a fully legitimate regime, one must look back into the history of Ireland, and examine the strategy of political leaders who commenced governing in less than ideal circumstances. Then one can begin to understand the multiple and extreme challenges to the regime today.

THE NEW FORMS OF SOCIAL CONFLICT IN FRANCE AND THE IDEOLOGIES underlying them pose some formidable questions to the historian and the sociologist of the workers’ movement. Those which particularly interest us deal, on the one hand, with the existence of anarchist ideas and concepts within the sum total of ideological utterances in May and June 1968 and, on the other, with the libertarian character of the methods of contestation which have appeared in France during recent years. I have deliberately confined myself to the wide notion of the ‘practice of contestation’ precisely because it goes beyond the phenomenon of the wildcat strike or the unrest in the universities and corresponds to a more general concept which has not as yet been monopolized by any theory. ‘Generalized contestation’ does not claim to be a definitive sociological category. On the contrary, it is a provisional portmanteau word which will take a more definite shape once we emerge from the chiaroscuro of impressionistic criticism and philosophical reflection.

THE POLITICAL SYSTEM OF WEST GERMANY MAY BE CHARACTERIZED as a ‘penetrated system’, a notion which has been developed by James Rosenau. After the restoration of German sovereignty in 1955 , Rosenau's definition seemed less applicable to Germany, since it was defined by the fact that ‘non-members of a national society’ . . . ‘participate directly and authoritatively, through actions taken jointly with the society's members, either in the allocation of its values or in the mobilization of support on behalf of its goals’. Wolfram Hanrieder tried to improve the applicability of the notion of ‘penetrated system’ to Germany by broadening the scope of the concept; he no longer restricted it to ‘direct and authoritative participation of non-members’. This concept fitted the German situation better than G. Modelski's model of ‘internal war’ which has been applied to Germany by some younger scholars since the process of the division of Germany was more or less a result of the action of the great powers and only rather late was it consciously endorsed by decision makers in both parts of Germany.

NINE YEARS AGO GEORGE WOOD SURVEYED THE ‘GHOST OF THE historical anarchist movement’ and concluded that there was ‘no reasonable likelihood of a renaissance’. History showed that ‘the movements which fail to take the chances it offers them are never born again’. Seven years later, when identifiably anarchist tendencies re-emerged in the youth movements in England and Holland, Woodcock wondered ‘whether I had been rash in so officiously burying the historic anarchist movement’. He decided. that he had not been rash because of the differences between the new anarchists and the old. The new anarchists represented no ‘knock in the coffin’ but ‘a new manifestation of the [anarchist] idea’.

Woodcock described the new anarchists as ‘militant pacifists’ who had ‘forgotten Spain and had no use for the old romanticism of the dinamitero and the petroleuse’. He pointed to the difference between the old days when one ‘joined’ an anarchist party and the current situation in which the young ‘became’ anarchists. Finally, Woodcock discerned no obvious signs of an anarchist revival in the United States.

PLATO'S ACCOUNT OF THE PLACE OF LAW IN THE POLITICAL ORDER IS in two phases, One is found in the Republic. The Republic is utopian; it describes the ideal state. In this state law has no place; ideal rulers do not need to be bound by law in order to do justice, and governmental relationships need not be defined by law if they are by nature ideal. But later, in the Statesman and the Laws, Plato moves from the utopian and ideal to describing the best state practically obtainable – the second-best state, which because of the necessities of the human condition falls short of the ideal, the Utopia. Here law is readmitted, indeed is given high place; the second-best state, which is the best of earthly states, is in fact to be held together by the golden cord of the law.

POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS IN DEMOCRATIC STATES HAVE USUALLY COME into existence as the manifestation of a principle of political philosophy or as the result of a compromise among forces with different aspirations for the polity. Often both factors have been involved. Certainly the consequences for political behaviour of introducing any particular structure have been of concern to its architects, but many of these consequences are unforeseeable and the actual impact of an institutional change or the character of a formal role may in time become quite different from that intended.

For a political actor, such as an individual, an interest group or a party, formal structures are given attributes of the political environment. Along with the more diffuse qualities of the political culture, they constitute the framework within which political actors must compete for influence over public policy. This framework, both formal and informal, is uneven in its effects on the fortunes of the various political forces. It favours some approaches and some groups more and in different ways than it favours others. The British Labour Party, with its concentrated voting strength, is disadvantaged by the single-member district/plurality electoral system, while its counterpart in Germany is able to maximize its strength in a system of proportional representation.

VIRTUALLY ALL THE MAJOR ACCOUNTS OF 1917 IN ENGLISH TO DATE deal almost exclusively with events in Petrograd, paying occasional attention to other parts of European Russia. An admirable exception has been provided by Dr John Keep, who has written a fascinating account of the reception of the October coup in the provinces. In this essay other neglected aspects of the hiatus between the capital and the rest of the country are taken up which refer to the period prior to October. As an introduction to these aspects it would seem useful in the first place to mention some of the well-established considerations on this subject.

Historians of every political hue have tended to equate the Petrograd-centred events with the Russian revolution. Because they were initially successful in Petrograd above all, the bolsheviks have preferred since 1917 to concentrate on the political course of events in the capital in order to justify their claim to have inherited the cloak of sovereignty from the old regime.

SPAIN IS THE WESTERN COUNTRY WHICH, SECOND ONLY TO PORTUGAL, holds the record for the most unmitigated, the most lasting and – by its own standards – the most successful domination of the extreme Right. None should be surprised, then, that after thirty-one years of determined authoritarian rule, Spanish anarchism should not be a significant force at present. Like all revolutionaries everywhere and always, Spanish anarchists in the past managed to gather some strength only when there was a degree of freedom allowing them to organize politically, unheard of in General Franco's regime, or else when dictators were afflicted by impotence in certain geographical areas, or by glaring imbecility, none of which has been the case in post-civil war Spain.

THE POLITICAL TRIAL IS FREQUENTLY RESORTED TO BY REGIMES seeking to establish or reaffirm their legitimacy. Almost by definition the opposition is the target of such trials for it has questioned or challenged the incumbent regime's right to rule. The trial, when successfully engineered, reveals the opposition as not simply misguided, but as subversive, treasonous, and, in the case of the monarchies, sacrilegious. The condemnation of all or part of the opposition for sins towards God and country emphasizes the objective validity and immutability of the regime's tenets, the components of its charter myth.

Such trials have several functions, but three stand out among them. First, one may consider the propagandistic, mass communication function. The trial itself becomes the scene for the definition, re-affirmation, and manipulation of the regime's symbols and credos. Official doctrine is hammered home to the society as a whole, under highly dramatic circumstances inherent in the trial process. The unfolding of the drama often evokes far greater public interest and concern than the routine propaganda efforts of the controlled mass media.

IN 1965 IT WAS POSSIBLE FOR THE AUTHOR OF AN ARTICLE ON THE anarchists in Britain to begin by observing that anarchists no longer figured in the popular consciousness and that the existence of anarchists could occasion as much polite surprise as the continued existence of the Independent Labour Party. This present article and its inclusion in a special issue on Anarchism is perhaps in part a proof that this situation is no longer true, and that anarchism has recently attracted sufficient attention to justify a new and closer look at anarchists in Britain today. It would hardly be rash to argue that whatever else may be true of the Left in Britain in 1970, the anarchists’ presence deserves to provoke much less polite surprise than it may have done five years ago.

This article is not, however, a description of the shape and variety of anarchists and anarchist groups to be found in Britain today. It is rather an attempt to describe one particular facet of anarchist thought which has characterized anarchism in the 1960s and to relate this to the ‘anarchhation’ of the New Left described by James Joll in his concluding article. It is to that extent an extrapolation and abstraction from a very wide range of alternatives and undoubtedly presents a picture which many anarchists would not recognize or would repudiate.

WHILE THE LITERATURE ON LEGISLATORS’ ATTITUDES HAS BECOME impressive in the course of the last decade, the study of legislative behaviour lags markedly behind. Even S. C. Patterson's Legislative Behaviour remains primarily concerned with the examination of legislator's attitudes. One of the clearest examples of this trend is exemplified by roll-call analysis: studies of roll-calls have principally attempted to elucidate the ideology or specific attitudinal characteristics of members of legislatures; they have not been concerned with the outcomes of these roll-calls as such, inasmuch as they might have constituted an indication of the extent to which legislatures could and did affect the ‘rule-making’ process in a national community.