The enterprise called political theory is very old; so old that to some it seems to have outlived its time. At long last — 13 years ago to be precise — it was pronounced dead. Since that pronouncement seems not to have been widely heard, or sufficiently heeded, a second certificate testifying to its demise was issued two years later.

SaudiArabia as a state has rarely been an object of interest for political scientists in the West, and the reasons for this are clear. Fluid in the location of her territory, lacking power and a sense of threat to her vital interests, encumbered with a xenophobic religion and a society in compressed transition from a nomadic to a feudal way of life, Saudi Arabia until the mid-1950's was inactive in international politics, even at the regional level. Like the United States and Russia in the early stages of their national development, Saudi Arabia first found her energies absorbed in affairs that could only with difficulty be distinguished as “domestic” or “foreign.” Saudi Arabia's main concern was to consolidate a territorially and socially expanding habitat and thereby to become an Arab state equal in scope with the Arabian peninsula. Specifically, this meant expansion in a south-easterly direction to the outermost limits possible, for Saudi Arabian power was too limited to challenge the more established positions of Great Britain in Iraq and Transjordan in the north. Only when revenues derived from oil resources being exploited by ARAMCO (the Arabian-American Oil Company) provided Saudi Arabia with the economic base of modern power and when revolutionary pan-Arabism gave her a political rationale for exercising her growing power did she begin to pursue a consistent “foreign” policy at the regional level.

Since World War II, a spate of interpretations of empire and imperialism has issued from the press. In part the interest stems from the progressive decolonization of much of what had previously been part of European empires. In part it arises from a present-minded concern with expansion by the modern superpowers, the United States, the Soviet Union and, more recently, China. Nor does the decline of the former great powers of western Europe lessen interest, for their loss of empire seems, for some, a manifestation of Spenglerian theory and for others, a causal factor in that decline. Certainly Great Britain's plummet from first-rate-power rank to a considerably lesser plane has been most spectacularly accompanied by a recessional from palm and pine. Not surprisingly, given the context of their writing, the new sociological and psychological studies and assessments are markedly critical of and variant from the old. New perspectives presented by an epoch seemingly finished and new techniques drawn from the behavioral sciences have molded historians’ assessment of the old “new imperialism's” apogee between 1870 and 1914.

My subject is the World Bank and the Third World. The Bank has taken on the overwhelming task of helping the development of the countries we call, for want of a better word, “underdeveloped,” less favored or, to use a kindlier expression, “developing.” In short, the poor countries. My talk will be divided into three chapters. The first will deal with the origins of foreign aid, the second with the present situation and the last with what we should do to improve our procedures, enlarge our sources of income and perfect their use in the developing world.

In his ideas on education, Alfred North Whitehead was a man of good sense as well as of wide experience, a traditionalist and yet full of new life. Freshest and as if novel are two ideas: there should be spontaneous joy in learning: joy is its life; and although reason and logic are of course necessary, vital intuitions belong to the essence of learning.

It has become commonplace in the 1960's to talk about the alienated American, the disinherited American, the culturally different American. Most people talk in general terms but they almost always mean the Negro American. For the Negro is an alienated American of the largest minority group in the United States. In its historical quest for a unified society, the nation has called upon the public schools to live up to their traditional socializing responsibilities. At the present time, however, the focus is not upon the European immigrant coming from foreign shores but rather upon the segregated black man living in the most alienated ghettos of America. Martin Luther King spoke about educating the minds and hearts of white Americans in a concerted attempt to usher in the true kingdom of an integrated and just society. And what better place to begin this process than in the schools! Yet many Negroes have begun to lose faith in the schools as they have come to view them as an unreconstructed part of a basically racist society. A few are calling for the total rejection of the white man's society including his inflexible school structure. Others are demanding community — and this often means black — control of the schools in order to make them more responsive to the total needs of their youngsters. They want schools that will nurture the self-identity of the Negro child, deepen his pride in his color and heritage, and develop his capabilities to help create a truly democratic society which is “worthy, lovely, and harmonious.” That grand old lady of the social settlement movement in America, Jane Addams, once stated these desires in another way — indeed quite a contemporary way — when she concluded “that unless all men and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having.”