American society over the past dozen years has undergone a general and continuing crisis. Almost everyone agrees on that point, but on the deeper meaning and significance of the crisis, on its origins and precise nature, there is massive disagreement. From all points of the political spectrum flow streams of mutually exclusive analyses and prescriptions.

The United Kingdom, already beleaguered in the mid-1970's by a number of serious problems—economic, social, political, diplomatic and even climatic—in addition has had to contend with a far-reaching constitutional crisis. Involving the subject of devolution of power (better known as home rule), it has been described as “the most crucial constitutional issue which has confronted the United Kingdom since it came into being.” The controversy over devolution has reached a new level of intensity since November, 1975, when the government, in an effort to resolve the dispute, published a White Paper entitled Our Changing Democracy: Devolution to Scotland and Wales. This article examines the following aspects of the devolution issue: its background, why it has emerged at this time, why the White Paper was issued, reasons for the hostile reaction to the White Paper, the prospects for parliamentary passage of devolution legislation, and the issue's political repercussions and implications, both domestic and international.

For nearly three centuries, Vico's name remained virtually unknown outside narrow philosophical and literary circles; indications are, however, that he is beginning to emerge from this obscurity.1 His resurgence, it seems to me, is by no means fortuitous or the result of mere antiquarian interests. In a striking manner philosophical developments in our time have revived central themes of the Neapolitan thinker; his preoccupation with practical-historical experience and its exegesis reverberates in many facets of contemporary thought—even bypassing the barrier between Continental and Anglo-Saxon perspectives. On the Continent, Vico's legacy had been preserved to some extent in Dilthey's “life-philosophy”; in a more rigorous fashion, the implications of this legacy were exploredby existential phenomenology and hermeneutics with their focus on the human “life-world” and on the significance of prereflective understanding for cognitive operations. Comparable concerns havesurfaced in analytical philosophy. Abandoning (or at least modifying) the quest for an artificial symbolism capturing the structure of the empirical universe, linguistic analysis during recent decades has shifted attention increasingly to ordinary language as the underlying matrix of practical and theoretical endeavors. In a similar vein, philosophers of science have tended to turn from logical calculation and empirical verification to the concrete “context of discovery”—the paradigmatic frameworks in terms of which investigative procedures are sanctioned and research goals formulated.

In the past decade American political science has experienced considerable internal conflict and turmoil. To an extent, these disturbances were unexpected for in the early 1960's the “epitaph” for a “successful” behavioral movement had been written and the “credo” of behavioralism presented. Nevertheless, by the middle of the 1960's a “new revolution in political science” was under way, a revolution “directed against a developing behavioral orthodoxy.” Behavioral political science was challenged on many grounds, but of central importance were these