The environmental movement has produced a confusion in American politics stemming from the difficulties of classifying it according to conventional categories. Most of its warriors are young people who identify with the Counter-Culture, yet it is often denounced by hard-line radicals as diversionary. Its most substantial supporters are left-liberal suburbanites, but it also attracts individuals who have no truck with civil-rights or antiwar causes. It is future-oriented in image and rhetoric, yet its severer critics call its leaders “arch-Druids” and accuse them of trying to repeal progress.

On may 8, 1940, some 24 hours before German panzers began their blitzkrieg through the Low Countries, a small group of middle-aged men gathered informally at the Harvard Club in New York City. These men, 9 in all, represented the “old Plattsburg crowd,” the same group which had cooperated with General Leonard Wood in 1915–1917 in organizing the famous Military Instruction Camps for Business and Professional Men at Plattsburg, New York. It was almost 25 years to the day that they had first met following the sinking of the Lusitania in May, 1915, and the present discussion concerned plans for a twenty-fifth anniversary celebration.

This article will sketch a political science that is founded on principles different from those underlying the discipline at present. The major thesis is that contemporary American political science is Newtonian and interactionist in orientation in a world in which scientific thought has become field-oriented and transactionist. Political scientists are still primarily concerned with defining abstract units of analysis and exploring the relations among these units, while many natural scientists and even novelists like Lawrence Durrell have advanced to the stage of studying fields of behavior and domains of human activity. What would a transactionist political science look like? What are some of the reasons for adopting such a political science as a starting point for research and analysis?

Radio Havana? Quotations from Chairman Mao? A black liberation group pamphlet? Wrong. These are excerpts from Roman Catholic publications in Latin America. Still regarded by many as one of the bulwarks of the status quo, the Latin-American Church has undergone a startling transformation in the last five years which has moved its official thinking and portions of its elite leadership significantly to the left.

Russia'S new naval presence in the Caribbean creates a situation somewhat like the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. This time, however, the problem confronting the United States, though less urgent, is more difficult in the sense that it is more complex. Its complexity arises mainly from the fact that, as regards the Latin Americans, Russia's main objective must be political. Its use of military force to coerce them is out of the question, and the scale of its trade with all of them except Cuba is too small to provide economic leverage. On the other hand, its naval penetration of the Caribbean could reasonably be expected to help promote Soviet prestige and political influence throughout Latin America.