The study of politics in Africa has undergone significant change in recent years. From an initial fascination with the mechanisms of politics at the state level, emphasis has shifted to an attempt to identify those basic factors underlying patterns of political organization and behavior. More attention is now being given to micropolitical analyses, and an effort is being made to relate political occurrences on the state level to local political culture, development and concerns.

Machiavelli, one of the most famous of political writers, wrote a play which many critics regard as one of the best comedies of the Italian Renaissance. The question which inevitably arises is whether there is a connection between the serious and the comic works of Machiavelli, whether the Mandragola stands alone, a tribute pure and simple to the versatility of Machiavelli's mind, or whether the themes of the Mandragola are an extension of the themes found in the bulk of his writings. Is there, in short, a political message, cleverly disguised, in the Mandragola? Some of Machiavelli's commentators think so, but they flatly contradict one another. Alessandro Parronchi regards the Mandragola as an “allegoria del ritorno dei Medici in Firenze,” while Theodore Sumberg interprets the play as a call to overthrow the Medici. Not surprisingly, then, the literary critic is apt to insist that students of politics should mind their own business: literary studies should be left to literary critics, political studies to political critics.

The need to introduce flexibility and diversity into an increasingly centralized and insensitive system of political and administrative controls is one of the most strongly felt problems in modern democracies. In particular, reforms must be fostered in state governmental and administrative structures to reckon with the evergrowing weight of regional units and metropolitan areas. The debate affects not only the United States but also Western Europe, witness the recent reforms in England, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Italy. Italy, after delaying by some twenty years the application of the 1948 constitution which called for the establishment of regional governments, has taken steps which should transform the political-administrative base of the country and may serve as guidelines for other societies where regional allegiances remain strong and where metropolitan areas outweigh rural ones in terms of financial needs and commitments. The changes, some twenty years in the works, are worthy of attention as they offer an interesting case of intrastate regionalism coupled with successful elements of micro-regionalization.

The “national interest” has proven to be a highly resilient concept, not only in terms of its malleability in the hands of foreign policymakers and various publics but also in terms of its ability to retain currency among several generations of international relations scholars despite repeated efforts to discredit it. There have been several attempts recently to rehabilitate the concept, including one by the Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy which recognized that repudiation of the term by academics did not absolve practitioners from their continuing responsibility to define it. However, the problem with recent attempts on the part of scholars as well as practitioners to reformulate the “national interest” is that they fail to take into account adequately the new realities of world politics which have tended to upset the normal calculus. If the identification of “national interests” has defied precise analysis in the past, it is an even more difficult task today.

During the past half-century or so, the world has seen the formation of some one hundred new nation-states, while many of the other fifty-odd political entities have radically altered their previous form of constitution by force, revolution, conquest, election, or change of political philosophy. This has given renewed life to the classical issue about what is the best form of rule under which men ought to live. Political modernization has become a crucial aspect of political science. The external form of almost all these new nation-states, to be sure, even of the most absolute, has almost invariably been some legal variety of “constitutional democracy,” the wording commonly given in modern times to the structure of the best state.