The importance of the countryside (rief) for the social and economic development of Arab societies whose populations are still greatly peasant in composition and whose wealth is still based on agriculture seems incontestable. Less obvious, but equally important, is the political role of the peasantry and the rural areas in the process of transition from traditional to more modern types of social and political systems in the Middle East. There is plenty of evidence that political modernization cannot take place without a solution to the peasant problem — without their incorporation into the political system. Huntington holds that in modernizing countries where the bulk of the population is rural but where politics remains a predominately urban game, governments are likely to be ephemeral, unstable and ineffective. He argues that the establishment of stable and effective regimes requires bridging the urban-rural gap through some coalition of urban and rural forces which will bring the peasantry into the system. Furthermore, both Huntington and Barrington Moore argue that the particular type of leadership under which the peasants are brought into the political system greatly shapes the whole subsequent development of the system. The countryside, according to Huntington, plays a crucial swing role and this role varies from very conservative to very revolutionary. Three possibilities seem to be typical. One outcome is where peasants are brought into the system by upper-class leadership, sometimes through a formally liberal type electoral system, informally based on patronage and traditional symbolism, sometimes through a conservative authoritarian system.

In this analysis I explore the key political and military events that led to the acquisition of state power by the Movimento Popular de Libertacao (MPLA) in Angola and the Frente de Libertacao de Mocambique (FRELIMO) in Mozambique during 1975–1976. At the same time, I discuss the decisive role played by the “guerrilla counterstate,” which the MPLA and FRELIMO movements constructed out of their national liberation party organizations, as a social formation to guide the cultural and political process of rapid social change. Indeed, I argue that one can point to the MPLA's and FRELIMO's divergent experiences with administering their counterstate institutions during the struggle for national liberation as a decisive variable in accounting for their respective successes and failures at institutionalizing social revolution after independence.

Recently Alan Gewirth has attempted to establish a universally valid foundation for ethics and politics by means of analyzing the “normative structure” of action and what that necessarily entails for any agent. By “normative structure”he means that by virtue of which certain “evaluative and deontic judgments on the part of agents are logically implicit in all action” (pp. 25–26). These judgments, leading finally to a supreme moral principle, are part of what is “conceptually necessary” to being an agent. Anyone who resists making these judgments is guilty of “selfcontradiction” and thus a diminution of his claim to be a rational being (pp. 44, 48).

Although Gewirth considers his approach to be a novel one, it infact exhibits some interesting parallels with the approach of the German philosopher andsocial-political theorist, Jiirgen Habermas. The latter has not written a systematic work on what he calls “communicative ethics,” but he has laid out its basic components. As with Gewirth, the foundation of this ethics lies in a certain “normative force” implicit in action. While there are such similarities of approach between the two theorists, they differ in the specific analyses they offer of action and of what constitutes an agent's claim to rationality.