These twelve organizations appear to have little in common. They are public and private, national and international, profit-making and charitable, religious and secular, civil and military, and, depending on one's perspective, benign and nefarious. Yet they do share three characteristics. First, each is a relatively large, hierarchically organized, centrally directed bureaucracy. Second, each performs a set of relatively limited, specialized, and, in some sense, technical functions: gathering intelligence, investing money, transmitting messages, promoting sales, producing copper, delivering bombs, saving souls. Third, each organization performs its functions across one or more international boundaries and, insofar as is possible, in relative disregard of those boundaries.

Is foreign economic expansion in some sense an “institutional necessity” for corporate capitalism in the United States? Is there something inherent in the internal dynamics of American capitalism that creates such strong pressures for foreign private investment that the U.S. Government must consider the creation and preservation of an international system that facilitates such expansion to be among our most vital national interests? What yardstick can measure the opportunities, the needs, die necessity of investing abroad, or tie cost and risk if tiie option of foreign private investment is threatened

The application of economic sanctions against Rhodesia and the results of that effort raise the question of the effectiveness of economic coercion as an instrument of foreign policy. A review of U.S. economic coercion against Cuba, in effect since June 1960, and against the Dominican Republic during the period 1960–1962 may be timely and instructive. By exploring the steps leading to the application of U.S. economic coercion, its objectives, and its concrete impact on the target states it may be possible to develop some useful generalizations about the role of economic weapons as tools of foreign policy.

The Hungarian economic reform was introduced in the beginning of 1968. It clearly represents the most radical postwar change, in the economic system of any COMECON country, which has been maintained over a period of years and gives promise of continuity. It has rightly been heralded as a major shift to decentralization, since centralized physical planning of the activities of enterprises was essentially ended widi its introduction. But a study of the new economic mechanism's functioning at the enterprise level, three years after its introduction, suggests a somewhat different interpretation of the reform from the ones most commonly given.

Most international lawyers are committed to the belief that law, rather than being a mere fig leaf for the raw thrust of national power, is an independent variable exerting, in Tony D'Amato's apt phrase, a certain pressure on national decision-makers. This fraternal consensus fractures, however, as soon as discussion turns to the questions, what is die exact nature of the phenomenon generally called law which influences decision, and how or why does it achieve the asserted effect

The historical role of the working class has recently been subject to reassessment. Frequently repudiated are the Marxist views that the proletariat constitutes either, as Marx's and Engels' classic scheme would have it, the revolutionary social force in capitalist societies, or, as Lenin believed, the pre-eminent element in a revolutionary alliance with the poorest strata of the peasantry, or, finally, as Mao holds, the leadership cadres needed to mobilize the downtrodden peasant masses into conscious, revolutionary action. Consider, for instance, the meager role attributed to the working class in Barrington Moore's brilliant effort, in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, to delineate three historical routes to modernity.