In a recent issue of this journal, Oran Young argued forcefully against the ‘collection of empirical materials as an end in itself and without sufficient theoretical analysis to determine appropriate criteria of selection.” The present paper issues a complementary critique of the opposite failing. Its target is the tendency toward compulsive and mindless theorizing—a disease at least as prevalent and debilitating, so it seems to me, as the one described by Oran Young.

Until very recently social interpretations of revolution have enjoyed a position of virtual orthodoxy among both historians and social scientists. Sociologists and political scientists concerned with the problem of revolution have been mainly of the structural-functional school. They describe a revolutionary situation as one of “multiple dysfunction” in the relations between the political system and the society it serves. Revolution thus interpreted is a violent redress of imbalance among functionally interrelated and historically synchronous social and political parts of one total system. It is commonly assumed that it is the social process, including economic change, that is the dynamic element in any revolutionary event, and that political institutions play a causative role only in so far as they fail to provide mechanisms for resolving the state of disequilibrium. Historians of revolution, many of them strongly if not consciously influenced by Marxist traditions of interpretation, have taken much the same position. If they tend to think more in terms of trends than of equilibrium systems, nevertheless they agree with the social scientists that revolution is primarily the result of accumulating social and economic pressures, with politics playing only a secondary role in shaping the course of events.

Foreign policy has been radically transformed by the revolutionary processes of modernization not only in the societies composing the Atlantic region, but wherever high levels of modernization exist. There is a quality about modernization that dissolves the effects of what have generally been considered the major determinants of foreign policy, whether these determinants are based on ideology and type of political system (democratic versus totalitarian foreign policies, for example), or power and capability (great-power versus smallpower policies). Wherever modernized societies exist, their foreign policies are more similar to each other than they are to the foreign policies of nonmodernized societies, regardless of the scale of the society or its type of government.

Most of the nations of Africa and Asia remain predominantly rural and agricultural. However, more than half the people in most Latin American countries are no longer rural, and a fifth to a third live in cities of 100,000 or more. In Asia and North Africa, Lebanon, the U.A.R., and the Philippines are also substantially urbanized, and Morocco, Syria, Turkey, South Korea, and Taiwan are not far behind. Moreover, virtually everywhere in the developing world, regardless of the extent of urbanization already achieved, cities are growing at rates of 5 to 8 percent annually. That is, they are doubling their populations every ten to fifteen years.

The trend toward economic rationality in the USSR has not beenconfined to domestic issues alone. It is also manifest in the search for more advantageous and efficient procedures in foreign economic relations, specifically aid and trade with the third world. In this search for ways to secure tangible gains, Soviet relations with the developing countries are entering a new phase, in which economic considerations of profit are challenging the hitherto dominant political motivations.

For nearly forty years, with great regularity, the late Vera Aleksandrova contributed articles on current Soviet literature to the Socialist Courier–the émigré organ of the Menshevik party. Now her husband, S. M. Schwarz, has selected from the large number of those contributions about 120 pieces and has published them in the original Russian under the sponsorship of the Russian Institute of Columbia University.

The result is a long, very significant, and in some ways unique book. One has every reason to be grateful to the editor and the sponsoring institution, and the only reproach that could be raised against them concerns their failure to include in the selection articles written between 1945 and the middle sixties. But this failure could still be remedied by issuing a second volume.

Nordlinger and Zeitlin have each used survey research techniques to make insightful and important contributions to the analysis of political transformation and regime stability. Yet Nord-linger's book on British working-class Tory voters and Zeitlin's study of the revolutionary Cuban working class differ as widely in approach as do the two political systems they study. Zeitlin makes a central assumption “that the social pressures arising out of the work situation are fundamental to the workers' political outlook” (p. 221), and he concentrates on concepts such as alienation and exploitation, which Nordlinger never explicitly considers. But he pays less attention to the distinctive elements of Cuba's political tradition that contributed to the one successful socialist revolution in the Western hemisphere. By contrast, Nordlinger explicitly seeks to connect the exceptional stability of British democracy with such apparently undemocratic, but characteristically English, attitudes as social deference and acquiescence toward authority. Despite the weight of some of his own data, he only briefly considers an interpretation of working-class Labour supporters as acting rationally on the basis of their class interests.