The concept of state is not much in vogue in the social sciences right now. Yet it retains a skeletal, ghostly existence largely because, for all the changes in emphasis and interest of research, the thing exists and no amount of conceptual restructuring can dissolve it. The present article develops a conceptual approach in which no violence is done to historical or empirical fact, but which offers a means of integrating the concept of state into the current primacy of social science concerns and analytical methods. It is hoped that this approach not only will provide a convenient conceptualization, but will contribute to attacking a substantive problem of some consequence. Since the relevant area is potentially huge, no more than a brushstroke configuration can be attempted.

The civilian strategic analysts who now constitute a distinct profession in the Western world have from the first been subject to criticism that has called in question the validity of their methods, their utility to society, and even their integrity of purpose. Some of it is directed at particular strategists or at particular techniques they employ, but much of it purports to expose deficiencies that are characteristic of the genre. Some of this is of so scurrilous a nature as not to deserve a reply, but some raises issues of real importance. What are in fact the distinguishing features of the new style of strategic analysis? What has given rise to the criticisms that have been made of it? And what substance do the criticisms have?

The 1967 lightning victory of Zahal, the Israel Defense Forces, was the result of a philosophy that had considered military effort as an instrument of nation-building from the very beginning of the Zionist movement in Palestine. In 1948, the Israeli War of Liberation thrust the army into prominence, and from then on army leaders have been influential in the governmental and economic elites committed to rapid modernization. The Sinai victory in 1956 and the third military success in Sinai, Jordan, and Syria in 1967 further enhanced Zahal's reputation. Although Israel's standing army is no larger than 80,000 men, one-seventh of the country's total Jewish population of 2.5 million is on active military reserve. Given these conditions, it is natural to wonder what impact the army has had on the political life of Israel.

Several years ago we reviewed in this journal a collection of books dealing with various aspects of Britain's role in international politics. In the opening paragraph of that review article we observed that “these writings can be viewed simply as discrete accounts of a single nation's unique experience. But one can also view such literature from a broader perspective. Particular cases are always unique in their totality. But they may be exhibits of more widely encountered types of phenomena. It is always possible, and it may be interesting and fruitful, to formulate general comparative questions about particular cases, and to derive hypotheses which could be tried out for credibility in other cases.”

If Ambrose Bierce were writing his Devil's Dictionary today, he would probably define psychology as the science that predicts that Russian leaders will behave the same way during a missile crisis that a female sophomore does on a date. If tiiis is a caricature, it is only mildly so, as one would quickly learn by reading die testimony on psychology and international relations during die hearings in 1967 of die Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

More sharply now than ever before, the world is divided into its more and its less developed parts—into relatively stable and fundamentally unstable communities—and the prospect before it is one of unavoidable but limited disturbance in and between its less developed societies, for as long as makes no matter, and of inescapable choice for its more advanced states between uncontrollable violence and abstention from war.

Until these recent studies by Riker, Watts, and Wildavsky appeared, the theory of federalism was embodied largely in the work of K. C. Wheare. Wheare published the first truly pathbreaking book in the comparative study of federalism shortly after World War II. He defined federalism as that system of government in which the federal and regional governments are both coordinate and independent. In applying this definition, he stressed the sharp division in the powers and functions of two coequal sovereignties as a basis for classifying systems of government as federal. Wheare's definition was derived primarily from his analysis of die American Constitution and, in particular, its formally sharp division of powers between national and state governments.