In 1899 a little-known, now long-forgotten, Polish revolutionist named Waclaw Machajski published a small book, The Evolution of Social Democracy, which provoked consternation in the nascent Marxist movement in Russia. Its thesis was that the new messianism of socialism masked an ideology of discontented intellectuals, and that the new socialist society would simply replace one ruling class with another, so that the workers would still remain exploited, albeit this time by a new class of professional leaders.

Modern Turkish history furnishes numerous examples of active participation by the military in politics. The so-called “Young Turk Revolution” of 1908, in fact, may well be regarded as the prototype of Near Eastern military coups of this century. A decade later, Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk] and other army officers took the lead in creating a nationalist Turkish Republic out of the ruins of the multinational Ottoman Empire. Since the proclamation of the Republic in 1923, however, the Turkish army has abstained from any such obvious role on the political stage.

Several reasons for the welcome growth in serious public discussion of military affairs are apparent. Americans are increasingly realizing that we are terribly vulnerable. Military preparations can no longer be deferred until after the onset of hostilities, making it more important that we analyze carefully in peacetime what our preparations should be. The magnitude of our defense effort has so increased that it naturally draws more critical scrutiny. Above all, what we do in defense interacts crucially with our foreign policy. To these considerations that obviously stimulate discussion, we must add another that weakens an inhibition against it. Critics need defer far less than formerly to military expertise.

The association of states known as the Commonwealth of Nations has received little attention from students of international politics. Outside the Commonwealth the association has, on the whole, been ignored; alongside other institutions and alliances, its significance is not great; and the foreign policies of the ten states that now belong to it can to a large extent be accounted for, except in the case of Britain, without reference to the fact of their membership. Within the Commonwealth there has been study of it, but the impulse behind this has been provided less by intellectual curiosity than by the desire to see it prosper: British students have been themselves in the grip of the myth of the Commonwealth, which has become in Britain, along with much else, a totem which it is scarcely good form to examine with an innocent eye.

The last several decades have each been broadly characterized by one or two central economic questions. In the 1920's the central problem was international capital transfers, or reparations and war debts; in the 1930's, the international spread of unemployment and destabilizing speculation; in the late 1940's, after the war, reconstruction; in the 1950's, defense economics and growth.

Not only can we identify them; it is on the whole fair to say that the central problems of the 1920's, 1930's, and 1940's have been solved. International capital transfer is accomplished by preventing war debts from accumulating, paying limited reparations in kind, and furnishing the capital needed for reconstruction, and in part for economic growth, as grants or on liberal loan terms.

Current Soviet politics have been somewhat neglected as an object of study in the American academic community, in favor of research on social and political institutions for which there is considerable data. Investigation of Soviet elite politics has been left largely to journalists and government analysts, some of them able scholars. However, these specialists are chiefly engaged in assessing the existing situation and basic trends in the USSR, rather than in testing significant hypotheses or in working out fruitful methods of research. Unfortunately, the products of their inquiry tend to be somewhat ephemeral, and their potential contribution to progress in understanding the character of Soviet politics has not been adequately realized.

Like some of the best novels, this book can be read in two ways. As a study of the European Coal and Steel Community it is a major addition to the literature, clarifying many points that have not been examined in other writings. As a study of the process of international integration it adds suggestive evidence and thoughtful analysis to one of the more interesting themes of the current study of international affairs. Read either way, it is a very good book.

American historians dealing with modern Germany have been preoccupied with the problem of why that country failed to achieve an effectively functioning democratic structure which could resist the onslaught of Nazism. Gordon Craig, in The Politics of the Prussian Army, has sought the explanation in the uncontrolled power and anti-democratic outlook of the Junker-dominated General Staff. Leonard Krieger's The German Idea of Freedom analyzes the divorce in German liberalism between the ideals of liberty and self-government, which led to its emasculating compromise with the Bismarckian state.