In an era that takes matters of religious faith lightly, it becomes difficult to consider thoughtfully a man who is suspected of saintliness. The task is particularly vexing for Americans, who have no feudal historic memories to remind them that saints were once important people. The obvious solution is to avoid the issue of saintliness altogether—to avoid, for example, questions about whether Gandhi's political shrewdness was compatible with the essential innocence of heart that one asks of saints; above all, to avoid trying to satisfy a generation of ambivalent skeptics who in one breath deny that saints exist and in the next maintain that Gandhi could not have been one because he did not meet such and such criterion of saintliness. The issue of saintliness is a diversion from a serious consideration of Gandhi's contribution.

The concept of pluralism has been a familiar one in political science since the first decade of this century, and has appeared in different theoretical frameworks. Pluralism is regarded as inherent in Western democracies, but it has also been interpreted as a transitional form leading to socialism. The Western communist parties, in adopting the concept of pluralism, have found a theoretical justification for abandoning the concepts of a leading model and one authentic party. The new doctrine that embraces pluralism advocates that the communist parties transform their societies to a more advanced, partly socialistic state, and then attempt to gain power by consensual means. The main issues of debate on the transformation are the abolition of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the guarantee of human rights, and the pluralist power structure.

In the general picture of Eastern European developments the Hungarian scene has some peculiar features. Hungary did not succeed in changing sides effectively during the recent war and at the close of hostilities was probably in the worst political position among the former Axis satellites. She did not enjoy much sympathy in the West, and was positively disliked by the Russians. In point of time Hungary was the last of the Axis satellites to conclude an armistice treaty with the three major Allies (January 20, 1945).

Among all the social sciences, the art of model building is perhaps best developed in economics.Models or theories are conceptualizations of and abstractions from reality; they rely intrinsically on ldquo;if-thenrdquo;statements and should lead to testable propositions if they are to be of any use at all.

It would be difficult to give a brief description of all the important characteristics of economic models, for there are numerous types, designed to describe or explain completely different aspects of economic reality. Most of them contain as essential ingredients some statements about the technical environment (e.g., marginal cost curves rise after a certain point) and some statements about human motivation (e.g., the entrepreneur desires to maximize profits; the consumer maximizes utility).The models themselves can have either descriptive or normative use. The Keynesian model or theory “explains” the factors diat cause the level of national income to be what it is and allows one to deduce the direction of change in national income resulting from changes in the parameters. The usefulness of such a descriptive model is determined by whether or not its conclusions are testable propositions. Normative models, most frequently encountered in economics in welfare economics and in operations research, also utilize statements about environment and motivations but do not pretend to predict; infact they merely prescribe. The test of the usefulness of such normative models is whether ornot their prescriptions are at least in principle imple—mentable.

The postwar period has been an unusual era in the annals of political science. Numerous practitioners of the discipline have ventured into areas previously unexplored, formulating new concepts, constructing new conceptual frameworks and models, putting forth new hypotheses and theories previously unstated, borrowing and importing ideas and methodological tools from sister disciplines, and improving upon old and innovating new research techniques (particularly quantitative techniques)—all in the interest of pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge. It seems no exaggeration to say that this is one of the most creative, if not necessarily the most fruitful, episodes in the development of the discipline.

With the end of the Fourth French Republic and the apparently effective performance of the Fifth Republic, France no longer provides an obvious touchstone for studies of “unstable” democracies. Perhaps as a result of the search for another such example, there has been an increase in American scholarly interest in Italy. Recent research—when combined with the studies of LaPalombara, Barnes, and Zariski, and with the studies conducted by Italian political scientists—provides a fund of organized and readily available information which may be used to test both general hypotheses and specific ones about Italian politics.

Chinese Communist military policy significantly affects our preparations for war and hopes for peace. However, we have few public studies of Chinese military policy and the reasoning on which it rests.1 This article tries to set forth the calculus or rationale which Peking employs to select military strategy and tactics. In other words, it makes no attempt to attack or defend Chinese military policy or to appraise that policy's specific strengths and weaknesses. It does try to locate the important factors that operate in the minds of Chinese decision-makers and Peking's perception of the consequences of different tactical choices. When we say that the Chinese have a calculus for military policy, we do not mean to imply that it works well or badly. We do imply that the Chinese have a military calculus which imposes a predictable pattern on their military policy. Obviously, an identical military calculus does not operate in the minds of all Chinese leaders. Accordingly, “Peking thinks” is shorthand for the “averaged” views that can be induced from the public record of Chinese words and acts.

The authors of three recent books attempt to account for Soviet military developments by exploring a wide range of possible explanations. In Soviet Strategic Forces, Berman and Baker adopt a“requirements“approach; they argue that the Soviet strategic posture has developed mainly in response to threats generated by the West. Andrew Cockburn, in The Threat, maintains that internal factors—in particular, bureaucratic politics and the workings of the military-industrial complex—are responsible for Soviet weapons decisions. David Holloway's more eclectic explanation, in The Soviet Union and the Arms Race, describes both the internal and external determinants of Soviet military policy. The evolution of Soviet regional nuclear policy, and particularly the deployment of the SS-20 missile, can be accounted for by several different explanations—indicating a problem of overdetermination of causes. One way to resolve this problem is by adopting a framework developed by James Kurth to explain U.S. weapons procurement. It suggests that the“modes of causation” for Soviet weapons decisions are generally the opposite of those for American decisions. This generalization is consistent with what an analysis based on the relative strengths of state and societal forces in the two countries would predict.

The uncertainty about whether atomic weapons will be used in future war, whether local or general, lends itself to political exploitation in the cold war. The efficiency of nuclear weapons in wartime, and their resulting threat-value in either war- or peacetime, constitute their political-military worth. In peacetime, the threat-value of weapons can be exploited in many ways: by an ultimatum, by authoritative or inspired statements on capabilities or intentions, by studied disclosures of new weapons at ceremonial occasions, by means of maneuvers, redeployments of forces, or by so-called demonstrations.

In the general election of June 1951, the French Communist Party lost almost 10 per cent of the votes it had obtained in 1946 and, thanks to an electoral system that was designed to reduce its parliamentary representation, almost half of its deputies. These results should not be interpreted as a serious defeat for a party that still holds the allegiance of one-quarter of the French people. Its loss of votes, particularly among peasant and middle-class elements, did not affect its major strongholds in industrial areas and in some agricultural regions. Communism in France remains a major political force in a position to threaten both political stability and capacity for effective military defense. The presence of a strong Communist Party, and to a lesser extent of a Gaullist Party that is in part its by-product, prevents the coalition government from adopting a forceful and constructive policy and giving the French people a sense of effective leadership.

HUNDREDS of books have been written to describe the ways in which particular groups or individuals have come to exercise domination over large numbers of their fellows. Despite this tempting wealth of factual material, or perhaps because of it, modern social science has very largely avoided any attempt to discover and explain, within a strictly empirical framework, what recurring patterns there may be in these myriads of events. The following pages represent a very modest effort in this direction.

If there is indeed a distinguishable process of acquiring power, or, as is more likely, a series of such processes, the attempt to distinguish them must be formulated in terms of a time sequence. It should indicate the conditions in the society as a whole that lead to a concentration of power. In addition, it should indicate the sequence of stages through which the concentration takes place.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is thought to have shaped constitutions profoundly since its adoption in 1948. The authors identify two empirical implications that should follow from such influence. First, UDHR content should be reflected in subsequent national constitutions. Second, such reflections should bear the particular marks of the UDHR itself, not those of the postwar zeitgeist more broadly. The authors examine the historical evidence at various levels to identify and untangle the UDHR's impact. In a macro analysis, they leverage an original data set on the content of constitutions since 1789. They explore historical patterns in the creation and spread of rights, and test whether 1948 exhibits a noticeable disruption in rights provision. The authors build a multivariate model that predicts rights provision with constitution- and rights-level covariates. To gain further analytic leverage, they unearth the process that produced the UDHR and identify plausible alternative formulations evident in a set of discarded proposals. The authors further test the plausibility of UDHR influence by searching for direct references to the document in subsequent constitutional texts and constitutional proceedings. The evidence suggests that the UDHR significantly accelerated the adoption of a particular set of constitutional rights.

Improved analysis of the Soviet and communist political systems requires a greater effort to locate that enterprise in the mainstream of comparative political inquiry. Toward this end the article (1) surveys Soviet and Western political process similarities and differences and identifies consequent conceptual implications; (2) introduces a model for comparative politics built in part from political process similarities evident in both Soviet and Western systems; and (3) reports a case study involving a partial application of the zonal model using Soviet political data. The comparative model integrates micro-, intermediate-, and macro-level zones of analysis as research foci and operational variables for empirical testing and generation of theory. The case study—the politics of Soviet industrial reform, 1962–1965—examines the relationship between two analytic zones, and concludes that changes in both the process and the content of economic interest articulation were strongly associated with prior changes in Soviet policy making.

Back in 1927 Vilhjalmur Stefansson wrote a little book entitled The Standardization of Error. In this essay he shows first of all that errors which fill social needs become standardized and, he suggests, it might be construed as antisocial to try to destroy them by raising points of fact. To this end, there is an advantage to knowledge by definition in contrast to knowledge by observation. This, as the writer points out, gives to arithmetic its finality. Two and two is by definition four. In the social sciences also, we have many ‘facts’ that are so by definition and so become immutable.

The growth of economic relations between the states of the Soviet bloc and the underdeveloped countries of Afro-Asia since 1953 has provoked widespread attention and concern in the West. This development is not an isolated phenomenon, but rather a reflection of the larger role which Soviet leaders have assigned to economic activities in the conduct of foreign relations.