Dr. Nolte's Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche is a work of exceptionally broad range that combines description, comparison, and interpretation in an admirable manner. It attempts three major tasks requiring skills rarely combined in a single historian: a general classification of Fascist systems aiming at a typology; a special examination of the main features of one pre-Fascist (Action Française) and two Fascist movements (in Mussolini's Italy and in Hitler's Germany); and an overall interpretation, in both historical and philosophical terms, of fascism as the dominant force of the period of European history extending from 1919 to 1945.

The comparative analysis of past and present systems as an approach to the study of international politics has been subjected to its first major test. It can be said at once that the effort is a most creditable one. The approach promises to become increasingly attractive with time. Much of the theoretical writing that uses the data of international politics is becoming the preserve of specialists in abstract theory. And the student committed primarily to international politics and to theory only insofar as it helps order and apprehend significant problems of international politics here and now is quite naturally attracted to the historical perspective. History can be used to illuminate the evolving structural features of contemporary relations and it provides some relief from the politics of the Cold War, which are becoming progressively routinized.

The acute phase of the Berlin crisis appears to be past. It began with the Soviet “ultimatum” of November 17,1958, and petered out in the aftermath of the showdown over Cuba. But though there are many indications that for some time a renewal of the threatening pressure on Berlin—West Berlin, to be precise—need not be expected, there can be no assurance that the situation will not blow up in our faces at any moment any day, as the death of Peter Fechter at the Wall in August 1962 illustrated. Also, we are as far as ever from a real solution for the admittedly abnormal situation of this city. And it still remains an open question whether, with the passage of time, acceptance and adjustment to the brutal abnormality of the Wall and the division of Germany will win out over growing frustration and the explosive and dangerous consequences of disappointed hopes for unification and liberation. Thus Berlin is likely to remain indefinitely both a thermometer indicating the temperature of the Cold War and a time-bomb that resists defusing.

WHEN men define the future as radically unprecedented, how can they prepare to cope with it? Statesmen have traditionally been students of history, on the assumption that history is full of precedents for the future. But even when statesmen are ready to agree that reading history may be useless, it is not easy to find substitutes. Statesmen are not likely to prefer learning from science fiction. Many of them are now prepared to accept at one level of consciousness that thermonuclear weapons have made history obsolete as a guide to action; but there is no agreement on whether adequate substitutes for history have been created.

Concern over natural resources not only persists in the contemporary world but may be intensifying. World war, cold war, the race in space, and the almost universal push toward economic development have individually and collectively, constructively and destructively, renewed public and private interest in natural resource requirements and availabilities. Planners in various countries, capitalist or socialist, require fairly comprehensive resource information before they can hope to succeed in preparing lines of economic policy. Answers have to be found for a wide range of questions. Is the domestic resource base sufficient to meet present and anticipated claims on it? If not, can technology be relied upon to produce substitutes or more economical processes? Failing or supplementing this, are foreign supplies realistic alternatives? And finally, how accurate are estimates of resource capabilities and needs?

Case-Studies of the policy-making process constitute one of the more important methods of political science analysis. Beginning with Schattschneider, Herring, and others in the 1930's, case-studies have been conducted on a great variety of decisions. They have varied in subject-matter and format, in scope and rigor, but they form a distinguishable body of literature which continues to grow year by year. The most recent addition, a book-length study by Raymond Bauer and his associates, stands with Robert A. Dahl's prize-winning Who Governs? (New Haven 1961) as the best yet to appear. With its publication a new level of sophistication has been reached. The standards of research its authors have set will indeed be difficult to uphold in the future. American Business and Public Policy is an analysis of political relationships within the context of a single, well-defined issue—foreign trade. It is an analysis of business attitudes, strategies, communications and, through these, business relationships in politics. The analysis makes use of the best behavioral research techniques without losing sight of the rich context of policies, traditions, and institutions. Thus, it does not, in Dahl's words, exchange relevance for rigor; rather it is standing proof that the two—relevance and rigor—are not mutually exclusive goals.

A decade ago Roy Macridis waved a red flag in the face of the politicel science fraternity by proclaiming that the collection of data on foreign political systems had become a sterile preoccupation because of its parochial and “monographic” concern with a limited number of Western great powers, and its theoretical shallowness.1 During the intervening years considerable money and time have been spent in a frontal attack on these deficiencies. Spearheading this attack has been a band of younger scholars brought together under the leadership of Gabriel Almond in the Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council.

UNTIL recently most of the books by disarmers said little about the dirty business of nuclear strategy and most strategists made only occasional references to the Utopia of disarmament. And so it also was with the actual policies—military vs. disarmament—of the nuclear nations. So long as this split persisted there was little chance of disarmament being seriously considered, and so long as the best military analysts considered nuclear weapons useful and even vital to Western defense—as a great many of them did—there was little hope for nuclear disarmament. But in the last few years this split between armers and disarmers has begun to be bridged by an increasing number of men who analyze from both perspectives at once, and by a shift in the consensus on the specific question of the usefulness of nuclear weapons— a shift largely reflecting the steady increase in Soviet nuclear power. These trends were given a considerable assist from these two excellent works by eminent Englishmen, both of whom assume that nuclear parity (and therefore, they believe, nuclear uselessness) is upon us, and both of whom are concerned with deterrence and disarmament, and how to get from one to the other.

IT is a commonplace in the West to think of Soviet foreign policy in terms of a grand strategy. Yet the subject has more often than not intimidated scholars into taking the route of specialization. Problems of obtaining source materials as well as the desire to avoid complexity and controversy have frequently discouraged Sovietologists from approaching foreign policy in other than small pieces. During the past year, however, several new books have been added to the small number which both offer detailed analysis of an extended historical period and approach the development of general theory. Each of the books covers a broad period and each uses the technique of focusing on a particular instrument of Soviet foreign policy.

ARE there any connections between epistemological theories and JTXpolitical doctrines? This question is of more than theoretical interest. If such links exist, it follows that concrete political events are influenced, not only directly by political ideologies, but also, at least indirectly, by abstract philosophical beliefs.