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.

SOVIET economic policy in the few years since Stalin's death has been characterized by flamboyance and ferment. In an attempt to free economic growth from the bottleneck of stagnation in agriculture, Khrushchev has sponsored some extravagant gambles in corn-growing and in expansion of the sown acreage. Policy toward the consumer has gone through two complete reversals: the regime at first experimented with offering the population an improvement in the standard of living, but is now once again asserting that abundance in the future requires austerity today. Perhaps the most startling innovation of all emerged in the past year when the regime began to develop a program of foreign economic assistance as a weapon in its economic competition with the capitalist part of the world. Because of their spectacular nature, these shifts of policy have attracted considerable attention in the West and have been commented on at length. Aware diat the Soviet Union is expanding her economic power at a more rapid rate than are the capitalist countries, Western students of the Soviet economy have sought in these policy changes-some clue as to whether its rate of growth is likely to decline or to be maintained in the future. The early indications of a rise in standards of living that would cause a reduced growth of heavy industry and so a decline in investment and in the rate of growth have now been dispelled. The inability of Soviet agriculture to provide an expanding food supply for a growing work force certainly appears to be a real threat to industrial growth, and with die failure of Khrushchev's gambles, this threat remains. Thus the evidence as to the over-all effect of these changes on the rate of expansion of die Soviet economy is still inconclusive.

Students and practitioners of international politics are at present in a strange predicament. Complex though their problems have been in the past, there was then at least some certainty about the “givens,” the basic structure and the basic phenomena of international relations. Today one is neither here nor there. On the one hand, for instance, one is assured—or at least tempted to accept assurance—that for all practical purposes a nuclear stalemate rules out major war as a major means of policy today and in the foreseeable future. On the other hand, one has an uncanny sense of the practicability of the unabated arms race, and a doubt whether reliance can be placed solely on the deterrent purpose of all this preparation. We are no longer sure about the functions of war and peace, nor do we know how to define the national interest and what its defense requires under present conditions. As a matter of fact, the meaning and function of the basic protective unit, the “sovereign” nation-state itself, have become doubtful.

The English and American ways of life have more than a little in common. Except however when “Rhodes Scholars in reverse,” Englishmen do not “major.” Instead, they “specialize”—a very, very few in International Relations. Some of these do it in London. This article is on what that means.

In cricket—a staple, incidentally, of the English way of life—there are broadly two techniques for bringing a ball to “turn from the off.” One, the less usual, is the “googly.” Fifty years ago it was a rarity indeed. Yet the writer knew in those days a fellow-schoolboy who, bowling googlies, was unaware that not everybody did. To him, they seemed the natural way to have a ball “turn from the off.”

The flood of attention that underdeveloped economies have received in recent years has revived interest in the normative questions of political economy. For the society that stands on the threshold of development apparently can choose among economic systems with different normative properties, each one of which claims enthusiastic followers. One such question concerns the impact of economic organization on freedom. Does a centrally administered economy restrict freedom by achieving its objectives through coercive means? Is the market economy fundamental to free institutions?.

New weapons, and the new strategies and tactics which they make possible, alter the conduct of wars.† But they may also induce changes in the conduct—warlike or peaceful—of international affairs. This happens for either or both of two quite different kinds of reason. First and least importantly, a new weapon may tilt the balance in favor of those nations pre-eminent in the skill to use or the resources to produce it. Second and more profoundly, it may cause the major contending Powers to adopt new or radically extended strategies, calling in their turn for a complete reassessment of national interests, and of the value of resources, alliances, and conventional armaments.

THE purpose of this article is to analyze in a preliminary way some of the basic sociological problems of bureaucratic political systems—legitimation, autonomy, and political struggle. For reasons which will be specified later—not least among them, reasons of space—we shall limit our discussion to pre-modern, historical societies, such as the ancient empires (especially the Egyptian), the Byzantine, Chinese, and Ottoman Empires, and some of the European countries in the age of absolutism. By way of introduction, we shall endeavor to discern some common characteristics in all these political systems, and the main differences among them; and then inquire into some of the sociological conditions that are related to both the common features and the chief differences.

A HISTORIAN is always uneasy when he writes of his own time. The present is too fleeting. It changes as his pen moves; it is transformed by the time his manuscript becomes the printed page—nothing at all like the past, which poses problems of its own to the scholar but at least has the decency to stay put.

The rapid drive of formerly colonial and dependent countries toward independent nationhood has gone hand in hand, over the last decade, with a thorough reorientation in the discipline of comparative politics. In Southeast Asia, on the Indian subcontinent, in the Near East—everywhere, the Western powers have surrendered their former positions of imperial domination. Even in Africa, once the dark continent of colonialism, fully half the population now has emerged to self-government. In all, a score of new nations has joined the roll of sovereign states, and their global importance is attested daily by far-flung programs of economic assistance, by the gradual shift of the cold-war front from Europe to Asia and Africa, and by the recent redistribution of voting power in the United Nations.

FRANCE, it is said these days, is the “sick man of Europe,” a dubious honor once bestowed on the crumbling Ottoman Empire. To the outside observer it seems as if crisis following crisis is the “normal” state of affairs in France. Within France, the illusion that the post-Liberation social order would somehow be fundamentally different from that of the prewar regime is no more; politically, economically, and socially France today seems distressingly similar to the France of yesterday. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

JAPAN'S response to the intrusion of the West, by contrast with the response of China and other Asian nations, has long intrigued statesmen and scholars. Generalizations about Asia, its cultural traditions, its policies, its economic development, are especially difficult to fit to the Japanese. “Japan is of course sui generis,” says O. H. K. Spate, the British geographer, and few will disagree.

On July 28, 1949, the French parliament ratified the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; a week before, it had given its assent to the treaty establishing the Council of Europe. On May 9, 1950, M. Robert Schuman proposed the creation of a European coal and steel community.

None of these arrangements for the defense of the free world and the unification of Europe altered France's status as one of the “big three” of the West: her sovereignty was not going to be substantially reduced by the institutions then created or planned.

A Review of the political situation in post-Stalin Russia may well begin with a reflection on its historical uniqueness. Stalin, who sponsored the “Russia first” theme in Soviet propaganda, established a real and momentous “first” for Russia by his own death. Never before had a totalitarian dictator of one of the world powers died, or been put to death, before his totalitarian system collapsed, or came near collapse, in war. Hitler and Mussolini, who lived long enough to bring down their systems in ruins, furnish no parallel.

“WE ARE living in an age in which all roads lead to communism,” Molotov proclaimed confidently in 1947. Kaganovich re-echoed him in 1955 by maintaining that “if the nineteenth century was a century of capitalism, the twentieth century is a century of the triumph of socialism and communism.” This serenely optimistic viewpoint sees the victory of communism as all-inclusive, leaving no room for any mutual adjustment between the Communist and non-Communist worlds. Indeed, the First Secretary of the CPSU, Nikita S. Khrushchev, has repeatedly made it clear that the concept of coexistence relates simply to a transitory phase prior to the final assertion of the Communist mode of life over the entire globe. It would be idle to dismiss these claims as mere expressions of blind fanaticism, for whatever the element of fanaticism in the thinking of Soviet leaders may be, such proclamations of faith in final victory are also supported by observation of recent trends in world affairs.

In the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, N.Y., resting on the open shelves along with other books from the President's personal collection, is a copy of Joseph E. Davies' Mission to Moscow. As was his custom, FDR wrote a short comment in the book after reading it. Inside the front cover, under the glowing dedication to him by the author, the President scratched four words: “This book will last.”

IN an earlier work I have argued for the need to develop general, empirically oriented theory as the most economical way in the long run to understand political life. Here I propose to indicate a point of view that, at the least, might serve as a springboard for discussion of alternative approaches and, at most, as a small step in the direction of a general political theory. I wish to stress that what I have to say is a mere orientation to the problem of theory; outside of economics and perhaps psychology, it would be presumptuous to call very much in social science “theory,” in the strict sense of the term.

IT was once suggested that the basic trait of psychological warfare—and, incidentally, the greatest asset to those that practice it—is its lack of known positive results.1 No satisfactory method has yet been developed to measure the effects of a propaganda campaign on its chosen audience. This characteristic is at once the greatest weakness of propaganda and psychological warfare (how does the operator know whether his effort was well spent or not?) and their greatest strength (if there is no reliable evaluation of the effort, it had better be continued, or even intensified, lest ground be lost).

Is anyone's esteem for political science better suppressed than a political scientist's? Ordinary modesty is admirable, but his is professionally destructive. For, not only hiding his light under a bushel, he follows the more nihilistic course of blowing it out. Granted that many political scientists neither deprecate their discipline nor permit a low regard for it to stultify their work, I have been repeatedly assured by members of the profession that no social science is more retarded and none less promising for systematic theory. Thus they hide—even from their own eyes—their discipline's accomplishments. This I shall try to show, offering two books as evidence. There is other evidence, too. When even politically ignorant undergraduates complain that the major in political science is thin, no imaginable poverty of the field explains enough. Such a phenomenon proves concealment, either deliberate or unintended.