Events of the last two hundred years have led many scholars to divide the societies of the world into contrasting pairs, such as developed—under-developed, advanced—backward, traditional—modern. Central to these concepts are not only ideas about the level of technological development, but the very character of the societies and cultures which are compared and contrasted as well. Professor Edward Shils has recently remarked that the traditional society is one in which, among other things, there is a strong attachment to the past, by which behavior is determined and validated. Solutions to problems old and new are determined by the past of the society, and modernization quickens when ties to the past begin to be cut and new criteria for determining and validating behavior are invoked.

One of the recent attempts to formulate a general theory of nationalism has been Deutsch's approach to the question. This aims to show that a correlation exists between changes in the process of social communications and the rise of national consciousness. A considerable number of studies based on this approach to nationalism will have to be carried out before its contribution to the identification of the elusive “essence” of nationalism can be evaluated with any amount of fairness. In the meantime one tentative procedure which might be used to assess its usefulness is to try to fit this model to the evolution of social communications in a number of countries which the author has not included among his illustrations.

An interesting question raised by the foregoing study is the extent to which pre-Kemalist Turkey offered a status quo. Did the Ottoman dynasty and its associated bureaucracy seek to maintain a stasis throughout its domains and to resist the inroads of change from without? If so, there is then the contrast, following the suggestions made by Deutsch, with the Kemalist revolution where an avid quest for innovation became the keynote. It is of course true that one tends to be so impressed by the social revolution engineered by Kemal Atatiirk, one of the most dramatic figures of modern political history, that the antecedents of the radical changes in Turkey following World War I are all but forgotten. Clearly, if Atatiirk was successful in changing the face of Turkey, it was on the basis of what had gone before.

The majority of Singapore Chinese originate from the rural areas of Kwangtung and Fukien provinces. They had already started to immigrate in relatively large numbers by the late nineteenth century, that is before the traditional society of the countryside had been greatly disturbed by new political events and ideas. The social systems Chinese developed in Singapore therefore have been considerably influenced by those existing in “traditional” times in the homeland. Yet they have also been very much modified by the new social environment of Singapore. Overseas Chinese have been free to associate according to a number of principles not open to them in their home villages. New alignments have resulted from the immigration of a body of people of diverse origins and from the heterogenous structure of urban occupations. They become manifest in organisations set up for a number of different kinds of activity.

Le même mouvement de la pensée scientifique qui rattachait définitivement l'homme à l'échelle des titres et l'intégrait parmi les phénomènes de la nature n'a pas manqué d'apporter une attention plus objective et plus systématique que jadis aux manifestations de la vie sociale. L'enfantement des sciences sociales en cours sous nos yeux ne se fait pas pour autant sans peine et it semble qu'on y puisse trouver une raison, si discrète soit-elle, dans la difficulté de constituer un vocabulaire apte à traduire des concepts définis et vérifiés. La remarque de Descartes n'y est pas moins vraie que dans les sciences de la nature: “Si de verborum significatione inter Philosophos semper conveniret, fere omnes illorum controversiae tollerentur.”