NOWHERE IN HIS WORK DOES ÉLIE HALÉVY SHOW THAT HE felt any particular preference for those whom man hold to be his predecessors or masters. He refers at Length to Montesquieu at the beginning of his third volume on England in 1815, but indirectly, through his English interpreters, especially Blackstone. Blackstone interpreted the British constitution in the light of the interpretation which Montesquieu gave it in l'Esprit des Lois. In so doing he yielded to the force of French logic and falsified the analysis of reality. As French logic is unable to understand the British procedure, and imposed upon the English a stylized representation of their own practice, this paradoxical exercise was greatly to the taste of Halévy, an historian who always enjoyed the paradoxes of history, and who understood so well the native genius of both peoples.

Beginning in 1930… I felt, almost physically, the approach of historical storms. ‘History is again on the move’, in the words of Arnold Toynbee. 1 am still marked by this experience, which inclined me towards an active pessimism Once and for all, I ceased to believe that history automatically obeys the dictates of reason or the desires of men of good will. I lost faith and held on, not without effort, to hope. I discovered the enemy that 1 as well do not tire of pursuing, totalitarianism, an enemy no less insidious than Malthusianism. In any form of fanaticism, even one inspired by idealism, 1 suspect a new incarnation of the monster.

WHEN ALL ABOUT THEM IN EASTERN EUROPE WERE LOSING their heads, the Russians could always count on the East Germans. Now nobody, least of all the Russians, seems so sure. Whether or not East Germany's leader, Erich Honecker, visits West Germany this autumn as planned, the German question is back on the political agenda of both East and West. The sharp battle-by-reprint, during the summer of 1984, in the party newspapers of East Germany and the Soviet Union over the permissible degree of contact between the East German regime and the West German government has revealed in public a remarkable rift within the Warsaw Pact over one of the most sensitive issues in post-war Soviet foreign policy: strategy towards Germany.

THE TERM ‘INDUSTRIAL ADAPTATION’ HAS RECENTLY EMERGED as a rallying call in the vocabulary of economic policy-makers in national governments and international organizations. At the same time the political consequences of the adaptation process, such as the reorientation of whole areas of government activity towards industrial priorities, or the escalation of unemployment, have redefined the agenda of economic policy for students of politics. This article, based on a comparison of the systems of industrial adaptation that have operated successfully in West Germany over the post-war period and, far less successfully, in Britain, focuses on the subsidy issue in the two countries and points to the hypocrisy of official economic doctrines and programmes. Insofar as governments must concern themselves with economic activity, issues such as subsidy must be evaluated not in pejorative, polemical fashion but in terms of their goals and of policy frameworks within which they can be controlled.

THE CONTRAST BETWEEN CLASSICAL POLITICAL SCIENCE AND its modern counterpart may help to illuminate certain serious deficiencies in the contemporar study of politics. It will wide diversity of research under the rubric of ‘contemporary political science’; nonetheless, it is possible to delineate a characteristic set of features inherent in a prevailing understanding of politics that is indeed recognizable, and is deserving of deep critical scrutiny. Futhermore, these features may be effectively exposed by a systematic contrast with the very different procedure of the classical study of politics. In particular, the latter poses major challenges to contemporary modes of political inquiry at the following critical points. First, political science must abandon claims to approximating natural science, though not necessarily ceasing to aspire to comprehensive knowledge. Second, an instrumentalist conception of political community should not be considered in any way primary or paradigmatic; the question of the nature of the association must be guided by the question of the ends for which it exists. Third, social theory operates by searching for principles of coherence, and analyses social relationships in terms of their coherence or incoherence. Fourth, the decisive basis of political science is not the distinction between fact and value, or between means and ends, but the distinction between part and whole.

THE OUTCOME OF THE FONTAINEBLEAU MEETING OF THE European Council in June marked the end of one phase in Western Europe's search for greater unity, and opened another – and potentially more positive – period.

The agreement reached after several years' painful search at last secured a number of long-overdue adjustments to the basic compact between the Community's present ten members, and removed the obstacles to the entry of Spain and Portugal. At the same time it opened up a new agenda for the future. The crucial problems which the current and prospective members of the Community now have to face will no longer be those which have dominated the headlines over the past five years – reform of the CAP, increase of budgetary resources and the UK's contribution to the budget. The central issues will be those concerned with how to develop further the complex of relationships between this group of countries so that their developing union can serve them better and become more effective. Many proposals to achieve this are already Fontainebleau to a new Spaak-type committee makes clear, several of the existing members now seek to make this the beginning of a period as constructive and as decisive as that which in the mid-1950s led to the relaunching of the Six and the signature of the Rome treaties.