‘VERY DEEP IS THE WELL OF THE PAST’, WRITES THOMAS MANN, as he begins his Tales of Jacob, ‘Might one not even call it bottomless?’ And indeed so it is if we search out the origins of government down, down, through its many levels in time until we reach only a misty shadow of what might have been some primitive society whose very existence we can but infer from artifacts, from myth and legend – and from an interpolation, unhistorical to be sure for it is mere hypothesis – from what we know of stateless societies still extant in this, our own day.

‘WHEN THE SWEDES BEAT A RETREAT FROM KEYNES THAT surely signals a climacteric.’ Thus Andrew Shonfield clinched his argument that the unwillingness of the industrialized countries to offset the deflationary consequences of the 1979 oil shock reflected a general crisis of confidence in the principles of the mixed economy. The loss of Keynesian innocence in the 1970s came to different countries in different ways. In Sweden it came comparatively late and abruptly when, in 1980, after six years in which public expenditure had grown from 46 per cent to 64 per cent of GDP, the coalition non-socialist government acknowledged that the budget deficit, amounting to 10 per cent of GDP, had reached crisis proportions. From 1980 the problem of curbing the recalcitrant deficit became a corner-stone of the non-socialists’ economic policy. Eschewing any increase in the tax-burden, which it was committed to reduce, the government launched a comprehensive attack on public spending. Its persistence on this course in the face of protests that it was eroding the welfare state and tolerating rising unemployment was a major factor in its defeat in the general election of September 1982.

THE 1982 WAR IN THE LEBANON AND ITS BLOODY AFTERMATH were not accidents of history. They resulted from the takeover of the Israel government and the world Zionist movement by Menachem Begin's Revisionists. This group of Zionist extremists (Dr Chaim Weizmann's description) had been derided and excluded from power for over 50 years. In 1977, they won their first Israeli general election and set about realizing their radical programme.

This article will discuss the roots of Begin's War and the challenge of the Begin revolution to world Jewry. First, it will review some of the available evidence about the fighting and the extent of civilian casualties. This review will throw light on Mr Begin's motives for launching ‘Operation Peace for Galilee’.

IF MARCEL PROUST'S CENTRAL PREOCCUPATION WAS THE unsettling instability of human character, an important minor consideration was the equally marked instability of intellectual and cultural life. À la recherche du temps perdu offers a series of brilliant sketches demonstrating the impact of fashion upon intellectual reputation, and these are usually scathing because of an implicit sociology condemning the frivolity and philistinism of ‘arbiters of taste’. Now whilst the sociology of the matter is, as we shall see, different, there can be no doubt that fashion has not exempted political theory from its attentions. This is obviously unsettling, but does it really matter? Is not fashion trivial, even harmless?

IT IS A TRUISM TO STATE THAT ALL AGES ARE AGES OF TRANsition, and that the clash of tradition and experiment never ceases. Nevertheless, there are periods when history seems to collapse in on itself, and the time-span of change so contracts that revolution, not only political, becomes almost a norm. Since the Industrial Revolution many writers have dealt with the ideological reaction to the predicaments of rapid social change. J. S. Mill described the English public of his day as caught between two warring camps of the ‘Men of the Past’ and the ‘Men of the Present’, those who wish to return to the certainties of an earlier age, and those who wish to hasten change in the hope of a better future. Such a division is clearly simplistic, but it expresses the sense of bifurcation in society. ‘Past’ and ‘Present’ serve in this context as omnibus terms for multi-dimensional complexities which allow ample scope for individual selection, organization and evaluation.