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.

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.

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.

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.