One of the important intellectual interests of American scholars and scientists at the present time is the movement toward greater integration of specialized fields and disciplines. The size of the movement must not be exaggerated—it concerns a small minority of scholars, and most specialists are still content to stay comfortably within the cosy walls of their own specialty. Nevertheless there is something which might be called an “interdisciplinary movement” in many areas of knowledge, and if the movement is occasionally more undisciplined than interdisciplinary, this can be charitably ascribed to growing pains.

This article is concerned with the general relations between power and informed public opinion in a Western democracy. It is based mainly on examples taken from France, where the separation between power and public opinion seems the sharpest, but is more or less applicable to all countries having the same political system. Parallel phenomena can be observed in most of the Western democracies, each of which could provide illustrations as striking as those the author has singled out.

“Language is eminently a social phenomenon.” From the outset one should expect an interdependence of linguistic and social phenomena, as well as extremely complex relationships of action and reaction. In such matters, oversimplification can only lead to a dead end. On the other hand, a criticism of data that respects their true nature within the framework of their extreme complexity can pave the way for researches from which one may expect solid results so far as future progress is concerned. These researches are necessarily bound up with linguistics (the first human science which, while still very young, assumed a rigorous form), with psychology (better and better equipped and yet disarmed in the face of so many problems), and with sociology, that latecomer in developing well-based techniques, whose theorists still confront each other with diverse points of view.

Indian villages are not yet industrialized. Influences of modern technology on village life come mostly from outside. Industrialization has affected the urban centers and is bringing about a change in the relationship between these centers and folk societies, thereby influencing the latter as well.

Indian folk communities have not been isolated societies like the primitive tribes. They were closely connected with non-industrial urban centers and together with them formed regional cultures. Folk and urban cultures maintained a give and take relationship during the ages. “Folk tunes, regional songs and styles, even non-Indian melodies,” says Professor D. P. Mukerji “were incorporated into the classical texture, and the new classical style in its turn was always affecting folk music a great deal.”

This principle of the Torah as a living unit connects with the third principle we are now ready to discuss, that of the manifold and even infinite meanings of the Torah. The different limbs in the simile of the organism were frequently interpreted not as coordinate organs on the same level of importance, but as different layers of meaning, leading the mystical student of the Sacred Text from the outer and exoteric meaning to ever deeper strata of understanding. The idea of an organism becomes identified here with the idea of a living hierarchy of meanings.

The full moon in May is the occasion of the greatest festival of the year in the Buddhist world, it being the triple anniversary of the birth of Sakyamuni, of his ascent to the omniscience of a Buddha, and of his final extinction in Parinirvana. Ceylon and the countries of southeast Asia, which adopted the Singhalese Buddhism in the thirteenth century—Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos—are monsoon lands where the month of May coincides with the beginnings of the rains, thus signaling great rejoicing exemplified by offerings to the monks, recitals of prayers, and nocturnal circumambulations of the temples by the faithful torchbearers.

In his article on tragedy (Diogenes, No. 7), Mr. Charles G. Bell has offered us some provocative insights and opinions. I am compelled to question, however, some of the basic concepts he brings to the interpretation of tragedy.

It would seem that Mr. Bell, despite the depth of his thinking, has embraced several of the current clichés, which perhaps have their origin in the writings of A. C. Bradley. Critics adhering to this school hold that, for one reason or another, it is not possible to write tragedy in the twentieth century and that no work ending in bleak pessimism or despair is tragic. Mr. Bell, combining literary and historical criteria, is particularly severe in his limitation of the field of tragedy and the possibilities open to it. If I read him aright, only Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and the earlier Sophocles (before he fell from grace) have ever really earned admission to the exclusive realm.

The doctoral theses of Georges Balandier, professor at the Ecole des Hautes-Etudes—Sociologie actuelle de l'Afrique noire (“Current Sociology of Negro Africa”) and Sociologie des Brazzavilles noires (“Sociology of the Negro Brazzavilles”)—are the culmination of studies undertaken in French Equatorial Africa while he was working in the Office de la Recherche scientifique Outre-Mer (French Bureau of Scientific Research Overseas). They are equally far removed from metaphysical sociology and from a static ethnography which seeks pure states and original traditions. They treat a moving present, ethnic groups already formed, African societies concerned about European intervention and about their own deveoping future. “Sociology,” Louis Wirth used to say, “is the science and the art of human relations.” Humanity is indeed the object of sociology, but sociology should be as well a tool for humanity. Balandier's work is a precious tool for understanding present-day Africa beyond what appears on the surface, and perhaps even for helping to construct the new Africa.