The strangely unreal debate on the feasibility of United Nations intervention in Rhodesia or South Africa (to overthrow “colonialist” regimes) or in Vietnam (to stop or deescalate a war) would benefit from a more serious examination of the largest and most daring U.N. experiment on record. The Congo peacekeeping operation was unique, controversial and costly. The growing body of empirical data about this four-year operation provides a solid basis for understanding the severe limits of the United Nations as an instrument for political reform and crisis management in the Third World, to say nothing of the more difficult tasks of state-building and nation-building.

At a state dinner to mark Ghana’s independence in March, 1957, Kwame Nkrumah first invoked the dramatic device of asking the band to play Ghana’s new national anthem. He then made his point, saying:

Jogging along the road to a dinner party one evening, Balfour's sister said she thought that the coachman had taken a wrong turn. “Well, that is his business,” remarked the politician laconically, “not ours.” The lady was quite in order to speculate about the matter, but interference was forbidden. Likewise, academic philosophers and sociologists have a perfect right to speculate about politics, but they must not, as academics, interfere with the political process; that is the job of the practical politician. Balfour himself theorized about politics and about the nature of human society, and also took a hand in directing the course of political events; but he saw the two as quite distinct activities. “Knowledge,” he maintained, is seldom power. And a sociologist so coldly independent of the social forces among which he lived as thoroughly to understand them, would, in all probability, be as impotent to guide the evolution of a community as an astonomer to modify the orbit of a comet.

The latest plan making its appearance on the American public scene as a solution to the problems of “big government” and the decline of state government in our federal system is that of revenue sharing between the federal government and the states. This proposal has met with a wide and uncritical acceptance by state legislators, members of Congress, and the public. A Gallup Poll taken on January 1, 1967, indicated that seventy percent of the American public favored the idea of revenue sharing. The sponsors of revenue sharing regard it as a means of revitalizing state governments; yet, an examination of this new plan of distributing state aid suggests that its results may be quite different from what its proponents expect. Most likely, revenue sharing will weaken the self-governing capacities of our states rather than strengthen them. This undesirable consequence may follow because revenue sharing would encourage those interests presently controlling most state governments to increase their activities. The point simply stated is that revenue sharing will not make reform of state governments any easier.

The extent to which American businessmen have shed the rhetoric of the 192O's — in particular, the suspicion of or opposition to government and labor — has been a subject of no little significance to recent business historians. Although few analysts take exception to James W. Prothro's contention that business thinking in the twenties reflected a too narrow or selfinterested view of the roles of government and labor and granted that researchers recognize the problems of assessing business thought in any era, an examination of the interpretations of the rationale of contemporary businessmen has revealed imprecision in definition and resultant lack of synthesis. The summary results of this historiographical examination are set forth below.

The workings of many factors have wrought political change the world over. Among these, the impact of scientific-technological development upon society has been the most powerful agent of political transformation. Obvious as this has been for a long time, the progress of science and technology continues to outpace political creativity by a broad margin. Increasingly, political institutions are being left to accommodate themselves to the accomplished fact of scientific-technological progress— or to lose their functional significance. The logic of the political which alone can devise and master the social order, has become subservient to the logic of the apolitical. It is as if our society insists upon giving to Karl Marx's crude hypothesis what our economic experience withheld; we are about to validate Marxist determinism by the failure of our political imagination rather than the failure of our economic system. It seems as if the contrivances of science and technology now tell us not only what we should do with them but also how to order our lives. If this appearance is not deceptive — and it is proposed here to show that it is not — political change will befall our society like a natural event beyond man's control. To foreclose a disastrous deterioration of the political order and hence the human condition, it will be necessary to develop an appropriate philosophy of political change and, in the light of such a philosophy, policies which govern the integration of scientific and technological progress — the making of our “tools” — into political development. Part of what follow will be devoted to showing why the political needs to remain primary in order to insure that political change will be beneficial change. At the threshold of political change must stand political will.