However distasteful it may be, nuclear weapons of the fission and fusion types have come to stay. Henceforth, they will be as much a part of human existence as rain and snow, morality and crime, the telephone and the airplane, pacifism and aggressiveness, freedom and tyranny, stupidity and wisdom. It is unlikely that this new invention can be undone except through the destruction of civilization itself. On the contrary, nucleonics sooner or later will provide the foundation of industrial civilization all over the globe. Given the anticipated increase in consumption of our energy resources, it appears that nuclear fuels, on a large scale, will have to be made available to industry within the life span of the present generation. Otherwise economic decline (and hence political catastrophe) must come about as the result of the gradual depletion of oil and coal deposits, the concurrent price rise of mineral fuels, the lack of a mineral energy basis in many countries, the rapidly rising demand for industrial goods, and the uninterrupted increase of population.

We are living at a time when events move more rapidly than in the past. It is therefore very difficult, even in an article for a review, to sum up the situation, and still more difficult to see even a short distance into the future. This is true for any country, even for those, like the United States and the Soviet Union, which have greater autonomy and greater power in the bipolar world in which we live. But it is probably in the case of France that the task is most difficult of all, for in this country the general problems are complicated by a particular kind of crisis growing out of internal conditions. As I write these lines, it is impossible for me to have the slightest idea as to what French foreign policy will be when the article is published.

A friend of mine has the misfortune of owning a number of stone cottages. I say “misfortune” because the cottages are in Scotland, and their rents are fixed at the level of 1914. The cottages were built long before 1914—some of them are eighteenth-century work, with their pantiled roofs and trick rubble walls and irregular little windows; but they are good to look upon still, with their white door-sills and their little gardens along the path to the road. The law compels my friend to keep them in tolerable repair, if they are tenanted, and to pay most of what rent he receives either to local authorities or to the Exchequer, in the form of rates and income-taxes. But the rent of each cottage amounts to a mere five shillings a week—seventy cents, at the present rate of exchange. This is not particularly depressing to my friend, for the rents of his farms are fixed at levels no higher than they were during the Napoleonic wars, let alone the First World War. The cottages are a cause of expense to him, of course, rather than a source of income; but persons of his station are now resigned to being ruined, and for some of his cottages he asks no rent at all, letting them to old people who can afford to pay next to nothing. Some of his tenants, however, are better off, according to their lights, than my friend himself: they have risen in the economic scale while he has descended. His income is still much greater than theirs, but his expenses are much greater, and his responsibilities. These tenants now have better wages and shorter hours than ever they did before; they can afford their little luxuries, extending sometimes to television-sets. Some of them have come to look upon rent as a luxury—for, after all, many of their neighbors are the recipients of my friend's charity, paying nothing for their cottages. Accordingly, my friend's agent occasionally has his difficulties when he goes from door to door, on Mondays, collecting five shillings here and five shillings there. One morning the agent knocked at the door of a tenant who was in good health and employed at good wages. The tenant came to the door and announced that he had decided to pay no more rent; he could not afford it; prices were high, and he could use that five shillings himself.

In any study of the dissemination of ideologies, Marxism must claim a special place for two reasons. First, Marxism is both more precise and more all-embracing than any rival ideology, and its advocates claim not only that it is a “good” ideology but that it is the only correct ideology. Second, Marxism has been revised, by people who call themselves Marxists, in a way that would have astonished its founder.

On the first of October, 1949, the Chinese Communists* climaxed their military success by establishing on the mainland a new revolutionary government, the “Chinese People's Republic.” While this government included a number of splinter parties, it was—and is—undisguisedly dominated by the Chinese Communist Party. The new rulers, who quickly destroyed the old system of political control, are today drastically reorganizing the country's social and economic relations. And they are planning to go far beyond the changes accomplished to date.

The vague conceptualization of basic social phenomena seriously obstructs a clear understanding of many of the causes underlying national and international tensions. Significant contributions to the solution of these problems can hardly be expected as long as social scientists continue to operate with common-sense notions and the idols of the market place whose connotations are ever shifting with the changing intellectual fashions and political aspirations. Frequently these public concepts themselves are potent tools with which special interest and power groups may create and perpetuate conflict situations. Among the most fundamental, and at the same time potentially most dangerous, ideas are those of the nation, the people, and the ethnic group. In the following essay an attempt is made to formulate scientifically more adequate concepts within the frame of reference of sociological theory in the hope that social scientists in various fields might find them useful in their analysis of the highly complex social systems characteristic of modern times, and in the solution of certain practical problems affecting the national and international order.

Millions of men stand under arms to defend democracy Their weapons are fashioned by scientific technology which, now as always before, has placed its highest ingenuity at the service of its most important client: the military establishment. The state, the schools and the mass media do not shirk the task of indoctrination: they have employed every available technical device in order to spread awareness of the dangers which threaten democracy as well as national survival. Yet the flame of the martial spirit flickers but feebly in the heart of Western man, more feebly indeed than in any epoch of the West's dangerous history. Citizens respond dutifully to the call to arms. They cannot do otherwise in the face of the comprehensive controls and sanctions available to the state. Individual men among them are still capable of high feats of heroism at war, as high as those performed by warriors in ages past. Yet no one can deny that the democracies are loath to fight and that abiding popular aversion to war has forced democratic statesmen into a long series of diplomatic retreats. Science that has done so much to defend the democracies against aggression has also taught them that there is no defense against aggression and that its latest tools might prove as deleterious to the victor as to the defeated. More important still, science has taught men to value life as their highest possession and to abhor death, to abhor death not so much as the ineluctable fate of all living things but as the break in a process of expanding knowledge and possession of the physical environment. There is little in the history of our times to show that modern man is more averse to violence than were his forebears. There is some evidence showing that he views and handles violence with an impersonal detachment that would have shocked his ancestors inured to the precariousness and brutality of a prescientific civilization. Modern man, like all men before him, eschews violence that begets retribution, seeks to avoid pain and cherishes the good things upon earth. What sets him apart from preceding generations is his belief in his perfectibility upon earth and the dreadful and absurd finality of death.