Nikita khrushchev views international politics through the prism of Marxism-Leninism. His image of the world is far different from ours. To try to understand the dimensions of this image and the underlying perspective he brings to the conduct of Soviet diplomacy presents a formidable problem. Yet, there are certain indicators in traditional Soviet theory and thought that provide a tool for analysis. One such indicator is the concept of the ‘correlation of world forces.’

Our mind strives for statements of configuration and statements of consequence. Where different things stand in relation to one another, that is configuration. How successive events arise from one another, that is consequence. We grasp far more easily disposition in space than process in time; further an incomplete “geographic” account can be valid as far as it goes while an incomplete “historic” account can be highly misleading. The difference in difficulty and reliability between “where” and “how” statements is at a maximum in politics. It is therefore not surprising that political science should have dealt mainly with configurations.

American foreign policy since 1945 has been made by the often cumbersome processes of response of a representative republic to very rapidly acquired responsibilities as a world power. It involves the story of the transformation of an isolationist citizenry, who had frequently assumed that international order was of no vital concern to it, or that the order would be maintained automatically, or that American efforts to maintain world order could end only in disaster because of the inadequacies of American leaders and the sophisticated deviousness of foreigners. The transformation of a largely isolationist citizenry into the consenting citizens of a republic facing the demands of world rivalry has the epic sweep of a decisive world historical movement. The magnitude of the effort involved, however, dwindles when the dimensions of the challenge to the republic are considered.

The relative as well as absolute aggrandizement of the executive branch of the national government is the outstanding single fact in the political experience of the United States. The Presidency today is not only stronger in relation to Congress and the Supreme Court but its role in the whole life of the nation has become much larger than apparently envisaged by the Founders. This development, however, is not considered a departure from the original scheme of government because the Constitution is held to be a “living document.” The intermittent but cumulative growth of the Presidency has been absorbed into current constitutional theory on the general principle laid down by Justice Holmes deciding a question of federal-state relations: “This case before us must be considered in the light of our whole experience and not merely in that of what was said a hundred years ago.” This unity of theory and practice constitutes, indeed, the genius of American politics to which Professor Daniel Boorstin has applied the term “givenness.” The two components of this “givenness,” according to Professor Boorstin, are the idea of a preformed original theory given to the nation by the Founding Fathers and adequate to all its future needs, and the idea of an implicit theory forever embodied in American institutions. Combined, these two tenets produce a sense of continuity — “homogeneity,” “seamless web” — in which past and present, tradition and progress, constitutional law and political practice, are blended into that peculiar American optimism, at once reverent and practical. Since the Presidency participates in this “givenness,” it also constitutes an indestructible composite of constitutional interpretation and history. It is a “living institution.”

Current literature on recent Soviet industrial and agricultural reorganizations emphasizes the economic rather than the political significance of the reforms. Because economists have written on these developments more than political scientists, the importance of politics and the political meaning of these changes have not been adequately recognized. This article does not purport to minimize the economic significance of these reforms; it will examine some of the political factors which hitherto have been overlooked or de-emphasized.

Pan-slavism is one of the elusive idea-concepts which can be easily defined. But the historian can hardly say how far they correspond to a political reality which exercises a decisive impact on the course of history. A similar contemporary ideaconcept is Pan-Africanism, propagated and commended by most Africans. So far it has failed to create a political or economic union. The only example of that kind, and that on a very minor scale, the Mali Federation, dissolved after a short existence. The same holds true of another similar concept, Pan-Scandinavianism, which is approximately as old as Pan-Slavism but better based on a much closer cultural and religious affinity.

NatoHas appeared under many labels since its creation — Guardian of Peace, Pawn of Power Politics, Savior of the West, and Harbinger of War. All of them probably have some validity. But no matter which sobriquet is most applicable, the most significant feature of the alliance may be that it has survived twelve years of continuous challenges. By its survival it has become the symbol of America's abandonment of isolationism. In an age in which foreign policy plays the kind of role in domestic politics that would have been unthinkable in the nineteenth century, NATO represents a coherence in foreign policy that transcends party differences. Conceived under the Republican 80th Congress, put into effect by President Truman and Secretary Acheson, and expanded by President Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles, NATO now takes its place with the New Deal as a major factor in American life in the mid-twentieth century.

There is a wide measure of agreement among contemporary observers that something is seriously wrong in modern industrial society. As to the exact nature of the disorder there are differences of opinion: some denounce above all a vulgarization of culture which they see as stemming from the supremacy of mass taste; others view modern men as victims of the illnesses of overorganization, with all spontaneity and uniqueness increasingly compressed within the patterns of public and private bureaucracies; still others believe that the crucial failure of present civilization in the West is that beneath the various forms of mass and organizational “togetherness,” the individual lies stranded, as it were, on the shores of nothingness, deprived of true contact with his fellowmen, with the physical world, or even with himself. Thus there is little agreement as to how the dehumanization of contemporary man is best to be described. That such dehumanization is a fact, however, is the subject of profound and widespread consensus.

Khrushchev has by now made an undeniable reputation for himself as a clever man. He has credit for the “de-Stalinization” of the Soviet system and a return to “Leninism,” but he also holds the reins to a system of controls largely created by Stalin. It is perhaps a bit early for judgments, but Khrushchev seems indeed to be having his cake and eating it too. A survey of the question of the transition to communism, for example, reveals that his position is nothing less than a synthesis of a most remarkable sort, and one well calculated to gain the benefits of both Stalinism and Leninism. He has apparently set out to achieve a wedding between controls and ideals which will both mark him as the builder of communism in the manner of Lenin and at the same time retain in his hands the power of a dictator.

Eleven years after his death, economists (strangely enough, the only ones who seem to care) still ponder the paradoxes of Joseph A. Schumpeter. While the contributions of the late Lord Keynes, not without intriguing paradoxes of their own, are being rapidly assimilated into the “common sense” of statesmen, Schumpeter, the only other truly great economist the twentieth century has produced, exerted no appreciable influence over public policy. Apart from a few misunderstood cliches, such as “creative destruction,” “obsolescence of entrepreneurial function,” and so on, his ideas have generated no “school” among young intellectuals. Indeed, it is doubtful that they ever will, even though Schumpeter is a profound and honest thinker in the tradition of Marx, Weber, and Tawney grappling with one of the crucial problems of our age: the innovating and growth capacities of various social systems under an advanced industrial technology.

Reinhold niebuhr is perhaps the most influential exponent of a Protestant view of life in modern America. While American Protestants today seem to be shifting their attention from Niebuhr to Paul Tillich, this recent trend is still far from counterbalancing the dominant position held by Niebuhr from the early thirties well into the fifties. And even Tillich's influence is, in a sense, an extension of Niebuhr's, for it was Niebuhr who brought Tillich to this country from Germany in 1933. Also, the latter's ontology is, on the whole, perhaps more complementary than contradictory to the ethics of Niebuhr.

ThePast fifty years have shown a marked tendency toward the suppression of any consideration of the mysterious as a part of history. R. G. Collingwood's categorical remark that “the blind forces and activities in us” are not parts of the historical process merely reflected, in a particularly distinguished quarter, an assumption that has since gained widespread support. In social studies this trend has favored the accumulation of extensive data of the kind, for example, that lies behind the growth-of-learning S-curve postulated by industrial psychologists who have made detailed studies of “cycles” in a wide variety of industries. Such accumulations of solid quantities of data that lend themselves to statistical interpretation are reassuring, and it would be foolish to disparage either the method or its results. But it is important, and especially appropriate in studying a complex topic like the morality of a culture, to recognize that if one examines closely even those more limited social patterns that lend themselves to statistical analysis, there often seems to be, as Walter Bagehot argued a hundred years ago, a point somewhere along the line of development where the individual, or a creative minority, emerges as the real source of the breakthrough which establishes the pattern.

Since the English conquest, the Quebec Roman Catholic Church has been the most important single agency for the defense and perpetuation of the French-Canadian heritage in North America. Although its commanding position is unchallenged, the Church has long shared its authority with elites in the political and economical spheres. These other elites, however, have by no means competed with the Church. Indeed, interchange and cooperation among elites have been characteristic of French-Canadian society. Viewed as essential to cultural survival, this close unity among elites has encouraged the retention of an ordered, hierarchical social structure with many pre-industrial features.

TheOrganic nature of all philosophic reflection can easily be obscured by the otherwise laudable efforts of specialists in such fields as the philosophies of ethics, political theory, and art. Granting the great speculative philosophers of the past, seeking a unified view of the totality of human experience, erred though an excess of undisciplined imagination, it is questionable whether the less ambitious, piecemeal work of the analytic specialist has saved philosophy from mysticism or has so truncated it that all vital connections with a humanity in search of meaning have been severed. The tendency to compartmentalize philosophy is not limited to any area of experience but in this article I should like to restrict myself to a consideration of the consequences of separating philosophy of history from inquiries into individual and political values. In order to appreciate these consequences we must first agree on the nature of a philosophy of history and the role it plays, or should play, in determining our estimation of human values.

In the antithesis of Western imperialism and colonial nationalisms and the still uncertain synthesis the United States has had a significant and in some ways a determining role. By the extension of its frontiers into the Caribbean and the Pacific at the turn of the century, the United States found itself an imperialist power. American imperialism consciously endeavored to bring what was best of the Western way of life to its colonial peoples. Nevertheless, it depended on the conventional instruments of military force and colonial-civil government imposed by the conqueror. For the United States the Philippines became the fittest subject for this Westernizing process for which Theodore Roosevelt was the outstanding spokesman and apologist. Under President Roosevelt's direction the work of civilizing a backward people received a full American expression, and from a consideration of that enterprise the temper of American imperialism may be sounded. Drawing from the Philippine experiment and from experience with the Caribbean countries Roosevelt combined practical judgments with certain intellectual and emotional attitudes to elaborate a comprehensive doctrine of imperialism.

A study of Edmund Burke's theory of history has not, to my knowledge, been undertaken before. There are two principal justifications for it. The first is that since Burke is, as some have claimed, “the principal founder” of the Romantic theory of history, his theory of history, as one aspect of the complicated association of thought and feeling called Romanticism, is important in the history of ideas. The second reason is that almost all of Burke's politics depends on his view of history or, at least, can be explained by it.

William shirer'sRise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York, 1960) has been widely hailed as a great work of history. Harry Schermann, chairman of the board of directors of the Book of the Month Club, says that it “will almost certainly come to be considered the definitive history of one of the most frightful chapters in the story of mankind.” The book has already sold more widely than any work on European history published in recent years. It is probable that tens of thousands of American readers will take theirviews on recent German affairs from Shirer's pages for years to come. For that reason, it is important to point out the serious shortcomings of this work.

In 1860 French liberal Charles de Rémusat noticed that pessimism had made rapid progress during the preceding ten years and that his period, which was once reputed to be proud of its accomplishments, then counted more censors than admirers. A similar observation had been made in 1852 by the distinguished Catholic historian of democratic convictions, Frédéric Ozanam, who stated that the best minds believed in decadence and that the idea of progress had become a discredited notion.

Among the revolutions in France since 1789 one, the Revolution of 1830, has been singularly neglected by historians in this century, and neither in this century nor the preceding one has it attracted much attention from any but the political historians. No monograph on the whole story of the Revolution has ever been published, and the standard account, in Lavisse's Histoire de France contemporaine, appeared nearly forty years ago. The economic and sociological dimensions of the event have been generally ignored. Consequently, the Revolution of 1830 is ordinarily seen as a political movement arising out of the unpopularity of Charles X and his ministers and out of their attempt to arrogate the sovereign power to the crown.

Since 1918 the doctrine that the Arabs are a nation and that nationality is the basis of politics has come to be accepted by a very large majority of Arab political leaders and of at least the lay intellectuals. The espousal of this doctrine, by a people who are predominantly Moslem in religion, is a development of revolutionary significance, since for many centuries Moslems viewed the state in terms of religion and dynasty. Moslems have recognized the existence of distinct peoples, or nations, since the time of Mohammed. Indeed, Islam in its first century or so was the peculiar religion of the Arab nation, and to become a Moslem was to join the Arab nation as a dependent person. This system, however, proved unworkable, and in the end Islam became the supreme bond which superseded nationality.