In May, 1968, France was saved from revolution not primarily by de Gaulle and his generals but by the French Communist Party. Nine million striking workers occupied the factories. Militants among the students and young unemployed workers had proven themselves more than ready to play the role of vanguard at the barricades. The peasantry had begun to move from passive grumbling to direct action, fearful that the end of agricultural tariffs in July would further depress their hard lot. Even the middleclass professionals, disenchanted with the hierarchical rigidities and the olympian paternalism of Gaullist society had risen to assert their rights to free expression and meaningful participation. All means of communication and transport and all financial agencies were either directly or indirectly under the control of the workers. At will they could have deprived Paris and other cities of food, water, fuel, electricity and gas.

InOurDay, the concept of progress has fallen into disfavor in philosophical and scientific circles, although most people ordinarily seem to take it for granted, in an unanalyzed fashion. There is some reason for its rejection by the more thoughtful; in most of its expressions it was accepted in what now seems rather simplistic terms with regard to its nature and certainty. Without some idea of progress, however, an age dominated by radical change may lack any standard by which to evaluate its condition and tendencies. Furthermore, the idea of progress, and of a meaningful history, was not always presented in oversimplified terms. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a singular figure in the French revolutionary tradition, developed in the middle of the last century a complex and flexible thought about progress in history, and attention to his now little-known ideas may help us save the concept for political analysis and practice.

GeorgeVonLengerkeMeyer learned, not at all happily, that he was to be American Ambassador to St. Petersburg. This was a disappointment to himself and his family, for President Theodore Roosevelt had earlier suggested that Meyer be sent to Paris. And St. Petersburg seemed a long way off — in distance, time, culture, and atmosphere — from Paris. Nevertheless Meyer recognized that the appointment was a presidential compliment. For almost a year the President had been working to end the bloody war that had begun with the Japanese attack on the Russian naval base at Port Arthur on February 8, 1904, and had surprisingly resulted in one Japanese victory after another. Roosevelt had urged peace throughout the conflict. He quickly saw the necessity of a first-class ambassador in St. Petersburg to replace Robert S. McCormick, the Chicago businessman who was a political asset but a diplomatic failure.

ItIs customary to describe the development of political science since the Second World War as a step toward the creation of an empirical science of politics. Not its empiricism, however, but rather its concern for theory is understood to be the defining characteristic of the new way. The prescientific period was also empirically oriented, but it was naive, unthinking empiricism which treated the acquisition of political knowledge as a matter of collecting political facts as one might collect butterflies. Empiricism became scientific, it is said, only when it became theoretical, when its practitioners realized that before they could collect butterflies they had first to fashion a proper net and devise a scheme for ordering the specimens to be caught. At the heart, then, of what we mean today by the science of politics stands political theory, understood as the self-conscious construction of conceptual systems for ordering reality and of hypotheses to explain the interconnections of the parts of these systems. Beside the scientist as survey researcher and statistician stands the scientist as theorist, as author of approaches, frameworks, and models.

Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, the foremost Austrian historian in the interwar period, made important contributions to knowledge of the materials and the facts of nineteenthcentury Germany history as well as to the interpretation of that period. No historian of Germany can properly ignore his interpretation of that period. Yet no serious attempt has been made to evaluate his historical thinking and to appraise his extensive contributions to German historical literature. The one exception to this neglect followed his death in 1951 which occasioned the customary obituary notices of his career and work.

Looking backward from the early nineteenth century, the Catholic Church in England had disappointingly little scholarly achievement of which to boast since the Reformation. Henry Holden, Charles Butler, John Lingard—all were men to be proud of, but Catholics of such intellectual bent were so few. And understandably so. The penal laws had effectively deprived the recusants of any access to higher education, and would perdure until the latter nineteenth century. Squires whose sons were barred for their faith from most schools and from the two universities had to be content to enroll them quietly at one or another of the exile schools across the channel. The Irish immigrants who later came to fill and overspill the churches in the nineteenth century had even less exposure to—and perhaps appetite for—scholarship. And the clergy who shepherded this extraordinary flock of secluded gentry and boisterous working folk pursued a highly sacramental and understandably unsophisticated pastorate. The Church naturally felt itself somewhat put upon, and fell into rather defensive postures. Scholarship would appear as a luxury at best, and at worst as a weapon that the Establishment seemed always more adept and smooth at handling.