Valery has written that “A great man is one who leaves others after him in a state of embarrassment.” Certainly, the eighteen-month-old era of aprés de Gaulle has been characterized by an unexpected sense of confidence, not the oft-predicted chaos. But embarrassment persists. The enigma of de Gaulle himself remains. We have many and varied chronicles of his long political career. We have his speeches, his early books, his war memoirs and the first volume of his new Mémoires d'Espoir. But we have only begun the long process of sifting and reconciling the varied and contradictory facts at hand. The final analysis, as with so many other political leaders who left an ambiguous mark upon their contemporaries, will be left to the judgment of history—So subjective, yet so precious to de Gaulle himself.

Remorselessly, and apparently inevitably, as 1976 ticks away, the death toll in the tangled Irish Troubles creeps higher, faster this year than any time since 1972—the vintage year for blood and turmoil. Except for the threatened, no one any longer seems greatly to care. Murder must be peculiarly grisly or quite spectacular to warrant more than cursory coverage in any but Irish journals. The dramatic detonation of a mine under the British ambassador's Jaguar outside Dublin in July engendered, briefly, media interest. Ambassadors are not assassinated every day, but in Ulster ordinary people are—or nearly every day. There have been too many nowarning bombs in pubs to remember, too many sprawled bodies discovered by pedestrians to concern any but the devastated relatives. The Provisional IRA's self-imposed truce has eroded and again there are bombs in Belfast, land mines in South Armagh, snipers in Derry. The British army and especially the Ulster police have become prime targets. Yet the Republicans feud among themselves. The Loyalist paramilitaries still pursue a strategy of random assassination and thus have unleashed a vicious, seemingly irreversible, cycle of tit-for-tat murders. Politicians, warders, judges are targets of assassins of various faiths. And the violence has been exported. There are bombs in Manchester and Birmingham, assassins in Kensington and gunmen firing into restaurants in London's West End, explosions in the underground, firebombs in the shops. The Loyalist paramilitaries have carried their war into the Irish Republic with explosions in crowded streets. The elegant Gresham and Shelbourne hotels have been bombed in Dublin and lesser resort establishments hit elsewhere. The greatest single slaughter, twenty-six people killed, came in a Dublin street, not in Belfast or Derry. No one sees an end. Even the hope that mutual exhaustion might bring an end to violence has flickered out.

InAustralian Hopes and Fears Colin Clark appears at one point or another in all of his several guises: statistician, economist, newspaper commentator on public affairs, and exponent of a Roman Catholic Weltanschauung. He has written several earlier books which embrace the first two and steadiest of his regular employments, notably The Conditions of Economic Progress, and he has written a very great deal in a miscellany of newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets which falls under the latter heads, but this, I think, is the first occasion on which he has given expression to the several facets of his mind in a single book. The result is utterly fascinating, not least because of Clark's extraordinary capacity for stating highly provocative views in a “dead pan” fashion, as though uttering dusty platitudes. No reader unacquainted with the Australian scene will fully appreciate just how often Clark sets a cat among the pigeons, nor how adept he is at redefining cats and pigeons. The reader must proceed, constantly on the alert for what on earth is coming next, this in spite of the fact that much of the book is ostensibly straight exposition. Clark's willingness to take the risks of discrimination and judgment within his particular frame of reference keeps his writing lively. The question one really has in mind all along is whether or not he takes all the facts into account before phrasing his pointed conclusions.

While our subject is the very broad one of “History and Diplomacy,” I thought I would narrow it somewhat and attempt merely to describe something of the aspect in which diplomatic history presents itself to a diplomatist who has turned late in life to the study and writing of history.* In doing so, I hope that I have not taken too great a liberty with the subject our hosts had in mind.

Scholars often assume Émile seeks to educate readers to become like Émile. However, I suggest that by calling upon his readers to act as judges, Rousseau's aim is not for readers to copy Émile, but to educate them to act as independent judges. The first section of this article argues that Émile's education fails to teach him this kind of judgment. He never learns to navigate the interdependent relationships created by property ownership or family life. Rather, as explored in the second section, Sophie's education offers a better style of judgment. The article concludes with a consideration of the reader's education as distinct from that of either Émile or Sophie. By emulating Sophie readers do not become like her. Rather, through comparing the characters and situations Rousseau presents in Émile and “Émile et Sophie,” readers learn to judge for themselves.

In Knowledge and Politics Roberto Mangabeira Unger offers an extended critique of liberalism. He formulates a conception of liberalism as a framework of ideas that is embodied in particular institutions and practices, constituting a way of life and a form of consciousness. He evaluates this liberal framework, its crystallization in the seventeenth century, its powerful but unacknowledged hold over developed Western societies, its fragmentation into specialized perspectives, its dilemmas of thought and practice, and the possible emergence of an alternative framework. Our reading of Knowledge and Politics initially led us both to a provisional agreement with Unger and to the realization that if his project is successful he has made a contribution of great importance to political theory. Our hesitation in fully endorsing his theory was due to this characteristic of Knowledge and Politics: while Unger often refers to individual liberal thinkers for purposes of illustration, he does not systematically apply his critique to any theorist. He realizes that he might be accused of erecting and toppling a “straw man,” for he states that “it might be objected that the view I discuss is a view nobody has ever held.” He acknowledges that the liberal framework he constructs is not intended to fit exactly the thought of particular liberal theorists, that his references to philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke and Hume “are designed to illustrate rather than to prove their adherence to the doctrines that are the subject of the critique. In this sense, the critical argument remains hypothetical.”

South Africa's policy of “separate development” of the races is an enduring feature in that Republic's predicament but the theory and practice of Apartheid have been changing. During the last fifteen years the policy has undergone a fundamental transformation.

The starting point for explaining modern Palestinian political history is the assumption that Palestinians failed to organize adequately during the British Mandate (1918–1948), were defeated by the Zionist movement, and consequently dispersed from their homeland. That Palestinians did not unite politically during this crucial period in their history, nor cooperate economically, nor even band together militarily is considered corollaries of this organizational incapacity and reasons enough for their failure to achieve a national sovereignty of their own. Thus Porath notes that ultimately no Palestinian political organization could bridge the divisions of region, family, and narrow economic or political interest which encouraged the proliferation of parties and weakened the drive against Zionism. Ann Mosely Lesch calls her book on Arab politics in Palestine, “the frustration of a nationalist movement.”

When Jonathan Swift described the episode of Laputa in his Gulliver's Travels his genius for satire took on a prophetic dimension. The Laputans were a strange race of men — a star-gazing, introspective people who decorated their clothing with emblems of the sun, moon, stars, and various musical instruments and served their food in fancy geometrical patterns. They devoted their time to the study of mathematics, astronomy and other subjects devoid of concrete claims and when in public were always accompanied by “flappers” to call them back from the far reaches of abstraction and impracticality. Swift employed great imagination and rich wealth of detail in heaping contempt upon the abstract mind.

Over the years, historians have engaged in various disputes concerning the origins, nature, and results of the progressive movement that dominated the political imagination of Americans during the first two decades of the twentieth century. No one set of categories has dominated those disputes, but much of the controversy has focused on a fundamental tension in progressive thought: the conflict between a liberalism centered in humanitarian and moral passion and one based in an ethos of scientific analysis.