We live in a world of several intersecting crises: the technological crisis, the psychological crisis of “national liberation”, the bipolar clash of monolithic and pluralist ideals, and the bitter paradoxical crisis in which the availability of military force far outweighs the political goals that might command its use. In combination, we have a crisis of the unknown, where science, soldiery, diplomacy, education, and many other agencies struggle fruitlessly to deal with the inexorable situation. And in this crisis military groups of the affected nations are subjected to a series of novel pressures.

This study suggested itself to the author when he noticed that such work as had been done on British attitudes to America fell into two main divisions: (a) studies, usually of American origin, of movements in the mass of British opinion; (b) studies of the radical and politically “nonconformist” elements in British political society. Both of these seemed to the author to be vitiated as contributions to the understanding of the various developments of Anglo-American relations, the former because the social structure of British political power does not weigh mass movements of opinion very highly, the latter because in the 61 years from 1895–1956, radical elements have controlled British foreign policy for a mere eight years and disputed control only for a further six.

The first issue of The Review of Politics was published in 1939, the year of Hitler's attack on Poland. The new magazine, thus, appeared at the end of one historical period, the interwar years, and at the beginning of the new age initiated by the Second World War. The years, 1918–1939, were themselves years of the working out of the crisis of which the First World War was an issue. That war, inhuman in its demands and protracted shock effects, had finally been sustained by Utopian and revolutionary hopes. The continuing crisis, compounded by that war, had been intensified by the world depression as well as by the period's characteristic political responses to the crisis. Often enough, the center and part of the right preferred to believe that things had not changed and that there was no crisis. On the left, widely enchanted by the Soviet Union's cooperation with history, seen as the ruthless work of justice, there was an astonishing unconcern about human liberty and a blindness to suffering. The right, too, often surrendered itself to the fraudulent conservatism of fascism, to political salvation by violence. So, in 1939, war, notably global in scope, came again.

A certain small group of men (hereafter called “the team”) shares an intention, the implementation of which requires at least a once-for-all decision of some public authority. The most obvious procedure is to plead in favor of that decision with the holders (or holder) of the competent authority. The next most obvious is to win over people who have easy and habitual access to the decision-maker or makers. These first and second procedures can be practiced under any regime.

After father edward sorin, C.S.C, the founder, Father John A. Zahm, C.S.C, was the chief inspiration of modern Notre Dame. Zahm, in turn, dedicated one of his books on South America, written under the pseudonym “Mozans,” to his “Brothers in the Congregation of Holy Cross, James Burns and John Cavanaugh.” After Sorin these three men were the creators of the modern university and, while its buildings have multiplied and its students and teachers have increased greatly, whatever is worthwhile has been built on the foundation laid by these men. Some would give Zahm the highest honors, others like best the eloquent Cavanaugh, but the best theorist was Burns. Zahm's plans for a great Catholic university, perhaps premature but well conceived, were buried in the avalanche of conservatism that swept American Catholicism in the early decades of the twentieth century. Father Cavanaugh tried to keep Zahm's noble ideals alive during this conservative reaction and Father Bums took over for a brief period and began to correct the evils of stagnancy and to set Notre Dame again on its way to intellectual achievements. These generalities are much too sweeping and cover too many years for a brief narrative. The three years of the presidency of Father James A. Burns are the most tempting part of the story and the one least known.

In the popular imagination, the fall and death of Parnel was for Ireland the beginning of a long period of deep despair and dejection. Actually, the heroic period in modern Irish history only begins when that great man was dragged from his high place, and his magnificent creation, the Irish Parliamentary Party, was shattered into petty factions. His death and the destruction of his political legacy were the neccessary preliminary to the release of the Irish people, which had been for so long subordinated to the national cause. The twenty-five years that encompass the fall in 1891 of Ireland's “uncrowned king” and the rising in 1916, are the years in which the Irish people did great things. It was the period when they secured to them selves the art of representative goverment, created a new literature, and laid the foundations for their welfare state. In truth it was an exhilarating period and Ireland was never more in tellectually alive.

Contemporary discussions of political forms exhibit a concern with constitutional procedures and values seldom encountered in the history of political thought. The search for a parallel development would require a turning to the classical period of Greek and Roman philosophy and politics. In the light of contemporary constitutional self-consciousness, as well as of the sustained inquiry of the ancient world into the various forms of polity, pure and degraded, ideal and historical, the political analyses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries assume the character of politico-ideological crystallizations of the breakdown of the ancien regime. There are, of course, fundamental underlying differences between these three periods of political reflection. The ancient Greek analyses, although centering on Greek realities and problems, bear, prima facie, a style of detached theory intended to be taken as philosophy, no more, no less.

Unu, in 1947, became the Prime Minister of the Provisional Government of Burma. He retained that post after independence in 1948 and, except for seven months in 1956–1957, he had been the duly elected Prime Minister until he gave up office in September, 1958, after the serious split in the ruling party, the Anti-Fascist Peoples' Freedom League (AFPFL). From then until the third national elections of February, 1960, General Ne Win, Chief of the Burma Defense Forces, held the reins of what was called a “caretaker government”, in which he proceeded strictly according to the constitution adopted in 1947. U Nu's Party won an overwhelming victory at the polls in 1960 and once again, with almost 80 per cent parliamentary backing in the 250-man Chamber of Deputies, the more powerful chamber in the bicameral parliament, he set about to govern Burma. On March 2, 1962, General Ne Win staged a coup. He took over the government in the name of a military Revolutionary Council, arrested the previous cabinet members, and set aside Burma's constitution.

The contemporary modus operandi of the Soviets in Ethiopia seems in many ways to be a refined and ideologically refurbished version of that of pre-Revolutionary days.

Russia's interest in Ethiopia is centuries old. An offer to join forces with Ethiopia and the Protestant West in the struggle against the Mohammedan Turks reached Moscow before the time of Peter the Great. Hiob Ludolf's pioneer work, Historia Aethiopica, was translated into Russian in the seventeenth century, and, nearly 150 years ago, the teaching of the Amharic language became a part of the Khar'kov University curriculum.

Emotional religion was embedded in the hearts of eighteenth-century Britons. The veneer of culture and moderation, so often considered the hallmark of the age of reason, was perilously thin. Conjure up an image of the Gordon Riots of June, 1780, to see the mob, rising in hysterical fear of popery, terrorizing the city of London for a week. From Charles Dickens' classic account in Barnaby Rudge to the recent King Mob of Christopher Hibbert, the saga of those savage days has fascinated historians and readers alike. Few of us remember that the Gordon Riots were merely the climax of organized agitation which had brewed for nearly two years and had already achieved singular success in Scotland. Victory there made possible the London disorders. In Glasgow and Edinburgh, in the intellectual capital of Britain, the heirs of John Knox had rejected the overtures of reason and moderation.

When President Soekamo of Indonesia on July 5, 1959, dissolved the Constituent Assembly and promulgated the reinstatement of the first Constitution (1945) discarded in 1950, he initiated a new revolution in Indonesia's modern history. This revolution will have far-reaching social and cultural consequences for the nation. The purpose of this paper is to focus upon some of the most significant social and cultural changes which have occurred in Indonesian society in recent years and in the wake of the eight-year development plan for 1961 to 1969.

Monsignor romano guardini, preeminent professor in the University of Munich, has had an enormous influence upon generations of German students and citizens. Now, after the steady and effective translation of his works during the past three decades, he has made a profound impact upon the minds and souls of young American scholars and intellectuals, changing, with the strength of conversion, their ways of dealing with knowledge, with ideas and human realities. In an article written for the twentieth-anniversary issue of The Review of Politics, I pointed out (“The Thinker in the Church: The Spirit of Newman,” January, 1959) that Guardini is a Newman type of thinker in the twentieth century. This is quite true. Certainly the range of his concerns is reminiscent of Newman's: literature (for instance, his studies of Dante, of Dostoevski, notably the legend of the Grand Inquisitor, and of Rilke's Duino Elegies): history (particularly revelation as history); subtle reflections upon theological questions as well as the critical problems of the contemporary political and social scene.

For more than a century there have been among the learned those who have tried to extend the outlook and the methods of the natural sciences to the study of man and to the behavior of human societies. Their efforts have raised issues which are of vital concern in the thermonuclear age which we have entered.

On october 6, 1960, President Soekarno of Indonesia introduced members of his group of officials and leaders to President Eisenhower in Washington. Among them was Dipa N. Aidit, since 1954 Secretary General of the Communist Party of Indonesia (Partai Kommunis Indonesia; PKI). The confrontation was unique, ironic, and symbolic. It illustrated United States' efforts to accept Indonesia on its own terms of neutralism; it was an instance of Soekarno's ebullient self-assertion; it marked a milestone on the Indonesian Communist movement's road from a low point of failure in 1948 to its present successful role of a party with 2 million card-carrying members that can claim control over some 8 million individuals in various labor, students, women and other “front” organizations.

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 political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes is rightly considered as marking the end of one era in political theory and the beginning of a new one. Formerly, men had sought and found a guide to political conduct in a basic principle upon which the order of well-being of the state depended. Hobbes broke with the past by postulating the state as simply a rationalization of the needs of men. He analyzed man's psychology and relied on his own observation and ratiocination to establish the best possible state commensurate with mankind's situation, but his supreme emphasis on force and authority left no room for the older constitutional, religious, and traditional safeguards of the citizen. This was the price that Hobbes willingly paid to achieve a secure state during the English Civil War.

On any list of the most penetrating and least deceived political theorists of the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville must be ranked high. Few others perceived the dangers both of egalitarianism and of racial thinking; of secular religions as well as of state churches; of historical determinism, as well as of those other explanations which equally well undermine responsibility by attributing everything to mere chance or to the appearance of exceptional individuals. Tocqueville insisted upon the obligation of free men to determine by empirical investigation just what are the genuine alternatives confronting them. By his own effort to perform this task, he made a classic contribution to the study of the relationships between social organization and political institutions.

During Pitt's 1785 campaign for moderate parliamentary reform, William Wilberforce supported the government primarily on a moral basis rather than on political grounds. He explained his reasons to a friend, Lord Muncaster, as follows:

It is not the confusion of parties, and their quarreling and battling in the House of Commons, which makes me despair of the republic … it is the universal corruption and profligacy of the times, which taking its rise amongst the rich and luxurious has now extended its baneful influence and spread its destructive poison through the whole body of the people.

When albert camus received the Nobel Prize in 1957, he was honored for the quality of his writing and as a representative of the generation that had come of age between the two world wars. Camus did not hesitate to identify himself with this generation. He was willing to be a witness for those who had been helplessly thrust into “twenty years of absolutely insane history.” This was the generation, he said at Stockholm, that had learned to endure in an age when history was dominated by “the death instinct at work.”

In recent decades the socialists have attracted more attention and historical study than other social reformers. The extreme positions, utopian socialism and Marxism, have been the subject of many studies, and indeed, have been investigated to the neglect of the intermediate and moderate forms of socalism. The concentration of study upon the extreme positions may perhaps be explained in that they are older movements and they have had an influence that certainly makes for quantitative importance. Moreover, those who take extreme positions are often the first to gain attention.