There has been a revolution in comparative politics. But as with X all revolutions, it is difficult to date its beginning, hard to chart its course, and now, when the revolution has become established, difficult to say what has been accomplished. The publication of Political Oppositions in Western Democracies, edited by Robert A. Dahl, provides a good occasion to reconsider the revolution and to review some of the problems that have emerged. It is a good occasion because the book is both a splendid comparative work and one that illustrates some of the dilemmas of comparative research.

The traditional distinction between domestic and foreign politics, made by both decision-makers and analysts, is increasingly called into question by contemporary historical developments. The cold-war conflict and the attending mobilization of military, socioeconomic, and psychological resources by the superpowers and their allies; ventures of regional economic integration; the changing nature of the nation-state; the close connection between the conditions prevailing in the international system and the attempts made by the new states to modernize and to coalesce into viable societies—these are just a few examples of how foreign and domestic policy projects have become overlapping and perhaps entirely inseparable.

If Ambrose Bierce were writing his Devil's Dictionary today, he would probably define psychology as the science that predicts that Russian leaders will behave the same way during a missile crisis that a female sophomore does on a date. If tiiis is a caricature, it is only mildly so, as one would quickly learn by reading die testimony on psychology and international relations during die hearings in 1967 of die Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Schwarz's study Vom Reich zur Bundesrepublik is, in the opinion of this reviewer, the single most important book on the occupation studyperiod in Germany after World War II that has yet appeared. It is not an ordinary narrative history—indeed, it presupposes a good deal of prior knowledge—but is rather a topical analysis of the following problems: the various possible solutions to the German question in the years after 1945; the policies toward Germany of the four victorious powers—Russia, France, Britain, and the United States; the development of German attitudes on the future political orientation of one or two Germanies; and finally, the factors that led to the voluntary acceptance of Western integration by most West Germans even though this integration meant the partition of Germany.

There is disagreement among analysts about political development in Africa. Debate over the meaning of political development is not confined to those concerned with Africa, of course. Once the question, What does political development mean? is reformulated as, What do we mean by political development? there is no dearth of people willing to provide definitions and to free us from value-laden concepts.1 The lack of consensus on definitions is neither more nor less profound among those who study African politics than among those who concentrate their inquiry elsewhere, and the major ingredients of dispute are present in both groups in approximately the same mixture.

The case study method, which despite the behavioral revolution is still the most popular method for studying political phenomena, continually confronts its practitioners with the necessity of solving the micro-macro, or levels-of-analysis problem. On the one hand, one can literally study a “case” in the most narrowly delimited way, risking no incautious generalizations but courting triviality.

More sharply now than ever before, the world is divided into its more and its less developed parts—into relatively stable and fundamentally unstable communities—and the prospect before it is one of unavoidable but limited disturbance in and between its less developed societies, for as long as makes no matter, and of inescapable choice for its more advanced states between uncontrollable violence and abstention from war.

Political development is undoubtedly a rich and variegated field of study. We have begun to accumulate first-rate studies of widely divergent cultures and social structures, masses of quantitative data on the socioeconomic variables involved in the modernization process, analyses of political phenomena ranging from the destooling of chiefs to the functioning of complex legislative systems, well-documented surveys of particular political systems, and a smaller number of useful typologies and general hypotheses.

Until these recent studies by Riker, Watts, and Wildavsky appeared, the theory of federalism was embodied largely in the work of K. C. Wheare. Wheare published the first truly pathbreaking book in the comparative study of federalism shortly after World War II. He defined federalism as that system of government in which the federal and regional governments are both coordinate and independent. In applying this definition, he stressed the sharp division in the powers and functions of two coequal sovereignties as a basis for classifying systems of government as federal. Wheare's definition was derived primarily from his analysis of die American Constitution and, in particular, its formally sharp division of powers between national and state governments.

The study of the processes by which foreign policy is formed has been in the embarrassing position of falling between two academic chairs. On the one hand, students of international affairs have displayed considerable reluctance to delve into the domestic factors that distinguish one nation's policies from another's. On the other hand, scholars of comparative politics, with their knowledge of political institutions and processes, have rarely considered the effect of various political arrangements on foreign policy.

Western observers of Soviet life have been apt to construe Soviet historiography as a political barometer. The character of statements rather than the events purportedly described by them has been the object of study. The tendentiousness of Soviet historical writing —its distortions and its employment of such elusive concepts as “relations of production”—have been not so much obstacles to investigation as they have been its subject matter.

Vincent Rock's A Strategy of Interdependence is a pioneering effort to consider the positive connotations of peace. Considering that a large proportion of “peace research” still takes the form of empirical, inventory-type work on the level of “subsystems” analysis carried out with highly sophisticated and successful computational and allied methods, Rock's work, which is based on a macroconceptual framework, deserves the thorough and careful consideration of political scientists.

By now it can be said that science and technology have entered, if just barely, the normal American political process. For much of our history, except the first years of the Republic, interest in the pursuit and application of physical knowledge was a subject of minor political interest, even at times when fundamental and far-reaching measures, such as the Morrill Act endowing colleges for the benefit of agriculture and technology, were enacted.

In reading the two books under review, I was reminded of Senator Fulbright's book The Arrogance of Power—or at least of the title. Each of these two works, also dealing with the relationships of the United States to the less developed world, but each making a different point, can be summed up in a similar substantive phrase: Geiger's thesis would be “The Humility of Ignorance”; Kaplan's, “Commitment to Responsibility.”