Fifty years ago the dreadful slaughter of Verdun and the Somme revealed to the still unsuspecting nations of Europe that the applied science of the machine gun, barbed wire and heavy artillery had changed the nature of warfare. Later on, when writers as different as Winston Churchill, Field-Marshall Lord French, Herbert Read and William Faulkner attempted to explain the general sense of stupefaction at the unprecedented massacres of the First World War, they pointed to a catastrophic gap between what had been expected and what came to pass. According to Winston Churchill, “for a year after the war had begun hardly anyone understood how terrific, how almost inexhaustible were the resources in force, in substance, in virtue, behind every one of the combatants” The military explanation came from the Commander-in-Chief of the British forces: “No previous experience, no conclusion I had been able to draw from campaigns in which I had taken part, or from a close study of the new conditions in which the war of today is waged, had led me to anticipate a war of positions. All my thoughts, all my prospective plans, all my possible alternatives of action, were concentrated upon a war of movement and manoeuvre.”.

In his “Forecasts of Warfare in Fiction: 1803–1914”, I. F. Clarke considers for the greatest part English books and articles, with only a few references to the French fictional output on future wars in the nineteenth century. The most prominent place is given to Captain Danrit and his trilogy. Not a single well known French author is mentioned in the article, with the exception of Victor Hugo, who does not fit into the category of writings which interest Professor Clarke.

Must a viable nation be made up largely of one language group? If this is true, then there are almost insuperable difficulties in the way of establishing a European political community. Recent events in India, Canada, Belgium, Nigeria and several other areas give one cause to think that there may be some basis for drawing that conclusion.

Authors in recent literature on developing polities have been searching for a middle class that could and, some even argue, should assume primary responsibility for all phases of development: social, economic, and political. This middle class has been identified as the New Middle Class (NMC). In contrast to the “old” middle class, the authors maintain, the NMC will create leaders; is more numerous; possesses organizational skills; is honest; develops forward-looking “new men”; in short, is shouldering, and should shoulder, social and political change.

As a major socio-political doctrine in the industrializing West, Marxism has had great impact on die research and theory of political sociology and behavioral political science. Particularly, a great deal of research energy has been expended on establishing the nature and degree of the relationship between social class and political partisanship in Western democracies.

Notwithstanding the wide currency of the concept of charisma in contemporary social science, considerable confusion exists in regard to its employment. While some authors insist that the concept should be used in the Weberian sense, others advocate its emancipation from the ecclesiastical context in order to render it suitable for use in the modern secular context. I will argue that “charisma” is ultimately a product of social structure and hence its nature and content will undergo a transformation as the society itself changes.