Man not only lives within history; he is changed by it, and he causes it to change. This interplay between individual lives and wider historical forces is many-sided, erratic, seemingly contradictory, charged as it is by capricious human emotions. Yet there are common patterns—shared images and styles of imagery—which men call forth in their efforts to deal with the threat and promise of a changing outer and inner world. These patterns can sometimes be seen most clearly in cultures outside of one's own, and I have found them to be extremely vivid in present-day Japan.

The four years between the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the surrender at Appomattox comprise a period of great effort and great achievement in the life of Karl Marx. He was forty-three years old in the spring of 1861, and his intellectual powers were at their height. He was, however, destitute financially and without influence politically. His old promise of a big book on socialist ideology had not been kept, and the despised Lassalle was the acknowledged leader of the German socialists. He was soon to experience great pain from physical afflictions, and to consider declaring bankruptcy. In February 1862, he told Engels, “A lousy life like this is not worth living.” But by the end of 1865 Marx had written drafts of the three volumes of Capital, found a publisher, and attained political leadership in the newly founded International Workingmen's Association. By the time the North claimed victory over the South, Marx could claim substantial success as a socialist theoretician and as a political leader. The ordeal of Karl Marx coincided with the ordeal of the American Federal Union.

Urban sociology impresses by the vastness of its field, its richness, the collections of data, the sophistication of its theories, and by its failure to provide sociological rules of wide application. Its subject matter does not lend itself to simple treatment and many of its principal theories had to be rejected after testing (yet we still carry several of these like millstones around our necks). At this pace progress is slow and we hold no hope of catching up with the current world urban growth. Urban sociologists must take Queen of Hearts' advice and run with all their might to stay in the same place.

I have taken my title from the Onomastikon or Word-Book of an Alexandrian Greek of the second century of our era named Julius Pollux. At the end of a longish section (3.73–83) listing, and sometimes exemplifying, the Greek words which meant “slave” or “enslave”, in certain contexts at least, Pollux noted that there were also men like the helots in Sparta or the penestae in Thessaly who stood “between the free men and the slaves”. It is no use pretending that this work is very penetrating or systematic, at least in the abridged form in which it has come down to us, but the foundation was laid in a much earlier work by a very learned scholar, Aristophanes of Byzantium, who flourished in the first half of the third century B.C. The interest in the brief passage I have cited is that it suggests in so pointed a way that social status could be viewed as a continuum or spectrum; that there were statuses which could only be defined, even if very crudely, as “between slavery and freedom”. Customarily Greek and Roman writers were not concerned with such nuances. To be sure, the Romans had a special word for a freedman, libertus, as distinguished from liber, a free man. When it came to political status, furthermore, distinctions of all kinds were made, necessarily so. But for social status (which I trust I may be permitted, at this stage, to distinguish from political status), and often for purposes of private law, they were satisfied with the simple antinomy, slave or free, even though they could hardly have been unaware of certain gradations.

The following comments on Dr. Lifton's paper will not concern themselves with the validity of his observations about the imagery of historical change in contemporary Japan – I would hardly be competent for such a task. My concern will be exclusively with the conceptual premises of Dr. Lifton's study, and, by implication, with the method of his observations. If psychology is used to explain change, can it be done by means of such categories as those Dr. Lifton has chosen? They, in turn, must inevitably refer to the more basic relationship between individual motives and trans-individual social determinants; or to the distinction between concepts pertaining to psychological, and to social systems. Thus, my comments would be much the same if Dr. Lifton had in a similar manner studied post-war changes in the Netherlands or in Italy.

The territories of the circum-Caribbean region contain some of the most complex societies in the world. Their complexity lies not in their size, degree of internal differentiation or technological development, but in the dependent and fragmented nature of their cultures, the ethnic diversity of their populations, the special nature of their dependent economies, the peculiarities of their political development and the apparent incoherence of their social institutions. It has been suggested that many Caribbean societies have no history of their own but should be viewed as an extension of Europe. Dr. Eric Williams, Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, has recently written in reference to his country:

On August 31st 1962, a country will be free, a miniature state will be established, but a society and a nation will not have been formed.

The Hebrew Bible contains a thrice repeated prohibition against the taking of interest on loans. For many centuries, these injunctions exerted a profound influence on the life and thought of the Western World. However, they have never been significantly observed or consistently enforced in their original, categorical terms. From an absolute prohibition, which treated all interest (of any kind, in any amount) as usurious, we have developed, through economic revolutions and moral transvaluations, a quantitative morality which determines legality by the rate of taking, rather than by the fact of interest. Today, these laws lack force either as social legislation or as religious command. They are virtually ignored and forgotten by men of affairs of all stations, Jewish and Christians alike. Only the social and religious philosophers, historians and other scholars of the past are still excited by the moral implications of this prohibition.

The purpose of this paper is to present briefly the theories of secular social and economic development which can be found in the work of Karl Marx and to place them within the context of general thought and theorizing on these matters during the nineteenth century. I shall not present in this paper any new interpretations of Marx's theories, but shall merely try to show that Marx's views are related at many points to other theories on social and economic development proposed during his life and that in many ways he must be regarded as a typical thinker of that period of European social thought.

The history of agrarian reform is as long as the history of the world, extending back into medieval, ancient, and biblical times. Like many other socio-economic and political movements, agrarian reform movements have been sporadic and discontinuous, although the last two centuries have witnessed almost continuous reform attempts commencing with the French Revolution. These attempts have become very common during the last two decades and have become part and parcel of United Nations programs. Though the literature on reform is extensive, there has been no endeavor to review reform movements in a historical perspective, or to synthesize the knowledge that can be derived therefrom and utilize it in guiding or evaluating reform. The need for this cannot be overestimated.

If we regard corruption as the use of public office or authority for private advantage and gain, then corruption is always latent in centralized polities; but even when manifest, it is not always easy to isolate from other conditions of its context for formal analysis. The Hausa of Northern Nigeria, whose history is fairly well known, and who have long traditions of political centralisation, provide data well worth study from this point of view. The Hausa language contains several terms denoting political conditions and practices of interest in this connection. Zalunci refers to oppression, tilas to compulsion, zamba to oppression and swindling, rikice to fraud and confusion alike, ha'inci to bribery, cin hanci to taking bribes, yi gaisuwa to making greetings or gifts, tara to fines, cin tara to taking (keeping?) fines, wasau to forcible confiscation of property, munafunci to treachery and breaking of political agreements, hamiya to political rivalry, kunjiya to a faction or group of supporters, barantaka to clientage, chapka to allegiance, loyalty, fadanci to courtiership, jekadanci to political agency, kinjibibi and kutukutu to differing types of intrigue, character assassination, and so on. Clearly if an extensive vocabulary describing cows indicates a people's preoccupation with cattle, this Hausa vocabulary indicates parallel preoccupation with political organisation; but to my knowledge, Hausa lacks a term for the concept of political corruption outlined above.

By convention the medieval period of Indian history is supposed to begin either with the death of Harsha, c. 648, or, as in this study, with the Turkish conquest of Northern India (about the beginning of the 13th century), and to end on the eve of the British conquests (about the middle of the 18th century). Although this sets a very late date for the close of the Indian medieval period, the arrangement is not illogical, since it was only with the British conquests that India became subject to the modern capitalistic system. But if we can say with certainty that the society of the period previous to British rule was not capitalistic, it is yet not a simple matter to define its basic elements. It is no longer possible to accept the assumption that its economy was based primarily on production for use, and not exchange, and that commodity production and money economy are entirely a gift of British rule.

This essay has to do mainly with the economics of Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406), historian and statesman of prominent Arab descent and medieval Islam's greatest economist, who spent most of his stormy life in northwest Africa and Egypt, engaged either in scholarly undertakings or in judicial and other governmental activities. His economic opinions, apparently the most advanced of those expressed in medieval Islam, are to be found principally in The Muqaddimah, originally intended as an introduction to his history (Kitāb al-‘Ibar) of the Arab and Muslim world and its pre-Islamic antecedents, though finally transformed into an exposition of the sources of historical change at work in that world. The Muqaddimah, initially completed in 1377, continued to be corrected or added to until shortly before the author's death; though manuscript copies were numerous, it was not issued in printed form until in the 1850's.

Recently, in this journal, René Millon and others discussed the results of their study of irrigation agriculture in the contemporary social setting of the Teotihuacan Valley, Central Mexico. In introducing their study, the authors briefly noted comparable investigations (including my own) and came to the general conclusion that “any system of irrigation agriculture creates its own distinctive potential for both cohesion and conflict, whatever may be the social system of the people who practice it.” Do social systems play as passive a role in determining the social effects of irrigation agriculture as the statement implies? I wish to suggest a distinction which may be important in seeking answers to this question and then to briefly compare certain aspects of Millon's Mexican example with my own study of irrigation agriculture and social organization in the Southern Euphrates Valley of Iraq.

While Professor Habib's main concern is to indicate the extent to which the monetization of the Mughal Empire was accompanied by the development of large-scale money-lending and credit, his discussion suggests three propositions which might be subjected to comparative analysis. These propositions are: (1) A demand for credit tends to emerge as a society's economy becomes at all differentiated, be it literate or not. (2) Demand almost invariably generates supply in the sense that necessity generates invention. (3) How this demand is met is conditioned by the extent to which a population is nonhomogeneous and differentially subject to credit-restricting constraints.

The Norman and Swabian monarchy has a rich and valuable bibliography. Scholarly interest has been refreshed at intervals by conferences on it, by comparative notes and latterly by polemics. But these occasional papers do not explain by themselves the continuing interest of the subject, which arises from the extraordinary political precocity of this monarchy, and from the personalities of two kings who stand among the great statesmen of all time, Roger II and Frederick of Swabia.

The purpose of this article is to shed some light on contemporary Indian problems of defense and civil-military relations through an examination of the role of the military in ancient Hindu society.

Is it quite certain that analysts of political forces in Africa are looking in all the right corners? We may perhaps recall that there have been critical lacunae before. After all African nationalism crept up unawares on a previous generation; and if, to take a wider example, one looks at studies of Indian politics before about 1950 there is hardly any analysis of the role of caste. It seems worthwhile, therefore, to go a-probing.