In recent years a number of investigators have been concerned with the antiquity of irrigation agriculture in central Mexico and its possible relationship to processes of social and political differentiation in the ancient urban civilizations of that region. Because of its strategic role in the prehistory of Middle America, attention has centered on the Basin of Mexico in the Mexican central plateau. The semi-arid Valley of Teotihuacan, in the northwestern part of the Basin, has been of special concern because it was the locus of the enormous city of Teotihuacan, one of the most powerful and influential centers in Middle America during a large part of the first millenium of the Christian era. Studies to date have dealt largely with historical and archaeological evidence bearing on this problem.

One of the most important developments in the relationship between the state and the individual citizen during the present century has been the growth in the rights of the citizen to claim economic services and cash benefits from the state. Social security programs, which have appeared in nearly every country of the world, are a central feature of this development. Their main purpose has been the prevention of poverty through protection of the individual and his family against loss of income and against certain financial burdens. The growth of these rights, while greatly enriching the status of citizenship, has always been confronted with certain fundamental economic and social questions. What is likely to be the long-run effect on the work habits and productivity of the mass of the people once a nation has eliminated the fear of destitution? Will a growing sense of security increase productivity? Or is it likely that the more surely individuals can count on essential services and minimal incomes, the greater will be the danger of drifting into indifferent work habits? Such a drift would probably take the form of a subtle change in values rather than a dramatic shift in attitude. Whatever the effect may be, it must certainly depend on the nature of the rights granted, social values and attitudes, and a country's economic and socio-political order.

The accelerated tempo of change since the Industrial Revolution has naturally focussed interest on those phases of development that lead from preindustrial to industrial types of society. Economists discussing development problems, and especially those concentrating on the so-called “take-off” phase, thereby bluntly assume that the pre-industrial, “traditional” or “handicraft” types of society were static, as they easily appear when compared to the dynamic tempo of change experienced — and required — in the modern epoch.

This occasional but substantial joumal, devoted by its title to the philosophy of history, will publish, we are told in an editorial note, material “principally in four areas: theories of history, cause, law, explanation, generalisation, determinism; historiography, studies of historians, historical figures and events which illuminate general historiographical problems; method of history, interpretation, selection of facts, objectivity, social and cultural implications of the historian's method; related disciplines, relationship of problems in historical theory and method to those of economic, psychological and other social sciences.” The distinctions here drawn seem, on the whole, to be indicative rather than analytical: “determinism” is grouped a little oddly with its neighbours, and it is not quite clear how the third area (“method of history”) is related either to the first or to the second; but all in all, there is little doubt what the province of a journal of philosophy of history is here taken to he be.To borrow words from the opening lines of the first contribution, an article entitled “History and Theory” by Sir Isaiah Berlin (a member of the editorial committee), “history is what historians do”; and philosophy of history is a mode of enquiry into what it is and how they do it. This philosophy is concerned with the explanation rather than the explicandum; its tools are analytical and its statements second-order statements. Some exceptions to this view can be found in the issues so far published and there may be more to come.

The problem I wish to discuss is how Russian history has differed from that of Western Europe and whether the reasons for these differences continue to be relevant and deep-seated enough to make it seem likely that they will continue in the future.

During the thirteen centuries of their particular co-existence, Islam and Christianity have shown astonishingly little intellectual curiosity about one another. Through the contacts history has afforded them, contacts marked to be sure by other intellectual achievements, a general state of mutual understanding seldom better than elementary has persisted. Perhaps no Christian any longer believes that Mohammed was a renegade cardinal of the Colonna family and few if any Moslems believe that the Virgin Mary is a Person of the Christian Trinity; but they have continued to accuse one another of polytheism, the very last thing of which either is guilty, down to the present time. Today the Christian living outside the Isamic world who can distinguish Sunnite from Shiite is as rare as the Moslem who can distinguish among Protestant sects (many of them can distinguish Catholic and Orthodox from Protestant Christianity).