Recent concern with the process of modernization has heightened interest in the origins of bureaucracy in societies which have succeeded in modernizing. Relatively little attention, however, has been directed to territorial governing elites as an element of bureaucratic development. In what sense did governors in premodern societies resemble modern bureaucratic officials? Did the resemblances increase as the societies approached the modern period; or (as Marion J. Levy suggests) did the bureaucratic elements tend to degrade in the particularistic environment?

The question of populism in Uganda was investigated by Professor D. A. Low in this journal in 1964.1 He argued that the concept of populism was appropriate to describe the political agitation by the independent small landholders and poor peasants against the breakdown of the traditional hierarchical structure of Buganda under the impact of colonial rule. The populists were particularly concerned to reduce their economic disabilities through control of the marketing system for cotton, but at the same time were concerned to articulate ‘the kingdom's corporate solidarity’. To that extent Buganda populism was socially conservative, though it may have seemed radical to the colonial rulers.

Distinctions, and tensions, between urban and rural bases of society are as old as civilization, in every culture. Even in so city-dominated a system as the contemporary United States, where urban models seem almost to monopolize every aspect of the culture, such tensions exist and are reflected, for example, in political attitudes and politicians' strategies. Although about four-fifths of the U.S. population now lives in urban areas, and despite the dwindling number of farmers, the rural present as well as the larger rural past continue to play a distinct role within the national whole and to act on the urban sector.

Almost everyone who has investigated the subject agrees that between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries a great social transformation occurred, primarily in England and France, but to a lesser extent in other European countries and America as well. In sociopolitical terms this change is generally characterized as the rise of liberalism and is linked with the English, French and American Revolutions. The socioeconomic factors are summarized under the general heading of the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism. Finally, there are several cultural dimensions to these changes, most notably the Protestant Reformation, but also the great advances in science, the declining status of the patriarchal family, new trends in philosophy, etc. It is generally felt that these dramatic events, which have shaped the course of Western civilization for four centuries, are, in some way, linked together.

Such is the power of early conditioning, that it is only after many years of reflection that I have come to question the university of the class struggle. Economic exploitation, and an intimate relationship between economic and political power, may be almost universal. But there are some societies in which the relationship to the means of production does not define the political struggle, and in which class conflict is not the source of revolutionary change.

It is axiomatic to the expansion of Europe, informal or otherwise, that the perpetrators of that expansion—explorers, officials, missionaries et al.—brought to the societies they infiltrated the ideas, concepts, technology and prejudices of their own cultures. This was a process, which, by definition, encompassed great variations in its penetrative power, dependent as it was on frequently intermittent contact dictated by policy, opportunity, necessity, and numerous other factors. Cultural borrowing on the part of the recipient polity is often seen as mere technological osmosis, the acquisition of more efficient military techniques and weaponry, and the indiscriminate consumption of the externals of European life in the guise of ‘trade goods’. To rest our conclusions here does a considerable disservice to the subtlety of such contacts.

The quest for information about a historical figure in this study is part of a larger research into the interethnic relationships among the different groups of Arabs in Galilee: peasants and nomads, Muslims, Christians, and Druzes.1 This paper on a strongman who dominated the Galilee for nearly thirty years is written out of a conviction that in his life-history we can see the dynamics of group relations in his time and that his biography is comparable to those of similar figures in other parts of the world.

The peripheral slum population in urban Latin America is still characterized, despite much research to the contrary, as a focus of discontent and political disruptiveness. The resilience of this approach lies in its being imbedded in a more general and unquestionably accepted definition of the slum population as culturally primitive and, hence, most frequently irrational.

Like Dr. Zenner, I have carried out field research in the Galilean region of Israel, and like him have had to rely mainly on older respondents—in my case, exclusively Druze—for basic data. But where Dr. Zenner is an anthropologist with historical interests, I am a psychologist; as such, my thoughts on the kinds of materials that we both collected may provide a worthwhile complement to his. Faced with the fact that memories of Aqiili Agha continue to echo through the Galilee long after his death, the historical scholar asks, ‘what manner of man engendered these accounts?’ while the psychologist asks, ‘why do these memories persist, and in what ways are these memories distorted by the same motives that keep them alive?’. Accordingly, Dr. Zenner uses his subjects as informants on an historic figure, Aqiili Agha, a person external to themselves. As a psychologist I use equivalent materials, from a similar respondent group, as projective data.

Since 1967 when Guy Swanson's challenging book, Religion and Regime, was published there have been several reviews attacking it on fairly specific points, but none of these reviews seems really to examine his basic premises and means for testing those premises. While the present reviewer has neither the space nor in some instances the knowledge to deal with all aspects of this comprehensive book, she has examined in some detail Swanson's basic thesis and model in order to show where they need modification. With greater care and flexibility in categorizing individual political units and by modifying Swanson's idea of immanence, his model could indeed help explain more than the official position on religion in a given state during the Reformation period. It could also be used in explaining the spread of Protestantism, whether or not it was officially accepted, and it could even be applied to the spreading of medieval heresies.

In recent years the study of the ‘Diffusion of Innovations’ has become a very fashionable subject. Everett M. Rogers stressed the fact that his book on the ‘Diffusion of Innovations’ was based on 506 diffusion studies published in the last decades. Of course quantity is not necessarily synonymous with quality and brilliant ideas are not a function of the number of titles printed. The first of the major conclusions reached by Rogers after perusing the 506 diffusion studies is that ‘innovativeness of individuals is related to a modern rather than a traditional orientation’. One may doubt whether such an extraordinary conclusion was worth the input of energy and goodwill that allegedly went into its production, but there is no doubt that innovations and their diffusion are a topic of major relevance in the study of social development. Innovations are to history what mutations are to biology. Actually, innovations show a remarkable tendency to cluster in time and space, and this incidentally suggests that attention should not be devoted exclusively to the eccentric individual genius of the innovators, but should also be extended to the anonymous forces of the environment.

One of the weaknesses of students of African development studies has been their inability to speak in the idiom of Africans. Anthropologists, despite their often magnificent contributions of earlier times in the field of ethnography must find a new role in the present state of African studies. The tendency to conceive precolonial developments in Africa in terms of primitivity, tribality, and feudality, has conveyed the erroneous impression that Africa is characterized by the static nature of its past. In other words, the dynamics of the growth of African societies has traditionally not been their concern. Unfortunately, the African historian who should have been particularly concerned with this aspect of study has, until recently, proved to be of little help. He has first to win the battle of African history, the mopping up operations of which are still going on. But he, too, must now realize that a history of specifically political developments is an anachronism: precolonial Africa had no clear-cut distinction between the political, the economic, and the social. To be meaningful, history must be conceived in its totality. Finally, the economist seems to speak least in the idiom of theAfrican. It is ‘fashionable’ for him, it has been pointed out, to assume that ‘the African economy’ ought not to work in a basically dissimilar fashion from ‘the Western economy’ and that something is wrong with it if it does. The problem of the African economist, then, is that of relevance, a problem that has to be satisfactorily solved if his readiness to offer his services as the specialist ‘doctor’ of African economic problems is to be taken seriously.

It is generally acknowledged that the contemporary revival of Weber's concept of charismatic authority was prompted by its utility in explaining the revolutionary movements of the first half of the twentieth century. The more recent applications of the concept to the study of leadership in the emerging non-Western states, constituted yet another revival, testifying to the analytical power of Weber's conceptual scheme.

Traditional law—Hindu, Muslim and customary—has been almost entirely displaced from the modern Indian legal system. Today, the classical dharmaśāstra component of Hindu law is almost completely obliterated. It remains the original source of various rules of family law. But these rules are intermixed with rules from other sources and are administered in the common-law style, isolated from śāstric techniques of interpretation and procedure. In other fields of law, dharmaśāstra is not employed as a source of precedent, analogy or inspiration. As a procedural-technical system of laws, a corpus of doctrines, techniques and institutions, dharmasastra is no longer functioning. This is equally true of Muslim law. 3 The local customary component of traditional law is also a source of official rules at a few isolated points, but it too has been abandoned as a living source of law.

In an increasingly integrated world social system, the communitarian society must guard its autonomy while it simultaneously adjusts to external institutions in order to survive. In this paper we are concerned with the ways in which two of the most successful or at least enduring examples of collective agriculture and communal living, the kibbutz communities of Israel and the colonies of Hutterian Brethren in North America, are adapting to the pressures of the external society in order to retain their cultural integrity.1 Although the ideologies of these groups are linked in the distant past, from the standpoint of cultural background one could hardly find two more disparate cases: the sixteenth-century Anabaptist Hutterites with their Christian brotherhood, and the kibbutzniks, with their secular socialism and Zionist zeal. These are real differences, but these communities also have two important things in common: a dedication to the principles of communal property and communal living, and making a living by operating large, diversified agricultural enterprises. These similarities create a common need on the part of both Hutterites and kibbutzniks to maintain a certain distance from the surrounding society and its prevailing individualistic organization; to calculate the advantages and disadvantages of an agrarian economy in an industrial age; and to experience virtually identical problems of management and social organization created by large-scale agrarian diversification.

One of the major themes in the intellectual history of the Western world has been the rise and fall of Calvinism. A militant and crusading ideology during the Reformation era, Calvinism was nevertheless showing signs of losing its expansive force by the time of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and the Restoration of the English monarchy (1660). Before much longer, the inner conviction of Calvinist adherents as well as their determination to impose their beliefs upon others somehow faltered. Despite periodic ‘revivals’ such as the Great Awakening of the 1740s in the British colonies, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were, for the most part, a time of gradual weakening for the Calvinist impulse. This weakening was by no means uniform; it occurred at different rates among different groups of people. (Indeed, even in the mid-twentieth century, a virtually undiluted Calvinism remains a powerful force in at least one part of the world: Afrikaans-speaking South Africa.)