EPOCHS OF MAJOR SOCIAL CHANGE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A SPURT to intense intellectual effort. The emergence of the new nations and their economic and political modernization constitutes one such epoch in history. The phenomenon has demanded from the student of society new modes of understanding and analysis, has provided him with both a challenge and an opportunity, and has called for new insights and a continuous re-fashioning of conceptual schemes. What is more, the nature of the change in these societies differs in significant respects from the experience of earlier epochs. It is neither the cumulative result of an outburst of creativity that marked the scientific and industrial revolutions in the West, nor a sharp break with the past brought about by a ‘bourgeois’ or ‘proletarian’ revolution, although undoubtedly both of these strands are involved in varying proportions. A deliberate attempt at condensing several centuries into a short span, the occurrence of ‘simultaneous change’ in so many spheres of life, the phenomenon of cultural dualism in so many societies, and the complex interactions caused by the constant closing in of national and international horizons, have led to a situation of continuous flux and readjustment that seems to have neither a beginning, nor possibly an end.

TO DISCUSS ‘OPPOSITION’ IN A ONE-PARTY SYSTEM, AND IN PARTICULAR in a communist one, might seem on first thought to involve a contradiction in terms. Communist governments have normally been regarded in the West as systems without opposition except in the form of illegal resistance by sections of the population to the regimes themselves. Yet Leonard Schapiro, in his foreword to the first issue of the journal, Government and Opposition, expressed the view that both government and opposition are always and at all times present (or potentially present) in every political order and referred to ‘the tentative process of loyal dissent’ becoming apparent in one-party states. A striking feature of many of the communist states since the death of Stalin has in fact been the emergence of political tendencies that can only be called ‘oppositional’, in the form either of resisting policies enacted or offered by the ruling party, or of proposing alternative courses of action. The observation of these tendencies by Western scholars, and the analysis of the experience of noncommunist states in Africa and Asia, have led to a re-examimtion of the nature of one-party states in general, and to the recognition that not only has opposition never been totally absent from communist systems, but that it has assumed more vigorous and varied forms in recent years.

1967, ONE MIGHT SAY, HAS BEEN GRAMSCI'S YEAR IN ITALY. In April a conference on the communist thinker was held in Cagliari, the capital city of his native island, Sardinia. A noteworthy book and several important essays dealing with his work, and a new history of the PCI from 1921 to 1926, have considerably enriched the already vast literature on the subject. Impassioned debates over Gramsci's political and intellectual legacy have vivified the usually drowsy atmosphere of the ‘cultural dubs’ in a number of middlesize towns, especially in the South. The time seems therefore appropriate for a reappraisal of Gramsci's role in present-day Italian culture and politics. In other words: how does Gramsci affect the contemporary Italian intellectual? More significantly, what does Gramsci mean to the leaders of the crisis-tom party he contributed to found and controlled before the day of his imprisonment?

THE MECHANICS, IMMEDIATE ANTECEDENTS AND IMMEDIATE CONSEquences of the coup d'état of 21 April 1967 in Greece are sufficiently known. By contrast, a defiaitive study of the officers’ plot must await the provision of answers to a number of debated questions (for example, as to the exact extent of the involvement of King Constantine or of members of his personal entourage). Meanwhile, however, it may be possible to try to set the coup, the military regime and the opposition to it which has emerged in the general perspective of recent Greek politics.

IN A SENSE RUSSIAN INDUSTRIALISTS WERE MUCH CLOSER TO THE vital centre of the Revolution of 1905 than any of the intelligentsia opposition; their workers, after all, were out on strike; and it was their private interests which were most directly and most seriously touched by the disturbances. Traditionally passive on political issues, Russian businessmen were catapulted into the ranks of the liberal opposition by the strike movement which rocked Russian industrial centies in 1905. The labour crisis goaded business men into examining government policy towards labour and capital; business groups then broadened their perspective and considered Russian society and the economy as a whole; finally, they injected political terms into the issues and echoed the pleas for constitutional reform and the extension of civil liberties so long championed by the libecal intelligentsia.