THE MAN WHO LIVES IN A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY, WHO MEETS and wishes to meet only his fellows and peers, does not allow himself to be influenced by others. He searches for his opinions within himself, but he finds them, or at least recognizes them, only if they are shared by his peers, if they are widely believed and are supported by the whole weight of society, His thoughts easily take an abstract cast, while his heart is freely open to pity. He is argumentative, compassionate and gentle. But being argumentative and compassionate does not fill his whole life. What does he do with his time? What principles govern his actions?

PLATO'S PROPOSALS FOR THE GOOD LIFE OF A COMMUNITY and of an individual are combined in his Republic. It was subtitled ‘On Justice’ and its basic premise is that ‘justice is a better thing than injustice‘. Commentators from Aristotle onwards have tended to look at his specific proposals for a philosophic élite exercizing political sovereignty and they have criticized those proposals which contravene normal social practice, like community of property and community (under strict regulation) of sexual intercourse among the governing élite. But what Plato really sought to present through these proposals was a society in which each individual and each class ‘did its own thing’ in the sense that it contributed to the whole life of the community the particular services and personal qualities it was best able to contribute.

ONE OF THE EXPLANATIONS FOR THE MUTED UPSURGE OF business creativity in Britain is that the cultural milieu remains largely antipathetic to the entrepreneur and to a lesser degree to business. This anti-entrepreneurial heritage is over a century old and cannot be easily eradicated; it will take probably another decade or so of earnest reconsideration of the British industrial malaise and the application of appropriate remedies to bring about a discernible and measurable revival of the industrial spirit. As entrepreneurial activity can speed up the process of industrial revival, the more entrepreneurs surface to create new, viable businesses the better; thus the task of finding and encouraging the entrepreneur assumes new importance; I propose to illustrate ways of approaching this objective.

DESPITE THE UBIQUITOUS PRESENCE OF JAPANESE CARS AND motorcycles in Europe and America, the products of Japan's social science have rarely been exported. In view of this, before dealing with the present state of political science in Japan, it would be better to begin with some explanation of its historical background.

IN BRAZIL, THE RISE OF SCIENTISM AS AN IDEOLOGY IN THE 1870s was part and parcel of a changing social setting. The great war with Lόpez's Paraguay, a big financial burden and no easy victory, laid bare several bottlenecks in economy and society. By the end of the conflict, comprehensive claims for modernization had entered the agenda of new political parties, reformist, liberal and republican. In the huge post-bellum tropical Empire (1870–89) a protracted poIitical struggle for the abolition of slavery, mounting pressures from urban groups claiming a number of liberal reforms, and the growth of umilitarynrest (the ‘Military Question’, 1883–86) tended to dovetail, thereby threatening the monarchy. Intellectually as well as politically the halcyon days of peaceful monarchic rule (1845–68) were gone. The liberal-conservative compromise was doomed. Its would-be philosophical expression – the pious eclecticism of Cousin's Brazilian disciples – began to falter under the combined assault of readers of Darwin and Renan, Spencer and Haeckel – and, last but not least, Comte.

GIVEN THE REMARKABLE CIRCUMSTANCES OF ITS SPONTANEOUS rise to prominence, and considering the sweeping range of social and political reforms achieved, it is scarcely surprising that the Roman tribunate has aroused interest among modern political theorists. According to Karl Loewenstein, this was ‘. . . an organ of officially authorized opposition . . .’. Maurice Duverger cites the tribunate as an example of the ‘separate organization’ of opposition, established specifically to criticize and challenge government policy, while not being expected itself to take part in government. To Ghiţa Ionescu and Isabel de Madariaga the tribunate ‘came near to the modern idea of an institutionalized opposition . . .’.

THERE IS NO SINGLE PREVALENT ‘MODERN SCHOOL OF POLITICS’ in Germany. Territorial fragmentation in the federal system and pillarization of the political subcultures and intellectual camps has had its impact on the organization of political science in Germany after the Second World War.

The new discipline had some roots in German intellectual history, though even the Deutsche Hochschule fur Politik (German Academy for Politics) out of which emerged the largest political science department in Germany, the Otto Suhr-Institute in Berlin, was no equivalent to the Ecole des sciences politiques in Paris or the London School of Economics and Political Science. Nevertheless the older German Staatswissenschaften had some impact on the founding fathers of American political science (Francis Lieber, J. W. Burgess, A. F. Bentley, and Charles Merriam).

THE FUTURE OF MODERN DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY APPEARS TO depend on the amount of political participation, i.e. on how much its individuals will have to participate in political interests and activities. To be sure, the way industrial society functions requires an increasing involvement of the individual in public activities. But is there a danger that the private lives and aspirations of all individuals will be increasingly absorbed by the ‘public cause’? And that the Church, the intellectuals, the artists, the trade unions, and last but not least, the media might become transmission-belts of the ideological-political organizations?

The welfare state gives in principle a due primacy to man's free choice of how to fulfil himself, for himself and not by the state and for the state. But within the welfare state, which could continue this balancing act, which is this balancing act, it is the individuals themselves who seem now to be more and more attracted, for stark economic reasons, but also because of ideological fallacies by the ‘external goods’ rather than by the ontological and interiorized raison d'être. Are we witnessing the transformation of the real man into the citizen, or comrade, of man into fan?

I base this enquiry on the simple proposition that the government of a university ought to be collegiate and that authority within an academic community should be diffuse.

Now it is clear – it became very clear at Manchester in 1981–82 – that the structure of control in most British universities is no longer capable of looking after its members in a rational, intelligent manner. Instead of dispersal there is centralization, and in place of collegiate government there is a persistent drift towards administrative control. Moreover, in relation to the title of this journal, universities are marvellously arranged to oppose but ill-equipped to govern. The words may sound harsh but they were amply illustrated in the crisis that descended on the unversity in July 1981.