THE AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION JUST HELD APPEARS to have been a momentous event. It was the greatest repudiation of an incumbent president and party in America since that of Hoover and the Republicans in 1931. Predicted by no one — by neither political scientist, pollster nor politician — this was as much a surprise to joyful Republicans as to luckless Democrats. The voters had not discussed the matter much, except in deprecatory terms borrowed from the media, and on the morning after they too looked around among themselves with wonder and satisfaction.

It could hardly be believed, as Carter's pollster asserted, that everyone turned to Reagan on the last day when the hostages held in Iran failed to appear. Something so considerable must have been meditated, or at least prepared; and this misfortune for Carter does not explain why the Democratic Senators, who were not involved with Iran, were voted out. Perhaps the large number of ‘undecideds’ were Reagan voters, too embarrassed to confess their decision to callers they suspected were unsympathetic. Or perhaps — a wishful fantasy of mine — the voters deliberately did not disclose their intention to the pollsters since they knew that sovereignty stays alive only with an occasional surprise. The voters may have sensed that they can be exploited if they can be predicted.

THE BRITISH CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT ELECTED IN MAY 1979 had, by August 1980, taken three decisions in respect of nuclear weapons and civil defence which in portent had had few peacetime parallels. These decisions naturally had a technical as well as a political dimension yet, until at least the spring of 1981, the involvement of the British scientific community in public discussion of the underlying issues remained negligible. No similar decisions could be taken, or even contemplated, in the United States without provoking a response both substantial and professional from American scientists. How does one explain the attitude, or lack of it, in this context of their British counterparts? Why, when these decisions were announced, did British scientists behave, or appear to behave, as political eunuchs? Are there no matters which rouse them to political involvement? Or are they perhaps more politically effective precisely because they pursue a low-profile course? These questions are important and it is worth trying to answer them. Before attempting to do so, however, it will be helpful both to identify the British decisions of 1979–80 referred to above, and also to outline such reaction to them on the part of the British technical community as had, in fact, occurred by the spring of 1981.

THE TERM ‘MAJORITY RULE’ IS OFTEN USED EITHER AS A synonym of democracy or as one of its defining characteristics. An important contribution that the scholars belonging to the consociational school have made to democratic theory is to point out that this close identification of majorit rule and democracy is fallacious. Majoritarian democracy, of which the Westminster model is the ideal type, is not the only form of democracy; the major alternative is consociational democracy. Furthermore, majority rule is not necessarily the best form of democracy; especially in plural societies - that is, societies deeply divided by religious, ideological, cultural, linguistic, ethnic, or racial cleavages into separate sub-societies with their own political parties, interest groups, and media of communication - consociational democracy is the more suitable democratic model.

ELECTIONS HAVE ALWAYS CONSTITUTED A PARTICULARLY sharp rupture to the general character of the West German political process, which depends heavily on accommodation by elite negotiation. In the arenas of parliamentary and executive politics a pervasive style of amicable agreement exists at elite levels, and the political value of Sachlichkeit (objectivity) remains important. Hence, in the legislative period 1976–80 over 90 per cent of legislation passed the Bundestag unanimously. An inquisitorial, as opposed to adversary, style of politics plays an important role in the work of the powerful committees of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat, the two legislative chambers in Bonn. Accordingly, and by contrast, elections tend to take on a remarkably dramatic character, even if, as in 1980, there appears to be little polarization of opinion about concrete issues of policy. British politics is, of course, characterized by the influence of the arena of electoral politics, of the ‘cut-and-thrust’ of competitive adversary politics, on other arenas of politics.

WHATEVER MAY BE IN DOUBT ABOUT THE CURRENT CRISIS IN the Labour Party, one thing is clear. In a sense true of no other internal crisis in the 62 years since the loose and inchoate ‘Labour Alliance’ of 1900 first became a true political party, with individual members and a distinctive claim to power, the arguments which have provoked it concern the rules of the game as well as moves within the game: the way in which party decisions are made and enforced, as well as the content of the decisions themselves. This, of course, is why the arguments are so fierce and the crisis so deep. Policy defeats can be revised later if Fortune's wheel turns again. Constitutional defeats damage the losers permanently. It is true, no doubt, that both sides in the current struggle have exaggerated the likely consequences of the changes forced through at the October party conference. The old French saying that there is more in common between two deputies, one of whom is a Communist, than between two Communists, one of whom is a deputy has not suddenly lost all relevance to Westminster merely because Labour MPs will have to face compulsory reselection between general elections, or because the party leader is elected in an electoral college. Reselection will not re-make the Parliamentary Labour Party in the image of constituency management committees, and the creation of an electoral college will not free the leader from the need to win and hold the confidence of his parliamentary colleagues. When all the necessary qualifications have been made, however, there can be no doubt that the constitutional changes will shift the balance of party power to the advantage of the Left and to the detriment of the Right — as, of course, they were intended to do. That is what the struggle has been about; and the media have been right to concentrate their attention on that aspect of it.

BARON HOLBACH'S EPIGRAMMATIC DESCRIPTION OF RELIGION as ‘the “eau de vie” of the people’ will undoubtedly outlive the memory of its author. On the other hand, Kingsley's advocacy of Christian socialism to the masses clearly implied the presumption that religion could also be their amphetamine. This latter possibility was systematically explored by Troeltsch with reference to Christianity. Weber deepened the analysis of the revolutionary potential of religion and extended it to the other world religions of salvation. There was something the philosophes did not know; religion could be revolutionary.

THE PRESIDENTIAL AND THE LEGISLATIVE ELECTIONS OF MAY-June 1981 have profoundly altered the political landscape of France. The change may be seen not only in the men who have now acceded to office but also in the measures which they have proposed or have already carried out. The new rulers of France intend to transform political society, economic relations and institutional arrangements. The change will be significant. Nevertheless, it should not be exaggerated. Large elements of continuity may clearly be discerned in both personnel and policies. Moreover, there are important international and domestic pressures which may force the new Socialist leaders singularly to limit their ambitions.

HAS ORGANIZED COMMUNISM GONE SOUR IN THE GERMAN Democratic Republic? Various signs suggest that it indeed has. Since late 1975, the regime of Erich Honecker has employed increasingly severe measures to combat internal dissent; and these measures have also been directed against West German media representatives, no less. On the economic front, estimates of national growth for 1979 vary rather widely — from 3 to 5.6 per cent. Yet no matter which figure is accepted, it is increasingly evident that growing international indebtedness to Western financial institutions (calculated to be between $5–6 billion), plus chronic energy shortages and recent agricultural failures have made East Germany's economic prospects gloomier than they have been since the late 1960s. The wave of emigration requests which eeted East Germany's signature of the Helsinki Agreement or1975 at least suggests that average citizens will take action on their own when the occasion allows them to do so. Added to the above consideration, of course, is the 'trade in humans' (Menschenhandel) which has resulted in the 'sale' of approximately 11,000 individuals from East Germany to West Germany between 1964 and 1975, according to one informed Western writer.

ONE APPROACH TO STUDYING THE CONSTITUTIONS OF THE People's Republic of China (PRC) has been to conclude that they are really a sham, designed to conceal the absence of citizen rights, and therefore presumably of little benefit as documents for study. Constitutions, however, are forms of political expression, and are perhaps best approached as reflections of changes in policy orientation. Their purposes include the formal institutionalization of past changes, the expression of immediate political priorities and laying the foundations for reorientations in basic policy.

THE CAUSES AND EFFECTS OF THE POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS in Poland are innumerable and difficult to unravel. Rightly the Western press has focused on the ideological aspects and on the prominent part played by the Catholic Church. This article chooses to focus more on social factors and on the manner in which traditional forces in Polish society have persisted into the state-socialist period.

While the recent bout of industrial protest in Poland was initially concerned with meat prices, it raised the question of control over much wider aspects of social consumption, and of dissatisfaction on the part of some workers with work-force democracy, and of others with the consequences of economic reform. The Polish industrial manual working class has a complex structure but the gap between it and the white-collar intelligentsia is not wide, and the pull and push of events in the work place can result in a pattern of shifting alliances. This has serious implications for the claim that the long-awaited union of intelligentsia and working class in Poland is at last beginning to appear. In order to put these problems in the right perspective one has to examine three different factors: the economic policy of the Polish Communist government, the new composition of the work force and the new structure of the intelligentsia.

ONE OF THE INNOVATIONS OF THE 1981 ELECTIONS IN ISRAEL which caught the eye, was the frequent use of ‘this time’ in campaign slogans. ‘This time only the Labour Alignment!’ ‘This time the Likud!’ shouted the slogans from all the billboards. This is an appeal to political support based on a short-term time perspective. This appeal differs greatly from that which characterized the Israeli ideological, mass-membership parties in previous periods.

The change in party slogans is a response to changes in the electorate. These changes in the electorate are most clearly reflected in the magnitude of the ‘undecided‘ vote and of its oscillation between different parties. The ‘undecided’ vote which used to be very low, amounted to about 40 per cent according to polls made in 1977 in the preelection period, and to about 30 per cent in the period preceding the 1981 elections. Moreover, the polls pointed to a particularly great oscillation of the electorate in the pre-1981 election period: the political forecast in December 1980 was around 60 Labour seats and around 28 Likud seats. In the beginnin of June 1981, the pendulum swung. The forecast for Labour fell to 30-33 seats while of Likud rose to 47 or even 49 seats. In the elections the race between Likud and Labour was very close. The results were 47 to Labour and 48 to Likud (as against 32 Labour and 43 Likud in 1977).

AS IS WELL-KNOWN, THE YEARS FOLLOWING THE SOVIET INcursion of 1968 saw drastic purges in Czechoslovakia. The number of those expelled from the Party was put by Vasil Bilak, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, at 461,751; a high proportion of these lost their jobs as well. (Bilak in fact claimed that only 30 per cent of those expelled — about 150,000 — had lost their jobs; but as Zdenek Mlynif and Karel Kaplan were quick to point out, Bilak's statistics took no account of those who were still employed but with lower status: medical consultants demoted to hospital porters, bank managers as office cleaners — in general, professionals redeployed in unskilled labour.) Those expelled suffered in other respects as well; in particular, their children tended to be denied higher or secondary education.

THE STATE, IN THE STRONGEST MEANING OF THE WORD, IS NOT indispensable to the functioning of civil society. Indeed society can often so organize itself as to prevent the emergence of a state intent on establishing itself as an absolute power. The very existence of the state itself, the consequence of particular sociohistorical processes, upsets the whole of the social system which is henceforth ordered around it. The relationships between the nobility, the bourgeoisie, the working class or, today, the middle classes, differ profoundly according to whether these groups were confronted by a strongly institutionalized state or a centre which exercised essentially co-ordinating functions. Still today the political systems which have simultaneously a centre and a state (France) can be distinguished from those which have a weak state without a real centre (Italy) or a centre without a genuine state (Great Britain, the United States) or neither centre nor state (Switzerland). In the first two cases, in varying degrees, the state dominates and manages civil society; in the two latter, civil society manages itself. It is therefore possible to distinguish societies in which the state attempts to dominate the social system by endowing itself with a strong bureaucracy (ideal type: France; paralle development: Prussia, Spain, Italy) from those in which the organization of civil society makes it impossible for a powerful state and a powerful dominating bureaucracy to emerge (ideal type: Great Britain; parallel development: the United States and the consociational democracies like Switzerland). Without claiming to retrace methodically the history of each of these states or of their political centres, I should like to sketch a broad outline of their evolution with the object of showing that the different relations by which the many governing groups are linked together within the different social systems depend sometimes on the formation of the state and sometimes on the simple formation of a political centre.

FOR MANY YEARS PUBLIC OPINION SURVEYS HAVE INDICATED that the peoples of the European Community nations support the principle that various functions now handled at the national level should be handled by European Community institutions. Opponents of supranational political integration have pointed out quite correctly that representative democracy is not based on public opinion polls and that the democratically elected representatives of the people can and should decide such questions.

In June 1979 a European Parliament was elected by the direct vote of the citizens of the nine member–countries of the European Community. For the first time in history, a body exists that was democratically elected by the people of the European Community nations rather than simply being appointed by the respective national parliaments. Though direct election of the European Parliament does not automatically bring increased powers to that institution, it clearly has enhanced the legitimacy of its claim to represent the people of the European Community. The candidates for the Euro ean Parliament represented all significant political parties an1 all shades of political opinion, ranging from the most convinced partisans of supranational political integration to the most ardent defenders of national sovereignty. The voters have chosen among them: what is the result?

PARTY HAS LOST NONE OF ITS ATTRACTIONS. THE DEVELOPMENT of party is regarded by recent historians, as it was by Namier, as the key to the development of the modern British political system. Indeed, the Whig historians of the pre-Namierite age had made the same assumption. But to what extent is it justified? And to what extent has the continued absorption of historians with the question of party development in British history elicited explanations of that development which are both consistent and adequate?

IN THIS PRESENT-DAY WORLD, THE STATE - AND THIS IS TYPIcally the more or less sovereign national state - is both indispensable and inadequate. It is an indispensable instrument to get many things done, to provide many needed services and to deal with many real problems. But it is inadequate to cope with an increasing number of other problems of life and death for many of its inhabitants. No state today can protect the lives of its citizens in the case of thermonuclear war against it, nor against the poisonous fall-out from thermonuclear war outside its borders. No national state can protect the world's ecology, the oceans and the atmosphere, nor can any one state sove the problems of worldwide population growth or lack of raw materials, energy or food. In all these respects, the first and basic promise of government - to protect the lives of its citizens - has become illusory.

THIS ARTICLE WILL ATTEMPT TO SHOW THAT WHILE MOST OF the recent writing on ‘corporatism’ is intellectually stimulating it does not enable any fuller understanding of the forces shaping government actions than the ‘pluralist’ and ‘parliamentarian’ theses which it has questioned.

I SHOULD LIKE TO START WITH AN EXTREMELY SIMPLE STATEment about the French Revolution. This is that there are many historical arguments among historians on many subjects, but that none of these arguments is so intense and so heated as the one which takes place in every generation about the French Revolution. It is as though the historical interpretation of this particular subject and the arguments of specialists directly reflect the political struggles and the gamble for power. It is true that we are all aware today that there are no unbiased historical interpretations: the selection of facts which provide the raw material for the historian's work is already the result of a choice, even although that choice is not an explicit one. To some extent, history is always the result of a relationship between the present and the past and more specifically between the characteristics of an individual and the vast realm of his possible roots in the past. But, nevertheless, even within this relative framework, not all the themes of history are equally relevant to the present interests of the historian and to the passions of his public. The subject of Clovis, for example, and of the Frankish invasions was of burning interest in the eighteenth century, because historians of that era thought that the Frankish invasions were the source of the division between the nobility and the common people: the conquerors having evolved into the nobility and the conquered having become the commoners. Today, the Germanic invasions are no longer considered to contain or reveal any secret about French society: they have become once again a subject for historiography, left to scholars and to the arguments of specialists.