The great paradigm of faith in Christian literature from Paul's Epistle to the Romans to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, has been the faith of Abraham. The story of Abraham, the story of a patriarch who trusted against all odds in a divine promise of posterity, has lent itself to this by its very simplicity. To Paul, converted from Pharisaism to Christianity, Abraham was the model of the man who finds righteousness through faith in God's promise rather than through observance of God's law. To Kierkegaard, coming after Kant's ethical interpretation of Christianity, Abraham was the model of the religious man as distinct from the ethical man. There is no doubt a parallel between Kierkegaard's religious man and Paul's man who finds righteousness through faith in God's promise. There is, moreover, a real parallel between both of these and Abraham. Yet there is also a difference all along the line. The difference becomes particularly apparent when Abraham's alternative is considered. The alternative was not to be an ethical man nor even to find righteousness through observance of God's law. It was to rely upon his own devices to secure the posterity which he so desired, to take the normal human precautions, to raise the son of his concubine, to refuse to offer his son in sacrifice.

Between 1940 and 1946, carastrophe befell France and the French Empire. In Europe, France collapsed before the German war machine and submitted to a humiliating treaty and to military occupation. Nor did Liberation and the triumph of de Gaulle's Free French Movement fully revive France's spirit. She had played a relatively small part in the Allied victory and in the conferences of the Powers that sought to restore the peace. The grandeur of France's past, her military tradition, and her civilization meant little in the world of 1946.

African Socialism represents the most comprehensive doctrinal and programmatic attempt to deal with the complex problems of the African continent. During the second decade of the second half of the twentieth century, in the effort to deal with those problems, African Socialism established itself as the ideological rationale for mass movements of solidarity in Ghana, Senegal, Tanzania, Guinea, and Mali. Outside the immediate confines of these countries, the influence of African Socialism has been impressive. Even countries as traditionally conservative as Ethiopia and Liberia have had to acknowledge its existence and in some cases adopt at least its vocabulary.

Mosca's and Pareto's elite conceptions have had a curious fate. Mosca's work, in many ways an anticipation of Pareto's, has been overshadowed by his more brilliant and renowned antagonist from the very beginning, and perhaps only the circumstance that his American editor chose as the title for his Elementi di scienza politica the two words which fairly epitomize his theory (“the ruling class”) enables many a student of sociology to associate Mosca's name with at least a vague notion about the nature of his contribution. Pareto himself, the skeptically disinterested “maître de Céligny,” whose only ambition was to “tell the complete truth and nothing but the truth,” has generally come to be regarded as a “Karl Marx of bourgeoisie,” an intellectual precursor of Fascism, and worse. Both are seen, unjustifiably, as enemies of democracy and detractors of the “new belief in the common man.”

The concepts of class struggle and the leadership of the proletariat figure high among the tenets of Marxist-Leninist ideology and strategy that Soviet theoreticians deem applicable to the developing areas of the world. “A new contingent of the world proletariat — young working class movement of the newly free, independent and colonial countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America — has entered the world arena,” asserted the 1961 Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It is this newly emerging proletariat that hopefully is expected to convert the nationaldemocratic revolutions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America into genuine socialist revolutions of the Marxist-Leninist variety. Hence, the advancement of the working class and the promotion of class struggle have become major concerns of Soviet strategy and tactics in the Third World.

The British general strike of May, 1926, was a strange event. Over two and a half million men left their work and for nine days closed down the British economy. It was the greatest strike ever to take place in Western Europe and it evoked much class bitterness. And yet many middle- and upper-class Englishmen who had been bitter and angry during the strike came eventually to look back on it as a gay adventure which showed how peaceful and sensible Englishmen were. They were proud that they had fought so great an industrial battle to a conclusion without a single death or even the firing of a single shot. Alfred Duff Cooper (Lord Norwich) who was a young back-bencher at the time of the strike (he later became Secretary of State for War and First Lord of the Admiralty) wrote in 1953 in his autobiography: “… it [the strike] threatened the survival of parliamentary government, and it brought the country nearer to revolution than it has ever been.” But despite this, English good sense triumphed: “Happily, no grave errors of judgment were made by either side and the remarkable result was achieved of complete victory without vindictiveness on the one side or rancour on the other. The air was cleared and from that day to this relations between capital and labour have been happier in Great Britain.”.