The Marxian idea of the great proletarian revolution that will end the pre-history of mankind and inaugurate its true history sprang into public effectiveness through the Communist Manifesto. Well known as is the progress of this idea after its formulation and publication of 1848, we know comparatively little about the process of its formation in the preceding decade. The main cause of this unsatisfactory state must be sought in the fact that the materials for a study of the genesis of he idea have been completely available only since 1932. In the meantime, the monographic literature on the subject has clarified many details; but a comprehensive study is still a desideratum.

Of the two main political devices of imperialist rule, race was discovered in South Africa and bureaucracy in Algeria, Egypt and India; the former was originally the hardly conscious reaction to tribes of whose humanity European man was ashamed and frightened, whereas the latter was a consequence of that administration by which Europeans had tried to rule foreign peoples whom they felt at the same time to be hopelessly their inferiors and in need of their special protection. Race, in other words, was an escape into an irresponsibility where nothing human could any longer exist and bureaucracy was the result of a responsibility that no man can bear for his fellow man and no people for another people.

The problem of Church-State relations—if under Church is understood the Church universal in its Catholic form—may be answered without too much difficulty on a high abstract level. But on the contingent level of concrete historical development the problem becomes not only highly involved, but almost inexhaustible. For every growth in the Church's doctrine, (for example, the decrees of the Vatican Council and every deeper-going change in the other partner's constitutional forms or in its philosophical and ethical justification or a change in its aims to greater comprehensive competencies) poses a new problem. No wonder, therefore, that in our era of restlessness, of dynamic social changes, of conflicting ideologies fighting for the baffled minds of the masses, of wavering traditions decomposed by the acid of nihilist skepticism, the Church-State problem arises in a new intensity and urgency. The external signs are there for everyone to see: the fury of a Hitler against the “Black International,” the violent persecution of the Church in die satellite countries of the Russian orbit, and the complete subjugation of the Orthodox Church not to a “Christian” Czar but to die confessedly adieistic Politburo. In minor degree the problem is also bothering the people of the United States. A secularist outlook, indeed, may slur over the reality and intensity of the true problem. For the secularized outlook die Church in her essence—and even more so the churches and the sects—is not different in genere from odier numerous private organizations for die furtherance of more or less rational aims and longings in a constitutionally pluralist society. The secularist will, therefore, recognize only one pragmatic rule: tolerance unless the public order and the competency of the police power is directly concerned. Public order includes all too often for the secularist his reform ideas and his social ideals based on a relativist pragmatism in ethics and thus makes him highly sensitive to die criticism by a Church which bases ethics on revelation and on competencies which die secularist can only consider as unfounded and arrogant. Only if the Church remains in the private sphere of private individuals and stays in this “free” sphere where the secularist will tolerate any mass-idiosyncracies, only dius will he condescendingly tolerate the Church. His attitude may be explained to a degree by the fact of an exceedingly strong religious individualism and a subjective and emotional spiritualism, inimical to form and tradition (indigenous to this country and resulting in the easy dissolution of doctrinal unity into a multiplicity of sects). This spiritualist “formlessness” of religion, here, makes the emphasis on organically grown and established forms and on the objective institutions of religious life, so characteristic of the Catholic Church, a somewhat strange and suspicious thing. Yet there is no avoiding the nature and self-understanding of the Church, if the problem of Church and State should be approached. Otherwise the term “Church” would stand only for utterly private opinions by very private individuals in that sphere of irrational feeling and unscientific imagination which for the secularist agnostic is religion. And it is clear that upon such suppositions it would follow that the political authority has exclusive and plenary competency to judge about the compatibility of such a religion with the policy and the public order of the state. The consequence of such thinking is the abolition of the Church-State problem by the complete elimination of the Church.

The principal obstacle to the success of Edouard Drumont's campaign against the Jews in France following the enormous success of La France juive in 1886 was his inability to elaborate a program which could tie effectively “the revolutionary worker and the conservative Christian.” Antisemitism served as a binding force, but Drumont was not so successful in his use of that weapon as Hitler later was in Germany. Most French Socialists by 1891 or 1892 had clearly rejected antisemitism, and by 1892 as well many conservatives had become frightened by the apparent radical aims of the antisemitic campaign. Even those Catholics who were still supporters of Drumont when Captain Dreyfus was arrested in 1894 were followers of Drumont only because no other party or group could attract them.

American wartime policy regarding Russia continues to be disputed heatedly. In these controversies the genesis of Soviet-American relations in World War II, although it obviously played a key role in shaping both the victorious anti-Axis alliance and the uneasy peace that followed, has so far been neglected. To throw light on the initial rapprochement, this paper is presented as a survey of the half-year period in 1941 between the German attack on Russia and the Japanese attack on the United States.

Sumner Welles, Under Secretary of State in 1941, records that “the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, particularly during the period of the German-Soviet agreement, had been practically non-existent.” The Soviet invasion of Finland, sharply resented by American public opinion, served to exacerbate relations further. Only after the German attack of June 22, 1941, did the two great powers draw together.

The most striking peculiarity of the Soviet regime, established in Russia more than thirty years ago, is its claim to be the instrument of a necessary historical and social development It regards itself as the accelerator of the evolution of mankind towards socialism and communism. The details of this evolution are unknown—but its general direction is known to the party, the Bolshevist-Communist party of Lenin and of his successor, Stalin. Therefore, the doctrine determining Soviet policies is not only a theory, but the basis for a practice carried out by an organization. This organization, the party, determines which steps are right and correspond to the demands of the situation. For the socialistic-communist aim will not be accomplished at once and easily; it will be realized by difficult and complicated struggles whose realization requires incessant maneuvering, constant observation of existing power conditions, and careful consideration of the degree of maturity reached in the advance towards the goal.