On the cold, clear morning of March 4, 1897, William McKinley took the oath of office as president of the United States. The very air seemed to promise better times. The newspapers called it “McKinley weather,” and all Americans hoped “The Advance Agent of Prosperity” would fulfill his title and restore political peace and economic prosperity to a nation that had passed through years of depression, social strife, and party turmoil.

Anthropologists, political scientists and sociologists have produced many excellent studies of political developments in modern Africa. Much, however, remains to be done; for work interpreting the meaning of modern African politics is barely under way. This essay seeks to contribute to that work. It analyzes African political thought and action in order to uncover the major premises that underlie African political phenomena, and it suggests that clarification of these premises is the necessary preliminary to an adequate theoretical interpretation of modern African politics.

It is readily recognized that the basic relationship between church and state within Euro-American political systems is relatively stabilized. This recognition prevails, even though that stability may be disturbed slightly and intermittently when older norms are reexamined by responsible public authorities. The result of such a reexamination may give rise to public outcry, such as occurred in connection with the recent Supreme Court decision on school prayers. But what is essentially a “resolved” issue in Western politics remains a problematical dilemma in many other parts of the world. It has been widely assumed that the future of all political systems lies in the same direction: namely, that political systems the world over will be secularized as much as possible and that religion, as a normative system or as a set of institutional arrangements, will have only tangential influence in the determination of public policies and the shaping of future societies.

The beginnings of Japanese liberalism date from the middle of the nineteenth century and appear as a product of the enlightenment movement during the Meiji Restoration. But the term Jiyushugi, today understood as equivalent to liberalism in English, has quite a different meaning in traditional Japanese usage. Jiyu consists of two Chinese characters Ji and yu meaning “to follow oneself” or “to use self as the only source of judgment for one's behavior”; shugi is translated as “principle” or “doctrine”. Thus, the word has traditionally been used, with very rare exceptions, to mean egoistic and selfish behavior that deviates from social norms and is specifically heedless of others.

The relations between Lord Acton and his ecclesiastical leaders did not pass without comment in his own lifetime, nor have they been neglected since. Yet the picture remains somewhat blurred. It is not that there are important items of information still missing; we may not yet know everything, but we do know a great deal, and have known it for several decades. The picture is not incomplete; rather, it is out of focus. Nor will this necessarily be cured by more research, for history does not write itself. A more detailed picture might still be out of focus.

In Marx's writings there is a notion of “nature” as applied to man, which is not the notion ordinarily imputed to Marx. This notion is a more fundamental one and offers the possibility of a fresh analysis of certain aspects of Marx's theory on man and society. Up to now it has not been exploited by Marx's American commentators.