The unexpected death of former Chilean President Eduardo Frei Montalva in Santiago on 21 January 1982 had suddenly deprived his country and the international Christian Democratic movement of one of its firmest pillars – a force for justice, decency and order in Latin America and the world. At a time when the very profession of politics has fallen into a sort of fashionable disrepute throughout the democtatic world, and the notions of compromis, conciliation, and community seem less attraactive than ideological purification and a post-“political” order, men like Frei serve to remind us that there are alternatives, if we would but pursue them.

A timeless issue in the history of political thought is the relation of theory and practice. From Plato to the present, it has preoccupied political philosophers and statesmen. In the discourse, an uneasy truce has prevailed between those who view theory as a handmaiden of practice and those who maintain that the twain shall never meet. Their differences are illustrated by discussion of the classical distinction questioning whether theory and practice should be paired at all. If theory merely finds expression and can realize itself only through application in practice, it becomes something less than theory conceived of as the quest for truth.

Since Pearl Harbor, American foreign policy during the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover years has receivedalargely negative appraisal from historians. In the aftermath of World War II, the adherents of Wilsonian internationalism dominated the writing of American diplomatic history. The crux of their indictment of the Republican administrations of the twenties was that this country's refusal to participate in collective-security arrangements for upholding the peace was responsible for the breakdown of international order in the years that followed. If the United States had joined the League of Nations, or at the minimum cooperated with the peace-loving nations, Britain, France, and, until the illusions of the wartime alliance collapsed, the Soviet Union, against would-be or actual aggressors, the Second World War could have been avoided. Although this view has continued to have its champions, the hardening of Cold War tensions —and the accompanying disillusionment with the efficacy of the United Nations — spurred a major counterattack upon what George F. Kennan has termed the “legalistic-moralistic approach to international problems.” With the emergence of the so-called realist school came a different—though no more positive—evaluation of the role played by the United States during the age of normalcy.

The question of national identity has been a central theme in Mexican thought since the Revolution of 1910. The writings of Octavio Paz, one of Mexico's most prominent literary figures, are an important and provocative locus for this question. The contribution of Paz to an analysis of Mexican identity must be seen in the broader context of an intellectual revolution in Mexico. This began in the late 1920's and was directed against the prevailing philosophical romanticism represented by Antonio Caso and Jose Vasconcelos. This was, in part, a protest against the anti-intellectualism inherent in an “aesthetic-intuitive” approach of these writers. But it was also the demand for a philosophical perspective more relevant to an emerging Mexican nationalism already being articulated in literature and art. The writings of the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset were of crucial importance in influencing Mexican philosophy towards realism. The key concept taken from Ortega was that of “historical perspectivism”: the view that reality cannot be grasped independently of the point of view from which it is being observed. Perspectives do not distort reality; they constitute it. Philosophy, then, is changed from something abstract and eternal to something concrete and historical. Ortega's historical perspectivism became the inspiration for Mexican thinkers who wished to develop a national philosophy and a concept of “Mexicanidad.”

The Catholic political tradition is at the very center of contemporary Italian politics, but the process by which that tradition came into existence and how it evolved remains obscure and often is subjected to extremely simplistic explanations. Modern Catholic political theory began to take shape during the period of the French Revolution. However, it was the Risorgimento that decisively influenced the political consciousness of Italy's Catholics. The unification of the country in 1860 came about largely at the Church's expense. Pius IX, once the darling of Catholic liberals, responded to the Risorgimento with a fusillade of counterrevolutionary invective in Sillabo degli errori del nostro tempo (8 December 1864), still the most notorious example of anguished Catholic imprecations in the post-Risorgimento period. The Church, never comfortable in the post-1789 world, now made unforgettably clear her utter and irrevocable rejection of that world. Her role as the aggressive critic of modernity hardened into one of the outstanding conventions of nineteenthcentury European culture.

In this analysis I explore the key political and military events that led to the acquisition of state power by the Movimento Popular de Libertacao (MPLA) in Angola and the Frente de Libertacao de Mocambique (FRELIMO) in Mozambique during 1975–1976. At the same time, I discuss the decisive role played by the “guerrilla counterstate,” which the MPLA and FRELIMO movements constructed out of their national liberation party organizations, as a social formation to guide the cultural and political process of rapid social change. Indeed, I argue that one can point to the MPLA's and FRELIMO's divergent experiences with administering their counterstate institutions during the struggle for national liberation as a decisive variable in accounting for their respective successes and failures at institutionalizing social revolution after independence.