The signing in Helsinki of the agreement on security and cooperation in Europe has led to bitter criticism of President Ford and of the policy under which the United States drifted into recognizing Soviet acquisition of 114,000 square miles of Finnish, Polish, German, Czechoslovak, and Romanian territory, apparently sanctified as well Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and recognized the “permanent” division of Europe. In return for endorsing these Soviet conquests, the Western states received some vague promises that the Soviet Union and the East European states would take a “positive and humanitarian attitude” towards applications from their citizens to rejoin their families in the West, would “facilitate the improvement of the dissemination” of publications from other countries, would provide three weeks' notice of large military maneuvers within 156 miles of frontiers, and assured that every European state would be free from “external influence.” All these phrases seem small recompense for such great concessions and from two years of negotiation by 492 diplomats, especially when hope in Western Europe in particular had been high for an end to jamming, censorship, and control over travel. Critics noted in particular that the formal summit agreement awarded the Soviet Union prizes it had sought since 1954, while the parallel discussion of reducing military forces in Eastern and Western Europe, in which the Soviet Union and its associates maintain immense superiorities, has long been stalled. Indeed, now that the West no longer has the lever of the Geneva talks, it has little pressure to persuade the Soviet Union to discuss mutual balanced force reductions. Many now fear that the Soviet Union will press instead for a collective security agreement, which would have no meaning, but which would totally demolish NATO, while leaving the Soviets on the commanding military heights in Eastern Europe.

It is not difficult to discern the historic factors which have brought the Middle East into its present position of “crisis area” in the foreign relations of the United States. The reasons why we have gotten from there to here, from the somnolent state of Middle Eastern affairs in, say, the year 1914 and their still sleepy condition in 1939 to the split-second enmities and antagonisms of the mid-1970's have been pointed up by events of recent history. First of all there was the rise of nationalism. Evident in Egypt in the late nineteenth century, it spread slowly to the other Arabic-speaking peoples of the region. Nationalism in the Middle East has become extremely important during the last twenty-five years.

Once upon a time there was a set of propositions that made up the Faith. Not everyone knew even most of these propositions; not even the pope knew all of them, for they weren't all uttered yet, and perhaps some later pope would promulgate a proposition that the present pope didn't know, except of course implicitly;for we all—unless we were heretics—held implicitly all the true propositions of Faith there could be, right to the end of time. There were many difficult problems: those that gathered round the early chapters of Genesis—the woman fashioned out of a rib, the talking serpent, the ages of the patriarchs; those that arose from reflection upon the history of the church—the rough and depraved and inadequate men who had held the Roman bishopric from time to time, the prevalence historically of an attachment (thought down to modern times almost a badge of orthodoxy) to the practice of religious persecution.

After the summit meeting in Moscow in June 1974, Dr. Kissinger called for a national debateon the issue of strategic arms and arms control. No such debate has taken place. It has been overtaken by the more immediate issues of inflation, the liquidity of the international banking system, and the extent to which Arab oil profits can be reduced, offset or recycled. But these more immediate issues are, in turn, dependent on what happens in the Middle East with its tripleproblem of the unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict, the oil weapon, and Soviet ambitions to control the world's economic jugular, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. The ability of the United States favorably to influence the resolution of these issues depends upon the strength of its ties with other countries with similar interests and its economicand military potential. Thus, we are once more brought face to face with the interdependence ofour economic and our national security policies.

In classical political thought, politics and art were alike since both were works of the practical, not the speculative, reason, within whose ample scope there was great room for things to be otherwise. Art and politics differed because politics was limited by its end, and therefore freed from the absolute indifference of pure possibility which looked to existence only as an alternative, as something which had no need of existence whatsoever, even though it was the ultimate origin of change. Art, on the other hand, was limited by the esthetic perhaps, but was not restricted by the requirement of definite being —a two-headed man, a green nose, a flying cow, any conceivable combination of sounds, shapes, or colors were thus quite possible artistically. Their reality depended on the creativity of the artist and his will to make.

It is by now a commonplace among American political scientists that the philosophical grounding of political inquiry is in dire need of critical reflection and serious repair, if not radical reconstruction. The sources of this widespread recognition are no doubt diverse, but not the least resides in the impact of the key ideas of Thomas Kuhn's celebrated work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For, although Kuhn's work was narrowly interpreted by Almond, Truman, and other key figures in the behavioral elite corps to conform to their image of science (basically a naive positivist image), the very breadth and subtlety of Kuhn's work, his commitment to formulating his conception of science from the history of science as practiced, and his ultimate antagonism to that tradition of the philosophy of science (logical positivism/empiricism) which behavioralists have embraced ensured that a lively and contentious debate would ensue.

The last yearly meeting of the Club of Rome, held October 14–17, 1974, in Berlin, featured the public presentation of the “Second Report to the Club of Rome” drafted by Mihajlo Mesarovic and Eduard Pestel.

That report, Mankind at the Turning Point, inaugurates a new stage in research done under the auspices of the Club of Rome and it provides, in my opinion, a good basis for thinking about the evolution of the international system which frames the destiny of our nation-states.

So much has been written in the past few decades about the United States involvement in the Korean and Vietnamese wars that it is difficult to move beyond the usual arguments and the rather skewed assumptions on which they rest. However, the need for fresh and serious review of these matters is essential to understand the new era of multipolar politics now dawning. The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to ascertain persistent patterns of the underlying rationale of the politics of American involvement in Asia; second, to critically analyze United States foreign policy in Korea and Vietnam during the war periods of 1950–53 and 1961–73.

Bernard Shaw's still lingering statement, “a Catholic university is a contradiction in terms,” is a tautology or a prejudice. A tautology if we read it literally to mean: “A universal university is a contradiction in terms.” A prejudice if we supply the historical depth and turn it into a more precise statement, to wit: “A university under such authoritarian strictures by the Church as was the university of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries contradicts the notion of free inquiry which our century identifies with the university.”

The relationship between politics and religion in the United States has been studied by political scientists from many perspectives. Church-state relations, religious bloc voting, political issues with strong religious overtones—these and other politico-religious phenomena have long been subjects of scholarly activity within the discipline. However, the use of religious symbols in politics has been much neglected by political scientists (though not by sociologists, psychologists and scholars). Long ago Harold D. Lasswell said “It is of the utmost importance to political science to examine in detail … the processes of symbolization.” Religious symbolization in American politics urges itself upon the political analyst, moreover, because of “the unique relationship” which has existed between religion and politics throughout the history of the nation. And there are, perhaps, no richer and more concentrated examples of politico-religious symbolism than those found in the campaign oratory to which the American public is regularly subjected. Candidates for the American presidency have long resorted to the manipulation of such symbols. Hence, a presidential campaign is a good situation for the study of the political use of religious symbols. The 1972 contest between George McGovern and Richard Nixon is an excellent case study. Frequently characterized by the public press as an election to choose “a national minister” because of the manifest use of politico-religious symbols by the candidates, the campaign provides ample evidence of the uses to which religious symbolization can be applied in American politics.

Felix Raab has argued that the interpretation of James Harrington's thought is today a key issue in the study of midseventeenth- century English history because, “at one point or another, hisideas have become relevant to every recent analysis of that difficult period.” In the not too distant past such a statement would have been unthinkable. Harrington's place in the history of political thought is unsettled, as might be expected of a thinker generally known as the creator of an exceptionally mundane Utopia. However, the rise, elaboration, and criticism of interpretations of Harrington in the last few decades has produced a rather large and discordant body of literature, enlivened by the peculiar assertion of exactly contrary interpretations of Harrington's intent and of his relations to the politics of his own day. Another curious aspect of this renewed interest in Harrington is the extent to which the various interpretations cohere with the ideological commitments of the interpreters—a fact which by itself warrants no more then caution in accepting any of these readings, but which also displays continuity with other uses2 that have been made of Harrington.

In recent years, scholars have been increasingly applying “behavioral” approaches to the study of Chinese politics. One interesting strain of this is the work of Lucian Pye and Richard Solomon, who stress the study of Chinese “political culture” analyzed mainly in terms of an “authority crisis.” Solomon's explication is the more detailed and elaborate. Part of his thesis is that harmony and peace are “basic and enduring political values in the Confucian tradition,” and therefore “questions of the handling of social conflict constitute a major area of tension in the Chinese political culture.” The Chinese hopes for order and believes that this comes about only through strong authority; without such authority there is luan, “chaos.” But the means required to exercise authority create resentment, and resentment becomes the basis for more luan.

In late 1927 the Communist Party of South Africa learned with surprise and shock that the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow had drafted a radical new policy for its distant affiliate in southernmost Africa, the only communist party south of the Sahara. The new policy, focused upon the slogan, “an independent native South African republic, as a stage towards a workers' and peasants' government with full, equal rights for all races, black, colored, and white” seemed to a majority of the small multiracial membership of the South African party to be directly counter to the old policy which, after a difficult process of internal disagreements and tactical reorientation, was bringing its first significant wave of recruits and support among the black majority of the country. The slogan proposed from Moscow, quenching dreams of socialism, generated widespread opposition within the party, but an unhearing Comintern decreed in October, 1928, that the South Africans must accept the new line. The consequences of the imposition of the new slogan and the subsequent bolshevization of the party shook the Communist Party of South Africa to its roots.

Modern politics is often said to be fundamentally secular, and many who do not say so may find the proposition too obvious to need stating. In a sense, perhaps, it is obvious; but what does it mean? No doubt it is valuable to have a term to describe a society without religion, or one in which common affairs are not religiously directed. But it is odd to suppose that the sheer absence of a characteristic can serve effectively to define a type of society; for one thing, we would need to know what kind of religion was absent, or in what respects religion was lacking, before we could assess what significance this absence could be said to have; for another, to define a society by the absence of a certain feature would seem to point to an intense preoccupation with its presence or absence, yet it is precisely the lack of preoccupation with religion that is held to characterize secular man. A fortiori, it is odd to suppose that secularity not only serves to distinguish broadly among kinds of societies—those with and without religion—but that it also determines the principal features of social and political behavior, to such an extent that one can speak of a secular political culture as a distinct and well-marked type.

Spain entered the twentieth century as a relatively underdeveloped nation still deeply rooted in her traditional past. Spanish life had barely begun to experience the stresses of social and economic transformation that recent scholars have identified with the modernization process. Toward the end of the last century, Spanish industry grew at a rapid pace, particularly in the Basque and Catalan regions, but the nation as a whole continued to lag behind the rest of Western Europe in the years before 1914. Although the recently formed trade union movements expanded in response to the new complex of urban-industrial problems, their organizational and political strength remained ineffective until World War I. In the other regions of Spain an agrarian economy, replete with strong anarchist movements, dominated and determined a social order in which provincialism, widespread subsistence living standards, and extensive illiteracy persisted.

The similarities between postwar France and Italy are striking. Both countries are traditionally Catholic. Both emerged from the Second World War with vital Communist organizations enjoying widespread popular support—owing in large measure to the leading roles the Communists played in their national resistance movements during World War II. Since the war, both the French and Italian Communist political parties-—by themselves—could count on commanding between one-fifth and one-fourth of the vote. France and Italy also emerged from the war with significant Christian Democratic movements and parties—-much stronger than analogous groupings in prewar days. Both countries had threatening Communist movements powerful enough to make credible attempts at seizing power without the aid of Soviet troops. And in both countries the Christian Democratic movement was a major obstacle to Communist designs. In both countries Social Democratic movements reemerged, but inferior to the Communists in cohesionand poised awkwardly between massive Communist and Catholic subcultures. In both countries a substantial part of the labor movement was dominated, not by gradualists, but by Marxist-Leninists who challengedthe very legitimacy of the regime. Not surprisingly, the character of the opposition reflected deep traditions of civic alienation, skepticism, and apathy. Finally, both countries have suffered from an ill-developed history of democratic practices, and have been notably subject to governmental instability.

The conventional wisdom on the basic philosophy of the constitutional concept of the separation of powers is well stated in The Federalist. In No. 47, citing the authority of the “celebrated Montesquieu,” James Madison wrote that “the accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Clearly the Founding Fathers feared the corrupting influence of power. As Madison asked in No. 51, “what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Another concise statement of the separation of powers concept is found in the famous remark made by Justice Brandeis in 1926, in his dissenting opinion in the Myers case, that “the doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by the Convention of 1787 not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was not to avoid friction, but, by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of governmental powers among three departments, to save the people from autocracy.”

Does the phenomenon which occurred during the last decade and has been loosely called the “New Catholic Left” include the Catholic Worker movement? Leaders of the Catholic Peace movement, civil rights activists and proponents of social justice in many instances have actively participated in the Catholic Worker movement or have at least been in contact with its followers. Yet, upon studying the Catholic Worker, a seeming paradox arises: the ideology of the Catholic Worker is a product of neither the American Left nor of liberal Catholicism but, rather, of the European Right. The ideology of the Catholic Worker, which is presented in the “Easy Essays” of Peter Maurin, is understandable only in the context of reactionary French Social Catholicism and allied movements. It is in the consequent repudiation of most of those ideas which were developed during the Enlightenment and became the basic presuppositions of American economics, politics and society that the radicalism of the Catholic Worker lies.

Jacques Ellul today lives and works in the French city in which he was born over sixty years ago, Bordeaux. His public life has two major aspects. First, he is a scholar, with degrees in history, sociology, and law. Before the Second World War he was director of studies at the University of Strasbourg until his dismissal by the Vichy government. Now he is professor of history and sociology of institutions at the University of Bordeaux. During the war he was active in the Resistance, and after the Liberation had the chance to begin a promising political career when he served for two years as deputy mayor of Bordeaux under Jacques Chalban-Delmas. But he abandoned that prospect to devote his time fully to teaching and writing. He has written more than twenty books and more than a hundred articles.

Ideology refers to a set of basic assumptions, both normative and empirical, about the nature and purposes of man and society which serve to explain the human condition. At the political level, it is a belief system through which man perceives, understands, and explains the universe as well as nature and the human community. Ideology also guides individual and collective action, sets forth the political goals one may seek and regulates the ways in which they may be obtained, and defines man's rights, privileges, andobligations. Finally, ideology sets the “parameters of expectations.”