The international political system is currently undergoing changes that are both rapid and extensive. Especially since the early sixties, a number of trends have manifested themselves and become interrelated in such a way that, taken together, they are substantially altering the fundamental postwar patterns of international politics. These indications of change and flux have engendered a substantial debate concerning appropriate concepts for the analysis of the international system.

Observers of Peru since Carleton Beals (1934) have been pre-dicting “fire on the Andes.” When Bolivia began its basic social transformation in 1952, a Peruvian conflagration seemed all the more inevitable. Then, in 1962, what appeared to be Peru's version of the Sierra Maestra phase of “the revolution” began in the densely populated mountainous areas of the south.

Tocqueville referred to the behavior of the French peasantry during the Revolution as a wonder of history. The centers of revolution, he noted, were the very districts in which social reform and progress had been most visible, whereas resistance to revolution sprang up in areas where the old order had been most completely retained.

An important task of the social scientist is the continual reexamination of his vocabulary. His purpose in such a reexamination should be the achievement of greater precision in meaning—that is, a more explicit statement of the real-world phenomena to which his terms apply. This research note is an attempt to stimulate the critical examination of the term “oligarchy” and related phrases identifying a ruling elite which have been used widely and repeatedly in discussions of Latin American political systems.

In determining how he will behave, an actor must try to predict how others will act and how their actions will affect his values. The actor must therefore develop an image of others and of their intentions. This image may, however, turn out to be an inaccurate one; the actor may, for a number of reasons, misperceive both others’ actions and their intentions. In this research note I wish to discuss the types of misperceptions of other states’ intentions which states tend to make. The concept of intention is complex, but here we can consider it to comprise the ways in which the state feels it will act in a wide range of future contingencies. These ways of acting usually are not specific and well-developed plans. For many reasons a national or individual actor may not know how he will act under given conditions, but this problem cannot be dealt with here.

The traditional distinction between domestic and foreign politics, made by both decision-makers and analysts, is increasingly called into question by contemporary historical developments. The cold-war conflict and the attending mobilization of military, socioeconomic, and psychological resources by the superpowers and their allies; ventures of regional economic integration; the changing nature of the nation-state; the close connection between the conditions prevailing in the international system and the attempts made by the new states to modernize and to coalesce into viable societies—these are just a few examples of how foreign and domestic policy projects have become overlapping and perhaps entirely inseparable.

Political development is undoubtedly a rich and variegated field of study. We have begun to accumulate first-rate studies of widely divergent cultures and social structures, masses of quantitative data on the socioeconomic variables involved in the modernization process, analyses of political phenomena ranging from the destooling of chiefs to the functioning of complex legislative systems, well-documented surveys of particular political systems, and a smaller number of useful typologies and general hypotheses.

The study of the processes by which foreign policy is formed has been in the embarrassing position of falling between two academic chairs. On the one hand, students of international affairs have displayed considerable reluctance to delve into the domestic factors that distinguish one nation's policies from another's. On the other hand, scholars of comparative politics, with their knowledge of political institutions and processes, have rarely considered the effect of various political arrangements on foreign policy.

By now it can be said that science and technology have entered, if just barely, the normal American political process. For much of our history, except the first years of the Republic, interest in the pursuit and application of physical knowledge was a subject of minor political interest, even at times when fundamental and far-reaching measures, such as the Morrill Act endowing colleges for the benefit of agriculture and technology, were enacted.