Statistics is the one discipline in which people have concentrated almost exclusively on how to collect and analyze data. Statisticians have been doing this as a goal in itself without having to be encumbered by substantive issues arising from some other discipline. Most of their work can be broken into components that fall in one of three categories: data gathering, data reduction (descriptive statistics), and statistical inference.

We are especially indebted to the author of this book because of the extraordinary paucity of biographies of the great man who is its subject. As the British military historian, Michael Howard, says in the foreword: “Clausewitz as a man remains almost completely unknown.” And again: “As yet mere has appeared no serious biography in English and for this reason alone Roger Parkinson's book breaks important new ground.”

The historical role of the working class has recently been subject to reassessment. Frequently repudiated are the Marxist views that the proletariat constitutes either, as Marx's and Engels' classic scheme would have it, the revolutionary social force in capitalist societies, or, as Lenin believed, the pre-eminent element in a revolutionary alliance with the poorest strata of the peasantry, or, finally, as Mao holds, the leadership cadres needed to mobilize the downtrodden peasant masses into conscious, revolutionary action. Consider, for instance, the meager role attributed to the working class in Barrington Moore's brilliant effort, in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, to delineate three historical routes to modernity.

The growing role of governmental bureaucracy has been one of the most noted and discussed characteristics of developing political systems. The phenomenon of bureaucratic intervention in politics, already discernible in the 1950's in many of these states, has, so it seems, become the rule rather than the exception in the years that have followed. Despite the prevalence of the politicized bureaucracy, however, and the amount of discussion engendered by the phenomenon, die sources of bureaucratic growth and dominance in the developing states remain obscure. Most analysts emphasize the superior organization of the bureaucracy and argue that this organization, reinforced by die transfer of techniques from abroad and uncontested because of weak indigenous political institutions, provides much of the explanation for the aggrandizement of the bureaucracy in die policy-making process.

In his magisterial general history, Spain 1808–1939, Raymond Carr concluded that the failure of modern constitutional liberalism in Spain was above all “a political failure,” that is, more the consequence of political culture, status cleavages, and ideological divergence than the inevitable result of unadapted economic structures that could not support the formal political system. American reviewers such as Richard Herr and Gabriel Jackson were quick to take issue, arguing that political conflict in modern Spain had not been positively resolved because the economic structure had been too backward to permit it. They were obviously correct that the backwardness of the Spanish economy greatly hampered the civic processes of modern Spain—a point that Carr readily admitted in general. It is nonetheless largely true that modern Spanish politics have more often than not focused on issues of status and ideology rather than on specific conflicts over concrete economic issues.

The postwar period has been an unusual era in the annals of political science. Numerous practitioners of the discipline have ventured into areas previously unexplored, formulating new concepts, constructing new conceptual frameworks and models, putting forth new hypotheses and theories previously unstated, borrowing and importing ideas and methodological tools from sister disciplines, and improving upon old and innovating new research techniques (particularly quantitative techniques)—all in the interest of pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge. It seems no exaggeration to say that this is one of the most creative, if not necessarily the most fruitful, episodes in the development of the discipline.

After a decade of play, the score in the match pitting men in uniform against politicians is nearly even. About half of the new states of Black Africa have remained uninterruptedly under civilian rule while in the other half each has experienced at least one coup in which armed forces—military and police—have played a prominent role. Most of the coups were followed by the establishment of some form of military government. Sometimes the original coup leaders were overthrown by others; sometimes they returned to their barracks, hovering about the seats of power; sometimes they or others abruptly interrupted “civilianization.”