It is becoming increasingly apparent that the rate of economic growth in India will have to be increased if the standard of living is to rise significantly within the foreseeable future. At the moment India is completing her Second Five-Year Plan. The objectives of the plan are indeed very modest. They provide for a 25 per cent increase in the national income and an 18 per cent increase in the per capita income over a five-year period. To reach these objectives, investment in the private and public sectors was to be increased to a rate of 10.68 per cent of the national income by 1961. An 18 per cent increase would raise the per capita income of India to only Rs 331 ($69.50) and the investment rate of 10.68 per cent may be just about sufficient for a take-off into economic development. Nevertheless, almost immediately after these targets were approved, doubts appeared whether the necessary funds for investment would become available. Although more foreign aid was provided than was originally expected, this was more than offset by the difficulties faced in mobilizing domestic resources. By 1958 the total objectives were revised downward by about 12 per cent.

How large is the Soviet gross national product (GNP) relative to our own? A third as large? Half? Two-thirds? Which of the estimates is correct? As the unique solution, none of them, unfortunately. Nor need we search for other numbers: these are probably the best of the lot, and in any case, the reply would be the same. The problem is not one of data, or of definitions, or of estimating methods. Such problems do exist and present difficulties of their own, but the inescapable and immovable barrier to the unique solution in US-USSR national output comparisons is the crucial fact of differences in the structures of the American and Soviet economies. In general, in comparisons of different economies or of the same economy at different times, diverse structures create what the economist calls an “index-number problem.” The worst of it is, the “problem” is insoluble.

The student of World War II, even if he confines his study to a limited period or a narrow aspect of the purely military side of the war, is confronted with an enormous body of records and an imposing array of published works and official documents. The testimony, exhibits, and other data assembled by the Joint Congressional Committee investigating the Pearl Harbor attack, for example, filled 39 thick volumes; the published record of the Nürnberg Trials, 56 volumes. For the World War II years alone, the Army, it has been estimated, retained more than 17,000 tons of records, and also possesses an undetermined but large quantity of prewar records essential to an understanding of the wartime period. When to this total is added the extant records of the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps, the result is a truly staggering mass of paper calculated to dismay rather than hearten the historian.

Prosperity brings its own disorders. When American sociology, unregarded and undemanding, was pleased to be allowed an academic existence, it suffered from lack of self-confidence. The other academic disciplines thought little of it and it was unknown to the outside world. Its rustic naïveté and its simple enthusiasm aroused no antipathies within its own parochial confines. When, however, it began to thrive—when its output became more interesting intellectually, as it did in the i930's, and the attention of the great world, of foundations, governments, and publicists, was drawn toward it—it also began to suffer the malaise of the prosperous. Professor Robert Lynd was probably the first of those who found that the subject they had fostered had not kept pace with their own political development toward the radical populism which was one trend in the leftward movement of the 1930's. In Knowledge for What? he accused his sociological colleagues of the evasion of the responsibilities implicit in the potentialities of their discipline. He was strongly for planning, for equality, and above all for radical political engagement; American sociologists—indeed, American social scientists in general—were charged with indifference, academic triviality, and subservience to the reigning authorities of state and economy.

A Practitioner of the social sciences may be forgiven his moments of Parkinsonian cynicism. At such times it seems that “research” in his field consists in the derivation of ponderous solutions to problems concocted solely to exhaust the time available from a growing body of print-minded confreres. Rare or plentiful as such moments may be—and in economics they are not unknown—they do inspire an enhanced appreciation of skillful applications of fundamental techniques to current and important social problems. In the case in point, Hitch and McKean have produced a work whose analytics are basic but imaginative and whose problem area is vital indeed.

A full understanding of political realism is needed, Kenneth Thompson writes in the preface of his recent study, “if American statesmen and scholars are to advance public understanding and awareness of the realities of international life and close the gap between what leaders feel and do and what the people imagine they do. Therefore the central aim I have had in mind is a careful explication, first, of the origins of political realism as an approach to American foreign policy, and, secondly, of its implications for the major unsolved problems of America's relations with the rest of the world” (p. vii).

The relationship between economics and politics is a complex one. Economics no doubt has important areas of theory where politics does not play a significant role, yet politics enters into the picture whenever the question is raised of mobilizing human and physical resources for economic ends. What is true of economic activity in general is particularly true of economic growth, where changes in attitudes and methods of work lend great importance to organizational problems. In discussing this question much depends, of course, on what one means by “politics.” The term may be used in a very narrow and partisan sense or, much more broadly, be applied to policy-making in regard to strategic choices among alternate courses of action. It is in this broader sense that politics is inherent in all economic action, and policy-making in this realm may be handled by a variety of agencies. When it comes to studying different systems of economic growth, policy decisions must be taken into consideration as much as rates and levels of achievement.

Ranke remarks somewhere that defending its borders is not sufficient justification for a nation's policy; “the condition of its existence is that it provides a new expression of the spirit of mankind.” That, he added, is “its mandate from God.” In his new, monumental Deutsche Geschichte, Professor Michael Freund finds that German history never has been “providential” in this sense, as was Israel's, Greece's, or Rome's which, respectively, brought forth the ideas of justice, science, and law. Having surveyed “a terrifying chain of catastrophes,” he concludes, half in despair, half in resignation: “Nothing remains of German history but a quiet luminescence” (p. 780). The phrase belongs to Prince Oscar von Preussen, who fell in Russia as Hitler's soldier, and whatever his merits as a coiner of phrases may be, it cannot be an accident that his words in particular were chosen to conclude a volume adorned with over a thousand other apt quotations. It will be seen that Freund's sense of history has a Friderician ring, and this also explains his terminal evasion into aestheticism: “form” has been a comfort of last resort precisely for those German historians who have grappled most profoundly with the problem of freedom and power.

Voting has become truly an interdisciplinary object of investigation in recent years. Historians, statisticians, social psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists have focused their attention on electoral behavior, individually or in teams. Such studies have been principally the work of scholars in the traditional Western democracies—Britain, France, Norway, Sweden, the United States—and fall roughly into three patterns. One approach has been to analyze trends in group voting behavior on the basis of census and election statistics, and frequently poll data as well, in a search for meaningful correlations between voting trends and socio-economic factors. The work of Siegfried and, more recently, Goguel in France, of Heberle in Germany, Tingsten in Sweden, and Gosnell and Key in the United States belongs in this category. A second approach has been descriptive, identified in recent years particularly with Nuffield College at Oxford. The Nuffield studies of elections in Britain, France, Ireland, Poland, Italy, and Africa have focused on the efforts of candidates and parties to influence voters in a particular electoral campaign. They are intended primarily to be contributions to contemporary history and works of reference for future historians. Lastly, we have the investigations associated, in particular, with the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University and the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. These have focused on the political images and electoral behavior of individual voters and, particularly, on changes in their attitudes during a campaign and the reasons for such changes. They have relied, almost exclusively, on survey research methods which involve questioning a panel of representative voters at length before and after an election and, lately, even over a period of several years and elections.

In 1943 a young American naval officer on duty in Moscow was sent to Murmansk to tend to the paper work involved in unloading a Lend–Lease convoy. Afterwards, a party was given by his Soviet counterparts, and by dawn, when it broke up, he was deep in an exchange of “basic fundamentals” with a congenial Red Navy lieutenant. Emerging into the street, they met a long line of men carrying supplies from the docks. The Soviet officer looked, and said with obvious sincerity, “See our happy workers.” The American officer looked—and he saw a line of convicts under the guard of police with machine guns. We see, it appears, what we are prepared to see in the USSR.

This volume consists of a series of essays that were published in substantially the same form in various scholarly journals in 1957-1960. In them, Schelling attempts to adapt game theory to sociologically relevant aspects of the strategic process not encompassed within the formal mathematics of the theory. Thus his book represents a strikingly original contribution to the literature. In general, the essays share the theme that formal game theory is not a sufficiently good tool for sociological analysis of the bargaining process that takes place in real life. (This contention would not be denied by orthodox game theorists, since they do not regard the provision of such a tool as the purpose of game theory.) Except for this unifying thread, the various aspects of Schelling's analysis do not seem to me to evince a consistent point of view. To press this point, however, would be pedantic, for in The Strategy of Conflict the reader will discover a number of illuminating and penetrating sociological analyses of strategic problems.