Current Soviet politics have been somewhat neglected as an object of study in the American academic community, in favor of research on social and political institutions for which there is considerable data. Investigation of Soviet elite politics has been left largely to journalists and government analysts, some of them able scholars. However, these specialists are chiefly engaged in assessing the existing situation and basic trends in the USSR, rather than in testing significant hypotheses or in working out fruitful methods of research. Unfortunately, the products of their inquiry tend to be somewhat ephemeral, and their potential contribution to progress in understanding the character of Soviet politics has not been adequately realized.

The exhausted countries of Western Europe started reconstruction after the Second World War with productive facilities hardly sufficient to provide for current subsistence needs, and with gold and foreign-exchange reserves, foreign investments, and export capacities greatly reduced. Many—though by no means all—of the lacking goods could best be obtained from the United States, and recovery would have been long delayed without United States aid. To the superficial observer the existence of a “dollar problem” was thus proved beyond doubt. Actually, these countries did not just lack dollars, but were short of factors of production and lacked a surplus of goods and services with which to expand those factors.

Bertrand de Jouvenel is one of a very small group of writers in our own time who make a serious effort to develop political theory in the grand style. In the English-speaking world, where so many of the interesting political problems have been solved (at least superficially), political theory is dead. In the Communist countries it is imprisoned. Elsewhere it is moribund. In the West, this is the age of textual criticism and historical analysis, when the student of political theory makes his way by rediscovering some deservedly obscure text or reinterpreting a familiar one. Political theory (like literary criticism) is reduced to living off capital—other people's capital at that.

Among the more significant international phenomena of the past generation has been the expanding role of administration in the proliferating intergovernmental agencies. The dimensions of international administration have increased in at least four ways: (1) in the number and variety of institutions at both the global and the regional level; (2) in the functional reaches of their operations—from strictly centralized and transnational to territorially deconcentrated and subnational activities (as, for example, in the UN technical assistance program, Unesco, NATO, and the European Coal and Steel Community)

Like some of the best novels, this book can be read in two ways. As a study of the European Coal and Steel Community it is a major addition to the literature, clarifying many points that have not been examined in other writings. As a study of the process of international integration it adds suggestive evidence and thoughtful analysis to one of the more interesting themes of the current study of international affairs. Read either way, it is a very good book.

The immense increase in the costs and risks of using military force to pursue political aims has once again focussed attention on the available ways of effecting changes in the international status quo by non-violent means. This is the subject of “peaceful change,” which has for some years troubled the minds of those concerned to reduce the resort to violence in international affairs.

The international status quo is embodied in several thousand treaties and understandings that mark out the current distribution of values and resources among nations. But this distribution is subject to constant pressure for revision as the needs and ambitions of nations change.

The two books under review exemplify, each in its own way, the prosperous state that Japanology has attained in this country. Maxon adds his name to the already respectably long list of American students whose grasp of sources is both broad and deep, who have worked directly with Japanese individuals and institutions as well as studied them, and who furthermore have a point to make. Maxon's book is a closely documented monograph. The revised edition of Reischauer's book contains some changes and a new section covering postwar trends.

American historians dealing with modern Germany have been preoccupied with the problem of why that country failed to achieve an effectively functioning democratic structure which could resist the onslaught of Nazism. Gordon Craig, in The Politics of the Prussian Army, has sought the explanation in the uncontrolled power and anti-democratic outlook of the Junker-dominated General Staff. Leonard Krieger's The German Idea of Freedom analyzes the divorce in German liberalism between the ideals of liberty and self-government, which led to its emasculating compromise with the Bismarckian state.

The ideas of liberty and democracy, Ernst Troeltsch wrote during World War I, came to Germany from the West; but, he continued, there they gained a new meaning, “determined by German history and the German spirit. … Liberty consists more in duties than in rights, or, rather, in rights which are simultaneously duties.” In the same vein, Thomas Mann argued against his “Westernized” brother Heinrich: “German individualism is quite compatible with state socialism, which, of course, is something quite different from the human rights-Marxist kind. For the social principle is opposed only to the individualism of the Enlightenment, to the liberal individualism of the West. … Under our princes' absolutism the individual rarely was short-changed.”

South of China, east of India, and above the Antipodes, Southeast Asia may be more of a “geographic expression” than a “region”; perhaps, however, it deserves analysis on a regional basis. Certain similarities unite these countries, even though a consciousness on the part of the peoples of the area that they are a “region” has been slow to develop; Dien Bienphu seemed nearer to Washington than to Singapore. One of the volumes reviewed here uses the term “low-pressure area” to explain the fact that historically the national states of Southeast Asia have not been strong, and that the area has been subjected to great pressure from more densely populated countries to the north and west.