I was at -St. Peter's on a beautiful Sunday morning in mid-May, and happily tall enough to see Paul VI as he walked down the main aisle in a small procession a bit after ten o'clock and perhaps a bit behind schedule. Everyone applauded him warmly. He responded with his usual shy, yet appreciative smile.

The Mass was beautiful and simple. In his brief homily, the pope said it was a commemorative ceremony to recall the eightieth anniversary of the publication of Leo XIII's famous social encyclical Rerum Novarum. Fr. Schall divides his teaching year between the Istituto Sociale of the Gregorian University in Rome and the University of San Francisco.

Barbara Tuchman's good book on General Stilwell and America's wartime China policy provides an illuminating introduction to that elaborate record of America's Vietnam involvement which the Pentagon, thanks to the New York Times, provided for us recently. The really interesting thing is not the way in which these two accounts of American adventure in Asia are alike but the way in which they are different.

The most perplexing problem which the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China raises for analysts concerns the view of history with which to interpret it. Most Westerners have a unilinear perspective which sees a straightforward transition from traditional society (with its agriculturally based economy, diffuse social relationships, and custom-bound orientation) to modern society (with its industrial economy, rational and functionally specific social relationships and secular mentality). This tends also to be the official view of the social sciences as they have developed in the West as well as that upon which governmental policies, journalistic commentary and individual judgement are most often based. Warren Mason teaches political science at Miami University in Ohio.

There is a certain level of writing on social and political issues that stands between good journalism and genuine scholarship. Good journalism attempts to assemble and report as much pertinent data as is available, Genuine scholarship, by making clear a theoretical framework or a verifiable testing technique, considers the weight that should be given to various facts to be used for explanatory, interpretive or constructive reasons. These two books fall at that certain level (though Melman's tends more toward scholarship and Plate's toward journalism). Both men assemble a wide range of pertinent data and place it in a particular framework (for both authors this framework is their concern that America pursue a path to peace).

Ernest Lefever has given us, as we have learned to expect, a knowledgeable and perceptive study into the interrelation between political leaders and those who control the use of force in three states in tropical Africa-Ghana, the Congo, and Ethiopia. Despite many unique aspects of their condition and experience, his book should stimulate some thinking about the relationship as it exists in Asia and our own hemisphere. Indeed, reading his book, as I have just done, in conjunction with Khrushchev Remembers, Newhouse's De Gaulle and the Anglo Saxons, and Hill's God's Englishman (Oliver Cromwell) carries parallels even further.

In the recent burst of enthusiasm for endorsing violence and revolution, there has been too little reflection on why men ought to obey the law. Indeed, it seems that the charge of irrelevance can be levelled against anyone who insists on thinking seriously about traditionally important issues of political ethics such as political obligation, which, according to Isaiah Berlin, is "the most fundamental of all political questions." Fortunately, as these books show, not all philosophers and theologians have succumbed to the attraction of easy slogans.