THERE ARE SOME BOOKS THAT ARE BETTER KNOWN FOR their titles than their contents. Mine is one of them. Various critics, usually from the Left, pointed to the upsurge of radicalism in the 1960s as disproof of the book's thesis. Others saw the work as an ‘ideological’ defence of ‘technocratic’ thinking, or of the ‘status quo’. A few, even more ludicrously, believed that the book attacked the role of ideals in politics. It was none of these.

The frame of the book was set by its sub-title, On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Yet the last section looked ahead. After observing young left-wing intellectuals express repeated yearnings for ideology, I said that new inspirations, new ideologies, and new identifications would come from the Third World.

EDMUND BURKE, REVIEWING IN 1790 THE EVENTS OF 102-101 years previously, saw no objection to penning and printing the following remarkable words: ‘The Revolution of 1688 was obtained by a just war, in the only case in which any war, and much more a civil war, can be just. Justa bella quibus necessaria’. He cannot have meant that the revolution was ‘obtained’, in the sense of ‘secured’, by the wars in Europe which followed from 1688 to 1697, for he speaks of ‘civil war’; nor is it likely that he intended his words to refer to the war in Ireland which ended with the Treaty of Limerick. Burke's Irish perspectives might indeed lead to his viewing this as a civil war rather than a war of conquest, but the context which surrounds the words quoted makes it clear that he is thinking of the ‘Revolution of 1688’ as an English political process and an English civil war. The ‘cashiering’ or dethroning of a king, he is instructing readers of Richard Price's sermon to the Revolution Society, is not a legal or a constitutional process, which can form one of the normal procedures of an established civil society.

SINCE GORBACHEV'S COMING TO POWER THE RELATIONSHIP between economics and politics in the Soviet Union has been changing rapidly. But even from the outset one could see that there would be limits to change. The primacy of politics which characterizes the relationship between economics and politics under the conditions of socialism in power will be fully maintained in the future, too. All proposals for more decentralization meet with obstacles when they seem to call into question the leading role of the party. The party is only advised to observe a kind of ‘economic restraint’: it should stop mingling every aspect of public administration with the economy. The idea is to free the party from its responsibility for detail in order to allow it to concentrate more on its central political tasks. In this respect socialism has problems similar to those which Western governments face in the welfare state. After the end of the hegemony of social democracy it is, above all, the conservative parties in Western Europe who are ready to reduce the responsibility of the governments of the day for many economic and social tasks: this is why we find deregulation efforts, privatization of public enterprises and the transfer of political functions to non-state social organizations everywhere.

The French presidential election will be held after the publication of this issue. Our summer issue will contain an analysis in depth of the results and the foreseeable consequences. But our readers will find here two contrasting interpretations of the significance of the Mitterrand presidency of 1981–88, the first in the history of the French Fifth Republic which produced an exercise in ‘cohabitation’.

THE AIM OF THIS ARTICLE ON MITTERRAND IS NEITHER TO ‘bury’ him nor to praise him, but rather to assess the impact of his presidency on French politics and French socialism. Any such assessment is inevitably a partial and interim report. The full impact of several socialist reforms (notably those concerning decentralization and workers' rights) might only become apparent after several years of implementation. But in January 1988 Mitterrand is still in the Elyste Palace. Despite his loss of a parliamentary majority in the 1986 elections and his subsequent ‘cohabitation’ with Chirac's RPR-UDF government, Mitterrand has won back, since 1986, considerable popularity and respect.

GREENLEAF'S THE BRITISH POLITICAL TRADITION IS ONE OF the most impressive intellectual and physical endeavours of modern British political studies. And yet even with these two recent books of over five hundred pages each, to match the first equally wellloaded and well-balanced double-barrelled pair which appeared in 1983, The Rise of Collectivism and The Ideological Heritage, the enterprise is still not complete. A fifth book is to follow on ‘The World Outside’ —which must dampen down for the moment an obvious criticism that the British political tradition would seem, on Professor Greenleaf s account, to be uniquely unaffected, like ancient China or Japan, by the outside world; or the outside world by it.

THIS LETTER FROM AMERICA WILL OFFER A RANDOM account of American trends that at best are marginally political: of interest to readers of Government and Opposition because they take an interest in political culture in the broadest (most nominal) sense. In choosing material, I have employed criteria of selection that are consistently arbitrary but only occasionally indefensible. For example, this letter is tied together by the letter B— for Barber, who is writing it, and Bloom, Bork, Biden and Gorbachev (forced to choose, I prefer arbitrariness to consistency) who are its principal subjects. If this seems a rather too cavalier approach, bear in mind that deadlines on a quarterly publication will make much of what was timely and clever when written seem stale and irrelevant when read months later.