In the seventeenth century America escaped from the world, in the twentieth century it has been forced to return to it. This cycle contains the drama of the American historical consciousness which protected America's provincialism in the past but is bound now, in the age of the reverse migration, to serve as an instrument of its dissolution.

The Liberal Tradition in America, by Louis Hartz, appeared in 1955. Since then it has taken a place among those few recent essays interpreting the course of American political thought that deserve our serious consideration. One thinks of works by Hofstadter, Boorstin, and Rossiter as comparable examples of the genre. In examining Professor Hartz's book, or any of its counterparts, I cannot believe that it would be useful or proper to assume the solemn office of a high tribunal, weighing the merits of a candidate for immortality. Classics declare themselves in their own good time. To treat an interesting contemporary discussion as an established masterpiece would be to sink the book under a punitive burden.

Through the Eastern Alps runs one of the great cultural frontiers of Europe, the zone of contact between the cultural sphere of the Mediterranean and the transalpine cultures to the north. This frontier has shifted back and forth over time, as have the boundaries of language and of various dominant political units. One of the present foci of culture contact in a zone of dispute and discord is the present-day Italian region of Alto Adige or Tiroler Etschland (still called the South Tirol by unreconstructed defenders of the traditional unity of the Tyrol) and the Trentino. Unified in the first part of the 13th century under the Counts of the Tyrol, the region passed into the hands of the Habsburgs in 1363, where it remained until 1918 but for a brief interlude during the Napoleonic period. The Napoleonic occupation divided the region, yielding to Bavaria the largely German-speaking province of Bozen (Bolzano), together with the North Tyrol, while grouping the Romancespeaking portions with Italy. This division became the prototype of later efforts to divorce the Romance Tyrol from the German Tyrol, a division effected again in the provincial separation between Province Bozen and Province Trento after the entire region was yielded by Austria to Italy at the end of World War I. Except for a brief period near the end of World War II (1943 to 1945), when both provinces were grouped as Operationszone Alpenvorland with Gau Tyrol of the Greater German Reich, the region has remained politically part of Italy. It remains also, however, an area of conflict in which Italian political hegemony and cultural influence has been combatted by the German-speaking population, impelled by a desire for greater autonomy or complete separation from the Italian state.

There are at least five ways of treating a political theory. One is to consider it a form of intellectual exercise, pure and simple—an adventure in abstraction to sharpen the mind. Another is to go through it, and through other theories, seeking a personal practical philosophy for oneself. A third is to distil the history out of a political theory—examine what light the theory can throw on the age from which it emerged. A fourth is also to treat the theory as a source of historical data, but not in the sense in which a river may conceivably be a source of some dissolved substance from the silt it carries, but in the sense in which a river may be a source of water. In this latter sense a political theory is not distilled to yield history. It is itself part of the flow of history—part of what Americans sometimes call intellectual history.

As a European historian who has learned to believe that everything worthwhile was discovered by the Germans until it was rediscovered earlier by the Russians, I am somewhat annoyed at having to admit that Mr. Hartz has written something eminently satisfying to my kinfolk and me. He stimulates in us a measure of condescending sympathy with American historians, who must deal with this crazy American people, none of whom apparently knows who he really is—he really is his own grandpa—and each of whom, like the proverbial piano player in the sporting house, is completely ignorant of what goes on upstairs. And how lucky I feel to be working in the clear atmosphere of Europe, where our classes are clean-cut, our parties shrewd and perceptive of their own interests, our political philosophy real and earnest. It is true that according to this picture the socialism we have is not quite as real as the feudalism we used to have, but then, nothing in the historical world is quite perfect. Indeed, Mr. Hartz' view of European history is, if anything, too perfect. It is reminiscent of a Rube Goldberg mechanism in which a fat nobleman opens the door at one end of a corridor and sets off a chain reaction which explodes Nicolai Lenin out the door at the other end.

In the 1840s, the time of Sir Robert Peel's great ministry, the British House of Commons debated and voted upon a number of substantial political issues. The Parliament of 1841–47 not only repealed the Corn Laws; it also placed on the statute books important legislation regulating factories, banks, railways and mines. It approved the income tax, reintroduced by Peel in 1842, and the Poor Law, which was renewed in 1842 and again in 1847. It discussed and voted upon, though it was far from approving, proposals for the extension of the franchise, the adoption of the secret ballot and the restriction of the special legal privileges of landowners. There were divisions as well on various aspects of the Irish question, religious questions and the position of the Church of England, army reform, fiscal reform and other matters.

It is just fifty years since the distinguished legal historian, Adhémar Esmein, addressing an international conference in London, discussed the interpretation of the Roman law maxim Princeps legibus solutus est by the medieval glossators, and the influence of their teachings on the growth of French government. Esmein thought that the glossators had perverted a doctrine of classical constitutional law, which had merely exempted the emperor from the observance of certain legal rules, into a general principle of irresponsible absolutism. Certain French constitutional lawyers of the sixteenth century, he maintained, struggled stoutly against this doctrine but, none the less, its acceptance opened the way to various abuses in French public life ranging from the arbitrary decision of legal cases to the issuance of lettres de cachet. Esmein accordingly took advantage of the occasion to congratulate his English hosts on having escaped the glossators' baneful influence.

The question of whether Japan can rightly be said to “have had feudalism” is by no means settled. Although Westerners have been writing about “Japanese feudalism” for well over a hundred years, the acceptability of this practice is still a matter of controversy among professional historians, notably among those who make the study of medieval Europe their specialty. To a long line of Western historians ending with Herbert Norman, however, there was no question about the appropriateness of placing the feudal label on Japan. Nor does the contemporary Japanese historian question a term which has become so important a part of his professional as well as everyday vocabulary. In a Japan in which the reading public is daily reminded that the “struggle against feudalism” is still being waged, feudalism seems a present reality which by its very nature cannot be denied to have existed in Japan's past.

Among the causes of the demise of the Fourth Republic, one prominently mentioned has been the incapacity of governments to govern. Not merely cabinet instability as such, but the association of premiers' popularity in the Assembly with their disinclination toward bold policy innovations, is the charge. Stability indeed there was: continuity of ministers under changing cabinets, relative persistence of cabinets (such as those of Queuille and Mollet) that maintained the existing political balance or even defended the Assembly against innovation. Stability, too, of policy: the continuation of the Indo-Chinese war and the Algerian war, for example, long after a policy change might have been considered. Underlying this sometimes artificial stability was the threat that an innovating premier or minister might soon find himself returned to the status of an ordinary denuty.

The aspect of Professor Hartz's book which I find particularly challenging, but with which I cannot wholly agree, is his view that American politics is characterized by an absence of fundamental conflicts. I do agree that American political struggles have been different from those of Europe, and that this difference can be aptly characterized as a consequence of the fact that, in the Tocquevilleian formula, we have arrived at a state of democracy without having had to endure a democratic revolution. Americans have seldom experienced the particular passions engendered by the impact of the idea of equality upon class distinctions derived from a feudal regime. But it seems to me that the conflicts of American politics, while in one sense attenuated by the comparative absence of a feudal inheritance, in another sense have been intensified by this very fact, by reason of the immediacy of the demands of equality. If all Americans did not accept with such thoroughness. the pre-eminent “Lockeian” tenet, there would not be the persistent record of violent anger and frustration attending what each group of Americans regarded as its just inheritance from the operation of that tenet. To take the single most overpowering present-day example: where in the world but America could there be such simultaneous demands for color-blindness and color-consciousness in the regulation of all institutions patronized by law? Yet both the power and the simultaneity of these demands are assertions of the claims of equality: one side insisting that no law is valid which recognizes inequality of rights; the other insisting that none is valid which does not incorporate their uncoerced opinions or consent. Hartz does not examine the genuine difficulties which inhere in the attempt to create a society dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. He observes the virtual unanimity with which Americans have been committed to it, and he observes that they have nonetheless gone on quarreling. He concludes wrongly, however, that they have therefore quarreled over phantoms or irrelevancies. The reason for this mistaken judgment is the implicit thesis that quarrels which are genuine and profound are always quarrels in which the idea of equality is in competition with its opposite.

Dès qu'il aborde les textes, le médiéviste rencontre des nobiles. Ouvre-t-il Grégoire de Tours, il y voit bientôt cités des nobiles, un nobile genus, un nobilissimus in genre sua. Parcourt-il les Capitulaires francs, il y trouve rapidement un article applicable aux omnes homines laïci, tam nobiles quam ignobiles. Sources narratives ou sources diplomatiques, partout il butte d'emblée sur le problème des “nobles”.

The history of Muhammadan Law in India falls naturally into three periods: (A) The period of Muslim domination (1206 A.D.–1857 A.D.); (B) The British period (1661–1951); (C) The Republican period (commencing with the promulgation of the Constitution of India on 26 January 1950). The dates are in such cases somewhat misleading and not mathematically “neat”. They may overlap, as in the British period, or, be ambient, as during the Muslim Sultanate. On the other hand they indicate with some degree of clarity the historical evolution and the time sequence of each system of jurisprudence. It will thus be seen that the Muhammadan law in India is one more instance of law being a function of society, thus being in a continuous state of flux. It is hardly necessary for me to add that the above classification must be read culliert to itc natural limitations.

One of the most impressive testimonies to the unity of mankind lies in the fact that certain basic features of social structure have been determined in different areas by the existence of similar conditions. Thus in ancient Egypt, in Japan, in early American cultures and among Indo-European peoples sociological analysis shows the rise of aristocracy to have been due to the coincidence of certain irrational, deepseated, retrospective convictions with certain economic conditions. Repeatedly the evolution of a ruling class runs back into that prehistoric darkness when related tribes first united to form a primordial political community; in the earliest historic age of such a community we find the members of this regarded as descendants of the gods or even as their earthly embodiments. It is on this belief in their divine origins that the great base their claim to a monopoly of political and economic power, the latter including disposal of the labor of the unfree. The same belief leads them to perpetuate themselves as a caste; their family lines must not be contaminated by the blood of the low-born. The mass of the free-born accepts this social order as divinely ordained. There is no sign of any consciousness of oppression nor thought of revolt against the privileges of the aristocracy. The latter for its part carefully heeds the rights of common mortals. There is either no tradition of a golden age of equality, or if there is some legend of a lost paradise, it fails to incite revolt against an order sanctified by immemorial existence. A society based on respect for an hereditary aristocracy that monopolized the best land could not be subverted by any forces generated solely within the lower classes. Discontent could become revolutionary only through the cultural developments that made it possible to ask the question, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”

A very great deal of our knowledge of urban life in Tokugawa Japan relates to the “happy society” of Genroku in the early 18th century, to the life of the theater and the gay quarters, and to the activities of the great merchant houses and the more extravagant and colorful of their heads. Extensive coverage is given theories of the state, administrative arrangements, and the discrepancies between the actual and theoretical positions of the classes of Tokugawa society. Ordinarily, mobility is treated in passing, partly because vertical social mobility is rightly presumed to have been a minor feature of that society until at least its closing period, and partly because the materials required are so difficult to unearth and so resistant to rigorous analysis. Bellah's observation that “…mobility was largely within classes rather than between them,” is apt, although Taeuber reminds us that “…movements of surplus youth from the rural areas to the cities were adjustments of population to resources and employment opportunies that ante-dated modern industrialization by some centuries.” Lampard completes the thought with respect to its implications for the transition to industrialism in his remark that “…old commercial-administrative centers [provide] ready markets, some tradition of urban life, and constant pressure to secure a livelihood from non-farming activity.”

At regular intervals in the United States political parties conduct campaigns, the purpose of which is to elect their chosen candidates to public office. Each party seeks political power, guided in this pursuit by a complex set of election laws which spell out in detail the rights and duties of the parties. The electoral process is the mechanism by which power is maintained within a party or transferred to a competing party. The legitimate right of one party to take power from another when the people so elect is enforced. The ideal image of the American political system in action reflects two parties struggling to maximize the interests of their constituents in the hope of maximizing votes in the next election. Out of this struggle the rights of the people are preserved.

The scholarly interest in emerging nations in the post-World War II period had its anthropological and sociological focus on the development of cities in these areas. Nationalism seems to be connected with industrialization and with urbanization. In West Africa much of the attention spent on study of developing cities has concentrated on the importance in such situations of the voluntary organization. It seems quite clear now that voluntary organizations are one of the most often used and most effective techniques for softening the shock of transplantation from the certainties of tribal life into the uncertainties of city life. The formation of voluntary organizations in cities is not restricted to Africa, however. In Central and South America, in Southeast Asia, and in India the voluntary organization has grown and developed and been studied. Most attempts to compare voluntary organizations in these places seem to have assumed that they were a natural or inevitable result of a process called “urbanization”. It does not seem to me to be necessary to compare these social phenomena in the context of such a process. We should compare voluntary organizations in different times and places and under different circumstances in order to enhance our understanding of more general social and cultural processes. This paper attempts two things: the delineation of the history of the formation of voluntary organization of one immigrant group in one West African city; and a comparison between the voluntary organizations of this group and of some other groups. It is hoped that the former will contribute to the body of knowledge we have about voluntary organizations, and that the latter will suggest hypotheses about social and cultural processes in general. It is not sufficient to describe the voluntary organizations of the Ibo in Calabar. It is necessary to trace the history of the town itself; to compare the reaction of the Ibo to the urban environment with that of the Efik, the indigenous inhabitants of the town; and to show in what ways the culture of the Ibo and the Efik predispose them to react in the ways they do.

With an eye to their own life goals, the native peoples of Pacific Islands unwittingly present to anthropologists a generous scientific gift: an extended series of experiments in cultural adaptation and evolutionary development. They have compressed their institutions within the confines of infertile coral atolls, expanded them on volcanic islands, created with the means history gave them cultures adapted to the deserts of Australia, the mountains and warm coasts of New Guinea, the rain forests of the Solomon Islands. From the Australian Aborigines, whose hunting and gathering existence duplicates in outline the cultural life of the later Paleolithic, to the great chiefdoms of Hawaii, where society approached the formative levels of the old Fertile Crescent civilizations, almost every general phase in the progress of primitive culture is exemplified.

The economic, social, and political development of newly independent nations depends upon the prior or concurrent strengthening of public administration. To be sure, the path of national development is a circular one as it traces a spiral ascent in which a step forward in one kind of development makes possible the next step in another. The administrative arc of this circle is here emphasized not because it is more basic than the others, but because it has often been slighted. New governments, often on the recommendation of technical-assistance advisors, adopt excellent programs in health, agriculture, education, and industry, but then fail to translate these programs from paper to action. The fault is not lack of earnest intent but the burden of an unresponsive and weak administrative system.

It has been long pointed out that the destinies of the various sections of mankind began to be interrelated long before the twentieth century, with its global wars and cold wars; or even the nineteenth century, the century of European world hegemony. Here we will study certain of the historical ways in which these destinies were intertwined; in this way we may distinguish more valid modes of tracing large-scale history and of comparing the societies involved in it, from a number of popular but unsound modes of trying to do so. I shall speak mostly of the ages before modern times, noting only briefly at the end of the paper certain crucial ways in which modern interrelations among human societies have been different from earlier ones.