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.

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 The Parliament of 1841–47 not only repealed the Corn Laws; it also placed on the statute books important legislation regulating factories, banks, railways and mines.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.

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.

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.

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.