The newly awakened interest in the comparative study of politics is part and parcel of a silent revolution that has taken place in the social sciences during the last decades. Such a re-orientation in turn is in part due to the radical social and political transformations in this era of total wars and revolutions. Because as Aristotle knew all too well, and peaceful periods in history all too often tried to forget, the social sciences are disciplines of “ethics”, spelling out man's deep involvements and demanding decisions at critical turning points of history.

It appears to be characteristic of a very large number of societies that from time to time movements arise in opposition to the established religious institutions, offering either new means of attaining the benefits offered by the established religion or new interpretations of its dogmas. The leaders of these movements often claim to have received direct revelation from supernatural sources, and for that reason are frequently called prophets, though this name is of wider application, embracing also such persons as the Hebrew prophets, whose chief function appears to have been that of moral criticism, and also the givers of oracles who have a recognized place in some established systems. There is no reason to suppose that the movements of this kind which appear among non-European peoples subject to European rule form a class by themselves, but, owing to the circumstances in which ethnographic information has been collected, the bulk of this refers to subject peoples, and among such peoples religious movements are largely concerned with the relations between subject and ruler.

How to account for the courtly love complex of the troubadours and minnesingers has been an unsolved puzzle ever since the romanticists discovered it as a scholarly problem. For about three generations, in the 12th and 13th centuries, Provençal and German lyrical poetry was preoccupied with a strangely uneven love pattern. In the classic version of this poetry, the male lover presents himself as engrossed in a yearning desire for the love of an exceedingly beautiful and perfect woman whose strange emotional aloofness and high social status make her appear hopelessly distant. But the frustrated and sorrowful lover cannot overcome his fascination and renders faithful “love service” to this “high-minded” and exacting lady who reciprocates in a surprising manner: She does not grant him the amorous “reward” which he craves, but she gives him what immeasurably increases his “worth”: She rewards him with approval and reassurance. The great lady accepts him as being worthy of her attention, but only at the price of behavioral restraint and refinement of manners, that is, at the price of courtois behavior. As the contemporaries put it, courtoisie is the result of courtly love.

Current population theory depends heavily on the hypothesis that a demographic revolution occurred in West European countries roughly between 1750 and 1880. According to this hypothesis, European death rates averaged at least 35 per 1,000 prior to 1750; hence, even very high birth rates did not enable populations to recover rapidly from the effects of catastrophes, which are supposed to have been frequent and intense. Only after the advances, mainly hygienic, which began about 1750 did the death rate commence a long-term decline. Because fertility remained high, West European populations grew more rapidly than they had ever done. Eventually, urbanization and industrialization sapped the forces which maintainted high birth rates, and low fertility became the major cause of low Western rates of growth.Since currently under-developed populations have high vital rates, it has been suggested that demographic principles are transcultural and that Western demographic patterns will be repeated.

Two irrevocable commitments of Spanish colonial policy were that the natives as “new Christians” merited some guarantees as to their property rights and the liberty of their persons and that colonizing based upon the services of Indian labor had to be made profitable for the Spanish colonists. The Spanish crown seldom vacillated in its sometimes quixotically pursued determination to reconcile these two cardinal commitments. Harmonized they sometimes were, but there are striking cases where the two goals seemed mutually exclusive. The aim of this essay is to examine some patterns of change and continuity which emerged during those periods of crisis when the general well-being of the colony apparently clashed with the specific welfare of the Indians.