I MUST CONFESS THAT I DID NOT CHOOSE THE SUBJECT OF this article out of theoretical or scientific interest. My dreams have not been peopled by the merits of replacing one team by another in government. It was FranGois Mitterrand's election to the Presidency of the French Republic to which I reacted in a way that I shall not conceal from you: alternation in government is not in itself a blessing. Let us admit that it is desirable in general and in the abstract that, where a country is divided between two blocs, each of them should some day come to power, one of them should not be condemned to the ungrateful role of a perpetual opposition. But having said that, we should not change government unless the new oneholds out more hope than the old.

DEVELOPMENTS IN BRITISH POLITICS BETWEEN JULY AND NOVember 1981 - Roy Jenkins's near-win in the Warrington byelection, the capture of Croydon North-West by the Liberal/SDP Alliance and Shirley Williams's triumph in Crosby - strongly suggest that the British party-system may never be the same again. Although it was possible to argue that the Warrington result reflected no more than the impact of a famous candidate on a situation of public hostility towards the two major parties in a working-class constituency, the Croydon result, which gave victory to a Liberal candidate with a long record of earlier failures, and which gave the Alliance 40 per cent of the votes in a seat where the Liberal Party's organization had been almost as non-existent as the SDP's, cannot be dismissed so easily. These by-election results, together with an impressive run of local election successes for the Alliance, and continuing evidence from the opinion polls, strongly suggest that British politics, as the SDP's leaders have proclaimed, must be entering a new phase.

No one, friend or foe, of the European Community could deny that its emergence, growth and consolidation in a very brief time as a ready-made administration, with all the powerful institutions it comprises, has been one of the most impressive achievements of modern political imagination and organizational skill. In Brussels, in Luxembourg, in Strasbourg, institutions appeared almost overnight created by the Treaty of Rome, the names of which inspire such contrary feelings in Europe and in the world at large: the European Court of Justice, the European Council of Ministers, the European Parliament, the European Economic and Social Committee; and last but not least, the European Commission, the most controversial of all these institutions, the most hated or the most admired, precisely because people believe and know that the Commission is the motor of this extraordinary development in European political history.

THE NEW CAMBRIDGE OR CAMBRIDGE ECONOMIC POLICY GROUP, (CEPG) School led by Professor Wynne Godley has received considerable attention in this country. Its policy prescriptions however are international as well as national. It is well known that it calls at regular intervals for comprehensive long-term import controls and reflation in the UK. It is less well known, and indeed a more recent occurrence, that it calls for ‘co-ordinated’ international trade - i.e. import controls for each country administered centrally by some body such as the OECD - and reflation. As protectionist pressures continue to grow throughout Europe and in the USA, the appeal of New Cambridge analysis may grow with it. We should therefore be aware of the nature of the arguments which it deploys in the attempt to make protection respectable.

QADDAFI'S THEORY OF POLITICS AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION amounts to the assertion that all forms of representation in fact result in unrepresentative government; that therefore they must be unjust; that therefore they must be replaced by nonrepresentative government. The Green Book describes the institutions of such government but is by no means utterly explicit about the relations between institutions, or about the way personnel are recruited to them. To examine what happens in practice at elections, surely critical events in a nonrepresentative system, suggests that Qaddafi is less a Periclean Legislator than an interpreter, casts some light on the theory, and hints at the nature of the concept of political community underlying both The Green Book and contemporary Libyan society.

PLATO'S PROPOSALS FOR THE GOOD LIFE OF A COMMUNITY and of an individual are combined in his Republic. It was subtitled ‘On Justice’ and its basic premise is that ‘justice is a better thing than injustice‘. Commentators from Aristotle onwards have tended to look at his specific proposals for a philosophic élite exercizing political sovereignty and they have criticized those proposals which contravene normal social practice, like community of property and community (under strict regulation) of sexual intercourse among the governing élite. But what Plato really sought to present through these proposals was a society in which each individual and each class ‘did its own thing’ in the sense that it contributed to the whole life of the community the particular services and personal qualities it was best able to contribute.

THERE IS NO SINGLE PREVALENT ‘MODERN SCHOOL OF POLITICS’ in Germany. Territorial fragmentation in the federal system and pillarization of the political subcultures and intellectual camps has had its impact on the organization of political science in Germany after the Second World War.

The new discipline had some roots in German intellectual history, though even the Deutsche Hochschule fur Politik (German Academy for Politics) out of which emerged the largest political science department in Germany, the Otto Suhr-Institute in Berlin, was no equivalent to the Ecole des sciences politiques in Paris or the London School of Economics and Political Science. Nevertheless the older German Staatswissenschaften had some impact on the founding fathers of American political science (Francis Lieber, J. W. Burgess, A. F. Bentley, and Charles Merriam).