THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF NATIONAL ECONOMIC PLANNING WAS fashionable in the 1960s at a time when the French model had become extremely popular in Western Europe. However, analyses of planning experience were then generally inhibited by a preoccupation with descriptions of the formal planning procedures rather than with any serious attempt to assess anything but the economic consequences of planning. (Andrew Shonfield's classic study of Modern Capitalism was a conspicuous exception to this criticism.) Attention was focused on plans as official documents rather than upon a set of planning practices that might be only remotely related to any formal statement of public policy. Planning was viewed too much from the forecasting end rather than the implementation end and the rationality of objectives became more of a preoccupation than the practical problems of translating them into reality. A normative model of efficient decision-making was all too often assumed to be readily transposable because of a wholly unrealistic notion of the ways in which organizations work.

THE QUESTION OF THE SIZE AND ESSENTIAL NATURE OF POLITICAL communities, that is to say of areas in which political power is exercised, has often been neglected by writers on politics in favour of an examination of power itself, or of the institutions through which it is exercised. In recent years interest in the topic has been revived by the discussions about ‘integration’ sparked off by the advent of the European Economic Community and other attempts at the creation of supra-national institutions. In the period before the second world war the issue had arisen in a different context, namely in relation to the strains encountered by imperial systems faced with the growing forces of nationalism.

THE WEATHERMEN EMERGED AS A DISTINCT POLITICAL ENTITY IN June 1969 in the United States of America. They had their roots directly within the political (civil rights and anti-Vietnam war campaigns) and cultural (emergence of the so-called counter-culture) activities of the New Left movement of the 1960s. Their interest lies not only in this new linkage of politics and culture but more substantially in their attempt to become a guerrilla band and instigate revolution in the most advanced nation in the world.