IN TRYING TO ACHIEVE THE SIMPLICITY OF, IN SOME SENSE, scientific statements one must either, in the counsels of the wise, be very laboured or very brief. I want to be very brief and to use an essay as an essay, an attempt to try something out or on before a learned audience, or a timely speculation (that is, in time to be stopped) about whether a possible future voyage is worth undertaking, not an account of actual discovery.

EPOCHS OF MAJOR SOCIAL CHANGE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A SPURT to intense intellectual effort. The emergence of the new nations and their economic and political modernization constitutes one such epoch in history. The phenomenon has demanded from the student of society new modes of understanding and analysis, has provided him with both a challenge and an opportunity, and has called for new insights and a continuous re-fashioning of conceptual schemes. What is more, the nature of the change in these societies differs in significant respects from the experience of earlier epochs. It is neither the cumulative result of an outburst of creativity that marked the scientific and industrial revolutions in the West, nor a sharp break with the past brought about by a ‘bourgeois’ or ‘proletarian’ revolution, although undoubtedly both of these strands are involved in varying proportions. A deliberate attempt at condensing several centuries into a short span, the occurrence of ‘simultaneous change’ in so many spheres of life, the phenomenon of cultural dualism in so many societies, and the complex interactions caused by the constant closing in of national and international horizons, have led to a situation of continuous flux and readjustment that seems to have neither a beginning, nor possibly an end.

I INTEND TO FOLLOW AN ABSTRACT LINE IN ANSWERING THE question why political systems change. That is, I am not concerned with the infinity of descriptive reasons why change occurs in any concrete case. It may be argued that now is not the time to bother with such a trivial approach, particularly when the language of crisis is what must be used, and also understood, and not the language of abstraction.

I think the answer to this is that for too long the evaluation of politics, and of government in particular, has become a ‘pseudoactivity’ in which descriptive categories like ‘parliamentary control over the executive’, or ‘reform of the committee system’ are comforting shibboleths which, although meant to contain some inner profundity have lost much of their original meaning. The truth is that the balance between normative givens and structural conditions is becoming so altered that the common-sense foundations of the discipline seem almost irrelevant.

TO DISCUSS ‘OPPOSITION’ IN A ONE-PARTY SYSTEM, AND IN PARTICULAR in a communist one, might seem on first thought to involve a contradiction in terms. Communist governments have normally been regarded in the West as systems without opposition except in the form of illegal resistance by sections of the population to the regimes themselves. Yet Leonard Schapiro, in his foreword to the first issue of the journal, Government and Opposition, expressed the view that both government and opposition are always and at all times present (or potentially present) in every political order and referred to ‘the tentative process of loyal dissent’ becoming apparent in one-party states. A striking feature of many of the communist states since the death of Stalin has in fact been the emergence of political tendencies that can only be called ‘oppositional’, in the form either of resisting policies enacted or offered by the ruling party, or of proposing alternative courses of action. The observation of these tendencies by Western scholars, and the analysis of the experience of noncommunist states in Africa and Asia, have led to a re-examimtion of the nature of one-party states in general, and to the recognition that not only has opposition never been totally absent from communist systems, but that it has assumed more vigorous and varied forms in recent years.

IT WILL BE NO NEWS THAT THE ACADEMY IS IN FLUX – THAT there is once again a ‘crisis in the university’. It is easy to exaggerate this crisis – but today, in countries like the US A and Britain, it has special ‘linked’ features. In this article I explore some of these links, especially their ‘political’ dimension. Politics affect the universities (and other centres of higher education) in countless ways – through budgetary controls, through definition of ‘national needs’, and in some countries, though political control over appointments. The students, transient and often bewildered travellers through the university system, can be the harbingers, and sometimes the agents, of political change. The universities, again, are bound to reflect or resist old social values – and to create new ones. There are new problems for university ‘governments’. They are all pressed to revise their rules of discipline – and some are faced with an internal ‘anti-intellectual’ opposition. The torments at Berkeley, the dismissal of Clerk Kerr in the aftermath of Governor Reagan's victory in California, the disclosures of the links between American student bodies and the CIA, the protests of British Vice-Chancellors over ‘public accountability’, the ‘sit-in’ in the LSE, the slogans of ‘student power’ – these are largely, and in some cases, wholly, political landmarks of the university crisis.

ON I DECEMBER 1966 THE BUNDESTAG ELECTED THE CHRISTIAN democrat leader Kurt Georg Kiesinger as head of a government formed by Christian democrats (CDU) and social democrats (SPD), by a majority of 340 (out of 496) members. The liberals (FDP), with 49 members, were pushed aside into opposition. For the first time since 1930 the social democrats entered a German central government, not as the result of an electoral victory but at the conclusion of an inner Crisis within the hitherto existing majority. The CDU whose prestige was badly damaged by this crisis continued to provide the chancellor. This helps to explain why some 60 members of the coalescing parties voted against the candidate. Public opinion oscillated between feelings of relief because of the end of a period of insecurity, and feelings of discomfort in view of an experiment which seemed unorthodox and hazardous. The disputes around the grosse Koalition (great coalition) thus revealed the ambiguity of conceptions of parliamentary government as they had developed since the establishment of the Federal Republic.

THE WAY THAT THE TERM ‘POLICE STATE’ ENTERED THE ENGLISH language is curious. It is simply the transliteration of the German term Polizeistaat. In German constitutional and administrative law the Polizeistaat was one of the triad of categories used to describe the characteristics of particular states. The other two categories were the Rechtsstaat and the Justizstaat. The Polizeistaat was the creation of 18th-century Prussia. The devastation of the Thuty Years War led the Prussian leaders to conclude that only a state based upon internal discipline, rigorously controlled, and economically self-sufficient could provide a proper basis for survival. This involved breaking the feudal powers of the aristocracy, substituting for them as the principal instrument of government a civil service wholly obedient and responsive to the rulers of the state, and creating a powerful army capable of protecting the heartland of Prussia, if necessary by wars of expansion. The permanent possibility of war became the basis of stable government, and stable government, even at the price of war, was the major blessing a state could bestow on its citizens.

THE PROPHETS OF DEPOLITIZATION ARE CONFOUNDED. IN THE last year or so, politics have come back with a vengeance. Indeed, what is characteristic in this new political activity is that, anticapitalistic though it may be, its immediate motives did not spring from urgent economic problems. In France, for instance, trouble erupted out of a blue economic sky.

For those who, convinced that the political conflict is perennial and ubiquitous, regarded the theories of depolitization with due scepticism, this was a ‘new wave’ of political conflict though with a noticeable change in techniques and mentalities. The change was so considerable and so abrupt, the methods so different, that one could not but wonder if they did not herald also the coming of another code of political behaviour. Once more the need to study the modernization of politics, by which is meant broadly the synchronization of the political process with the evolved economic and social processes, seemed even greater.

THE OUTSIDE OBSERVER OF THE WEST GERMAN SCENE, JUDGING from casual newspaper reports, might be inclined to consider student opposition as a permanent feature of German political life. In fact, student protests and student demonstrations, though a recurring phenomenon in the Federal Republic, have been until recently rather rare and it is difficult to assess their influence on, or real importance for, political life. As a rule student politics whether they take the form of ‘opposition’ or not, are normally an inner-university affair and, at least in relatively stable democracies, come to the attention of public opinion only when they develop into political activity giving emphasis to outstanding critical issues in general politics.

1967, ONE MIGHT SAY, HAS BEEN GRAMSCI'S YEAR IN ITALY. In April a conference on the communist thinker was held in Cagliari, the capital city of his native island, Sardinia. A noteworthy book and several important essays dealing with his work, and a new history of the PCI from 1921 to 1926, have considerably enriched the already vast literature on the subject. Impassioned debates over Gramsci's political and intellectual legacy have vivified the usually drowsy atmosphere of the ‘cultural dubs’ in a number of middlesize towns, especially in the South. The time seems therefore appropriate for a reappraisal of Gramsci's role in present-day Italian culture and politics. In other words: how does Gramsci affect the contemporary Italian intellectual? More significantly, what does Gramsci mean to the leaders of the crisis-tom party he contributed to found and controlled before the day of his imprisonment?

EVERY POLITICAL SYSTEM, WHETHER IT IS PREDEMOCRATIC, DEMOcratic, or postdemocratic totalitarian, has both leaders and followers. All those who are leaders – in other words, all those who exercise power over followers – can be grouped together under the category of the ruling class. Any ruling class, to be such, obviously must be accepted by those who are ruled. Human beings are followers only if they choose to follow. Leaders must have recognition and at least some degree of consent from followers to be leaders. This is the necessary condition for possession of power by the ruling class. If the ruling class does not provide those elements which are necessary for the survival of the political system, both its power and that system are in peril. In return for the security which it provides its followers, the ruling class gives the tone to politics. It does not, however, have to occupy the actual administrative posts to be the ruling class, but it must possess a prestige position.

HISTORIANS AND POLITICAL SCIENTISTS HAVE CLEARLY ESTABLISHED that party as an institution developed slowly, and thus the term took in a wide variety of social forms. We also know that the acceptance of party competition and constitutional opposition was an equally gradual process, aided, but certainly not secured, by the writings of Bolingbroke or Burke. Throughout the 18th century, most references to party as such were unfavourable, although some echoed Bolingbroke's judgement that the efforts of a virtuous opposition were vita until, and only until, it triumphed. But before Burke, even before Bolingbroke, there was a theory of party nonetheless incisive because of its discontinuity with most writings of the time.

The general disrepute of party needs no elaboration. There has also been some valuable research into the much rarer genre of literature that showed a limited appreciation of the virtues of party conflict. A number of these sources were limited to the fleeting expression of an attitude rather than a coherent theory.

IN CHAPTER XVIII OF THE CONSIDERATIONS ON REPRESENTATIVE Government (1861) which discussed ‘The Government of Dependencies by Free States’ John Stuart Mill wrote that ‘It is always under great difficulties and very imperfectly, that a country can be governed by foreigners; even where there is no extreme disparity, in habits and ideas, between the rulers and the ruled. Foreigners do not feel with the people. They cantlot judge, by the light in which a thing appears to their own minds, or the manner in which it affects their feelings, how it will affect the feelings or appear in the minds of the subject population.’ This to Mill was a disadvantage; but reflection may lead us to conclude that there may be solid advantages in such a state of affairs; for we will remember that government, whether by foreigner or by native is exercise of power; and power, it is commonly and rightly said, sets up barriers, isolates, puts him who exercises it in a Merent world from him who is subject to it. Those who have power and those who do not have power are different species of men. It is therefore safer and more prudent for distances to be kept , and for the governed to approach their governors with cautious and mistrustful circumspection. An ancient Chinese sage declared it a mistake to compare the ruler to a father; for, he said, the ruler does not (or at any rate should not) feel affection towards his people. Again, the story is told of another wise Chinese, a ruler who, recovering from an illness, heard that his subjects had sacrificed an ox for his recovery.

THE MECHANICS, IMMEDIATE ANTECEDENTS AND IMMEDIATE CONSEquences of the coup d'état of 21 April 1967 in Greece are sufficiently known. By contrast, a defiaitive study of the officers’ plot must await the provision of answers to a number of debated questions (for example, as to the exact extent of the involvement of King Constantine or of members of his personal entourage). Meanwhile, however, it may be possible to try to set the coup, the military regime and the opposition to it which has emerged in the general perspective of recent Greek politics.

POLITICAL OPPOSITION IN ITALIAN CITY STATES WAS NOT FOR MEN who valued themselves more than they valued politics. The stakes were too high. Exile or loss of life and property were too often the penalties. The difficult legal circumstances which attended organized political opposition went back to the early commune, to the fervour of the civil struggles that began late in the 12th century. These were to affect the character of the opposition down to the 16th century. If the contenders in political strife sometimes expressed a readiness to compromise, they revealed, just as often, an inability to do so. And in critical times the desire for the physical elimination of political opponents easily emerged.

Major rivalries of the 11th and 12th centuries inadvertently favoured the rise of local government. The communes – rendered bolder in many cases by their quickening economies – profited from the conflicts between papacy and empire, between the emperor and the German princes, and between the episcopal and comital powers in Italy. As imperial authority waned, local groups all over north and central Italy pressed forward to take over the administration of their own affairs.

IN A SENSE RUSSIAN INDUSTRIALISTS WERE MUCH CLOSER TO THE vital centre of the Revolution of 1905 than any of the intelligentsia opposition; their workers, after all, were out on strike; and it was their private interests which were most directly and most seriously touched by the disturbances. Traditionally passive on political issues, Russian businessmen were catapulted into the ranks of the liberal opposition by the strike movement which rocked Russian industrial centies in 1905. The labour crisis goaded business men into examining government policy towards labour and capital; business groups then broadened their perspective and considered Russian society and the economy as a whole; finally, they injected political terms into the issues and echoed the pleas for constitutional reform and the extension of civil liberties so long championed by the libecal intelligentsia.

ISRAEL IS MORE SUI GENERIS THAN OTHER POLITICAL SOCIETIES not so much in virtue of the nature of its political arrangements and postures as in virtue of what underlies them. To highlight some basic issues of Israeli politics from this point of view is to take one's cue from the most fundamental question of Jewish existence: To be like or unlike, any other nation? If Zionism prevents Israelis from distinguishing themselves in the manner in which other nations distinguish themselves from each other, a major reason is that Israel's neighbours deny her the right to realize within sovereign boundaries the resurgence of a Jewish state and nation.