CHARLES PÉGUY IS CERTAINLY NOT FORGOTTEN. IN DEATH, as in life, he remains a controversial figure. A man of passion, he still arouses passion in others. Even today, at least in France, a book on Péguy is almost certain to give rise to polemics. The details of his political, sentimental and religious life are scrutinized in minute detail. What is most often neglected, what is not taken seriously in this stormy celebrity, is the thinker or, if you like (Péguy would have liked), the philosopher. His views on the city and the Church, on Sophocles and on the Gospels, on the modern world and what makes it move, on men and gods, are sometimes very profound and beautiful. So many writers who are greatly inferior to him now occupy a major place in the text-books of philosophy, sociology and historiography that it is only fair to deal, even if only briefly as here, with Péguy's thought. He himself would have liked to be considered from this angle: was it not the ambition (one of the ambitions) of his life to finish a thesis on the place given to history and sociology in modern times? Although unfinished, the few hundred pages which he left are rich enough to show that he was one of the most enetrating critics of the historical and sociological points of view which dominate modern consciousness.

DURING THE LAST DECADE ‘EUROPEAN UNION’ HAS BECOME something of a modern catchphrase in the European Community. In its simplest form it is a protean concept which serves as a convenient label for all those who advocate a more regulated and binding Community, though their conception may not necessarily be restricted to the present Community of Ten. ‘European Union’ first emerged at the Paris conference of heads of government in October 1972. There it was agreed that the Community's main objective was to transform, before the end of the decade, ‘the whole complex of the relations of Member States into a European Union’. The communiqué issued after the Paris meeting of the heads of government on 10 December 1974 reaffirmed this commitment and urged the Community of Nine to ‘agree as soon as possible on an overall concept of European Union’.

THE ELECTIONS IN ARGENTINA HAVE BEEN A SURPRISE TO everybody. The results, contrasted with those of 1973, were the following:

THE OUTCOME OF THE FONTAINEBLEAU MEETING OF THE European Council in June marked the end of one phase in Western Europe's search for greater unity, and opened another – and potentially more positive – period.

The agreement reached after several years' painful search at last secured a number of long-overdue adjustments to the basic compact between the Community's present ten members, and removed the obstacles to the entry of Spain and Portugal. At the same time it opened up a new agenda for the future. The crucial problems which the current and prospective members of the Community now have to face will no longer be those which have dominated the headlines over the past five years – reform of the CAP, increase of budgetary resources and the UK's contribution to the budget. The central issues will be those concerned with how to develop further the complex of relationships between this group of countries so that their developing union can serve them better and become more effective. Many proposals to achieve this are already Fontainebleau to a new Spaak-type committee makes clear, several of the existing members now seek to make this the beginning of a period as constructive and as decisive as that which in the mid-1950s led to the relaunching of the Six and the signature of the Rome treaties.

THE RECENT VICTORY OF RAUL ALFONSÍN AND THE RADICAL Party in Argentina marks the end of forty years during which the Peronists were, overtly or covertly, the major factor in Argentine politics. It also sounds the death-knell of attempts to find a trans-class solution to the problem of political legitimacy in Argentina. It may not be inappropriate, then, to look back on the most sustained attempt to establish this legitimacy via an ideology of class collaboration: the ideology of Peronism.

WHEN IN OCTOBER 1982 LE MONDE COMMEMORATED THE centenary of Arthur de Gobineau's death, it borrowed as headline Jean Mistler's description of him as ‘le plus grand méconnu du dix-neuvième siècle’. Despite its hyperbole, that judgment is useful in alerting us to an absorbing case partly of neglect and partly of misrepresentation, and to the circumstances under which this pioneer of Aryan racist ideology was posthumously rescued from the first of these fates only at the price of condemnation to the second. There are both personal and public reasons why Gobineau has proved so difficult for his own contemporaries and for posterity to assess. Much of the problem arises from the enigmatic complexity of the man himself: a figure (in Jean Gaulmier's phrase) ‘tantôt fascinant, tantôt insupportable’, a self-styled aristocrat, a charming yet fiercely pessimistic autodidact, an energetic novelist, poet and dramatist as well as diplomat, journalist, historian and orientalist, and someone who bore the stamp both of polymath and of charlatan. But the image has been blurred also because of the impact of wider historical experience, concerning above all the record of Franco-German mutual hostility. From whichever side of the Rhine they came, the attempts at viewing Gobineau through the gunsmoke of 1870–1 were already confusing enough even before the turmoil of 1914–18 further obscured the scene. Further misperception thrived once Nazism started to implement across France and Europe at large a vision of Teutonic racial destiny which was widely, yet wrongly, taken to reflect directly Gobineau's own ideas. The points of disjunction between those beliefs and what actually became known as ‘gobinism’ need to be recognized. Even so, that awareness is enhanced by acknowledging also that Gobineau's whole mode of thinking about race made him singularly liable to such distortion. In short, he himself had quite gratuitously created his very own hostages to intellectual fortune.

THE ISSUE OF CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS PRESENTS THE new Argentine government with several problems. One is the structuring of government, that is general staff relations. Moreover the new authorities must take a position in the short to medium term over the question of responsibility for the ‘dirty war’, the plundering of the public purse by the officer corps between 1976 and 1982 and the defeat in the war with Britain. And in the longer term they must confront the wider issue of how to both ‘civilianize’ the armed forces and ‘demilitarize’ civil society.

THE FOREIGN ADVENTURISM OF THE ARGENTINE MILITARY may have made a few minds more cautious about automatically welcoming the advent of any other future military regime. This point was made more than a decade ago by Stepan in his seminal work on the military in Brazil; what he said then could have been said of most military regimes anywhere:

Whatever the future outcome, it is clear that the attraction of military rule – its presumed stability, unity, and ftvity of purpose – has been largely illusory. Even more importantly, the difficulties encountered by the highly professional army of Brazil, with its technocratic civilian allies, illustrate that there can be no apolitical solution to the problems of political development.

TO THE AVERAGE EUROPEAN CONCERNED WITH, OR SIMPLY curious about, international politics and the Third World predicament, Latin America is a glaring compound of violent Machtpolitik, rampant demography and collective soul-searching. Uneasily torn between Western loyalties and the dismal realities of underdevelopment, the huge continent from Rio Bravo to Patagonia keeps featuring as the unhappy part of America – indeed, of the whole West (for Latin America, unlike Africa, is not just a lost possession of the West – rather, it is a Western projection, for all the obvious significance of its non-Western ethnic and cultural components).