Elections satisfy both the practical and the theoretical requirements of classical democratic theory if they answer one question only: Who shall rule? Judged by this test the American elections of 7 November 1972 returned as clear and unequivocal an answer as the United States Constitution permits – crystal-clear as to individuals, equivocal as to parties and political forces. But the student of politics and society cannot resist treating elections as data-gathering devices on a wide range of other questions, on the state of the public mind, on the relative potency of pressure groups, on the internal health of the political parties, and, of course, on the shape of things to come. In this ancillary role American elections, despite the generous wealth of statistical material which they throw up – so much more detailed and categorized (though often less precise) than our own – Suffer in most years from one severe limitation, a limitation which in 1972 was particularly conspicuous; they do not engage the interest of more than a moderate percentage of the American citizenry. In 1972 that percentage was as low as 55 per cent, i.e. out of an estimated eligible population of 139,642,000 only 77,000,000 went to the polls. Since this circumscribes the conclusions which can be drawn from the results themselves, as well as constituting a phenomenon of considerable intrinsic interest, it seems worthwhile to begin any examination of the 1972 elections by an analysis not of the votes counted but of those which were never cast.

In October 1865 Cambridge University was offered an endowment for a lectureship in the History and Institutions of the United States. In February 1866, after full and open discussion, the Senate of the University, which was composed of all Masters of Arts, voted to reject the offer. This false start to American Studies in Cambridge was no mere donnish eccentricity, but an indication of the attitudes of conservative Englishmen to the United States at the close of the Civil War.

Kipling's ripest comments on the United States are to be found in the late (1926) short story, ‘The Prophet and the Country’. The tale begins with the breakdown of the narrator's car on the Great North Road late one summer night. A passing American offers shelter in his trailer, and a tow in the morning: which offers are accepted. The generous fellow-traveller is Mr Tarworth, a former realtor from Omaha, Nebraska, five years a widower. He drops a few hints about the Collective Outlook of Democracy, the Herd Impulse, and ‘the counterbalancing necessity for Individual Self-Expression’ and then launches artlessly into the story of his life. His own Primal Urge for Individual Self-Expression, we learn, came to him on his way home from his wife's funeral, when he had a Revelation qua Prohibition. Prohibition is the sin of Presumption, foisted on the American male by the American female. The sin will be duly punished, because to protect any race from the ‘ natural and God-given bacteria’ of civilization is to induce a condition of virginity which is terrifyingly vulnerable. ‘Immunise, or virg'nise, the Cit'zen of the United States to alcohol, an' you as surely redooce him to the mental status an' outlook of that Redskin. That is the Ne-mee-sis of Prohibition.’ Such had been Mr Tarworth's Revelation. The next question was, how to convey it to his fellow-countrymen. He decided to make a movie, even if ‘the Movies wasn't a business I'd ever been interested in, though a regular attendant’.

In the summer of 1931 Joseph Hergesheimer, author of more than a dozen books of fiction, returned to Germany for a visit, his first since 1907. This very American trip is recounted in his Berlin (1932) forgotten book by a well-nigh forgotten writer. It is surely one of the most curious volumes of a literary type which, for all its vigorous and perceptive judgements, is itself something of a curiosity. By now, I suppose, it is a commonplace mat the travel book, the elegant bastard of genres, invariably reveals more about the traveller than about the geography he supposedly describes. This is true certainly for modern examples which come to mind – James's The American Scene (1907) Hemingway's The Green Hills of Africa (1935) or Steinbeck's Travels with Charley (1961). And whatever other defects mar, say, Truman Capote's Local Color (1950) or John Knowles's Double Vision (1964), the failure to impose personality on the scene –to let voice and stance, even with their inadequacies, shape and experience – is in large measure the source of our disappointment in those books. Hergesheimer's Berlin does not fail for this reason. Like Local Color, it is mannered, and like Double Vision, it is thin; but it is not merely mannered and thin.

Since the publication of Mr Sammler's Planet in 1969, it has been difficult to anticipate the development of Saul Bellow's fiction. Although this novel is Bellow's most disappointing work, its obvious limitations are anticipated in Herzog. There is a strong thread of ambiguous irony which, in Bellow's most recent novel, has deepened into unintentional parody. This is, I would suggest, a symptom of Bellow's inability to balance his protagonists' subjective reality with a convincing version of their social milieu.

Some six years ago Gordon Wood closed a brief discussion of mobs in the American Revolution by asking whether, if the mob was no less a mob than its European counterpart, the revolution was any less a revolution. Three recent full-length studies, Pauline Maier's From Resistance to Revolution, Richard D. Brown's Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts and Patricia U. Bonomi's A Factious People, deal in significant part with mob, or, as I will call it, crowd activity in early America, although in none of them does it form the main subject. The approach to it of all three is fresh and sophisticated but, as the cliché goes, they raise as many questions as they answer. This essay will look first at the questions they answer and then go on to the ones they raise.

During the last decade William Appleman Williams has become one of the most influential of contemporary American historians. In particular, the comprehensive interpretation of United States foreign policy which he originally expounded in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland and New York, 1959; revised edition, New York, 1962) has attracted many adherents in these years of the Vietnam war and the rise of the ‘New Left’. A school has developed and in a number of monographs and articles Williams's interpretative framework has been applied to various episodes and aspects of American foreign policy. Now Williams has edited a volume of essays, largely by members of this school, which ‘can be used as the basic guide for a course in American foreign relations’. Its appearance, following the recent publication in this country of Williams's own substantial work on the background to the Spanish-American War and America's acquisition of the Philippines, provides an appropriate occasion for a general review of the interpretation.