The problem of economic development was among the main preoccupations of the classical economists; and Karl Marx, Max Weber, and their followers continued to be interested in it. The Anglo-Saxon economists and their followers, however, during the century preceding the Second World War, all but forgot about economic development—perhaps because they took it for granted. The growth of most of the advanced economies was impressive enough to be taken for granted; as for the underdeveloped areas, next to nothing was known about their rates of growth, although economists (at least in the advanced countries) seem to have supposed that the magnitude of capital exports to these areas gave them a chance to develop even faster than, and ultimately to catch up with, the more highly developed Western economies. Only England's development received some attention and mild doubts were occasionally raised as to whether her rate of economic growth was as fast as it could and should have been. From the turn of the century onward, blue books and white papers appeared, uneasily comparing British with German and American industrial production, questioning the wisdom of exporting quite so much capital, stressing the need for more aggressive export drives—but next to nothing was done about all this. For one thing, the philosophy of laisser faire still ruled supreme; for another, business fluctuations obscured and rendered difficult a true assessment of the situation; for a third, Britain's continued political supremacy may have lulled concern over the deterioration of her relative economic position. The problem of development came to the forefront of economic discussion only with the Second World War, as a result of two important changes. In the West, political power shifted across the Atlantic; in the East, Russia's war record established her both as an important center of political attraction and as a shining example of the success of planned industrialization and development.

The problem of how to conceive and write “universal history” A is increasingly haunting the imaginations and troubling the consciences of historians in the West. We live in one world, but our historiography is still national, or at most regional. We no longer really believe that piling the known historical facts higher and higher will save us, but we still hopefully support antiquarianism and monographic research. Professional historical writing has thus lost all power to influence the man in the street because its thought-frame is parochial, myopic, and so irrelevant to the modern world. It cannot prepare us to understand the world we live in unless it casts off Leopold von Ranke's Europe-centered mentality and becomes truly “universal” in attitude and perspective. Or so it seems to one particularly articulate British historian, Geoffrey Barraclough, in History in a Changing World, a volume of essays recently published.

When John Stuart Mill composed his System of Logic, he maintained that valid application of the comparative method to problems in the moral or social sciences is impossible, or, at best, inadmissible, since it must be based on a priori judgments. Mill founded his objection to the use of this method in social science on two essentially interrelated propositions: the uniqueness of each social event, and the multiplicity and variety of causal factors which may be considered as having a determining influence on these events. Although this conception of the special nature of social events has, on the whole, remained unchanged, social scientists have freely applied the comparative method to the analysis of social problems. History has been outstanding among the social sciences in rejecting longest the application of this method. The main argument against its use was derived from the description of history formulated by Ranke and his school, a description which was endowed with a philosophical underpinning by Windelband and Rickert, who classified sciences according to method into a nomothetic and an ideographic group. History was the ideographic science par excellence, and with the strong historical emphasis that was placed in Germany upon other social sciences as well, there was a tendency to return to the viewpoint of Mill and to regard as scientifically suspect generalizations in social science based on the application of the comparative method.

Mahan wrote protractedly about sea power, although certainly not more than his notable subject deserved, without using an unqualified “Sea Power” as the title for any of his works. His “Sea Power in Its Relation to the War of 1812,” for example, was published in two volumes totaling 860 pages. Held against this standard of thoroughness, any book entitled “Air Power” and running a modest 200 pages should perhaps be suspect at the outset. The purchaser should nevertheless be entitled to anticipate that such a book would in fact concentrate on discussing air power, that air power would be defined and placed in perspective as an instrument of policy, and that knowledgeability would be exhibited with respect to existing and projected national air forces. The reader might also expect a full awareness of the scientific and technological revolution now proceeding at so accelerated a pace that air power in some respects has to repeat its coming of age almost annually. Some expectation might be justified that the author would make his own contribution toward concepts and philosophy touching the use of air forces and the place of air power. If the author was English, as is Mr. Lee, the reader could also confidently expect some appreciation of future British air power, more especially as the United Kingdom has unequivocally replaced its ancient reliance on sea power with a new reliance on air power as the military fulcrum of its national strategy.

The current attempt by European and American scholarship to come to grips with Africa is bound to be frustrating work for some years to come. The continent is vast and varied; Western knowledge of it is, for the most part, recent and superficial; and yet the demand for understanding, arising out of Africa's increasing importance in world affairs, will not wait for the slow process of maturation which scholarship normally requires. Policies must be made and points of view arrived at, and it is no use complaining that the stock of information and ideas out of which these policies and points of view must be fashioned are the premature products of half-digested thought. At the same time, it is clear that it is in such circumstances as these, where standards are non-existent or only half-formed, that the academic charlatan and the purveyor of facile formulae thrive. The more long-term goals of orthodox scholarship may be in danger of being sacrificed to the search for quick answers.