Scientific thought today is dominated by the spirit of synthesis, in contrast with eighteenth and nineteenth century works which were characterized by their analytical impulse. However, this movement is still lurking in the collective unconscious, and not having achieved as yet its complete flowering, it remains ignored by most of the intellectual élite. Not only because it is impossible to see the forest for the trees, but especially because, influenced by an academic tradition inherited from the great masters of past centuries, the élite today is loathe to open its eyes to the reality of our own times. Official science, most universities and specialists have been trained to feel a horror for general ideas. It would, therefore, seem that this intellectual tendency is not likely to favor the creation of vast conceptions, were it not for the fact, as we shall see later, that despite themselves, scholars and researchers are carried along by the same movement of ideas. For, in order to advance into the most varied domains of scientific thought in our time, it is sometimes necessary to establish such intimate relationships among special fields, widely separated from each other in terms of their subject matter, that actually the sketching out of veritable syntheses is taking place to some degree everywhere. It is really very simple; in the absence of such generalizations, one would be pawing the ground.

This study does not claim to be an exhaustive critique of the contemporary cinema, whose abundance and diversity defies any attempt to unify it. It has no other purpose than to clarify the underlying meanings of certain productions which are typical of the medium (as for example, L'Avventura by Antonioni and A bout de souffle by Jean-Luc Godard), and to show that the “learned” cinema, that is, the cinema conscious of the ends pursued and the means employed, cannot but fail when it undertakes to introduce new connnections between the sign and the sense.

Both in the case of colloquial language and in the case of specialized scientific language we always have to face the essential issue : what must we do in order not to be misled by an incorrect use of language? When we refer in general to being misled by some use of language we have two cases in mind: primo, when the language in question wrongly performs its communicative function so that the speaker is unable to convey his ideas to the listener, and, secundo, when the language by means of which we think imposes on us, through its structure and forms fixed by tradition (in the case of natural languages), incorrect ideas about reality (cf. the issues of hypostases). The causes of such and similar difficulties are varied. These difficulties, among other things, suggest the idea that language is not only an instrument, but also an object of research, an idea which induced twentieth century philosophers to engage in the study of language in its ontological, gnosiological, and methodological aspects. The method of semantic analysis, understood as a method of analysis of meanings of words, is directed precisely against these shortcomings of language. That method is meant to prevent semantic and logical errors that encumber the process of thinking with difficulties and hamper communication both with others and with oneself. Among other causes, these errors are due to the ambiguity and vagueness of words.

It is impossible to understand the significance of Machiavelli's work if one does not understand, to begin with, the concept of man and of the world which dominates it.

Too frequently the image of Machiavelli is limited only to a study of the procedures, tricks, string-pulling, ropes (and even ropes around the neck) which he prescribes for the attainment and maintainance of power, all of this well embellished with a psychology which is either praised or deprecated.

The true character of the Inca Empire is poorly set forth in works dealing with its economic and social structure. Too many historians or sociologists have attempted, in their enthusiasm, to make of it a state corresponding to a modern formula : a socialist, a totalitarian or a welfare state. From the sixteenth century on, how many arbitrary pictures have been drawn, propped up by quotations! In fact, among the chronicles and reports and documents which Spain, that rummager of old papers, has handed down to us, and in the accounts of the Indians themselves, one finds enough mixed-up assertions and facts to bolster or justify the most diverse interpretations. Reality has frequently been confused with a schematic, abstract order which was the fruit of frequently gratuitous speculations.

There is no need to explain the difficulties connected with the scholarly study of Shakespeare in a foreign country. In this respect Soviet scholars are in much the same position as other scholars outside England and the USA, which possess the most source material, books and manuscripts. However, thanks to the rich collections in the public libraries in Moscow—the Lenin Library—and Leningrad—the Saltykov-Schedrin Library—and in the Arts faculties of the universities as well, practically all of world Shakespeareana is available to Soviet students. They also profit by communication with such important centers of scholarship as the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-on-Avon and the Folger Shakespeare Library at Washington.

The notion of resistance to the state has come to be bandied about a great deal, and a great many political movements place themselves under its sign. This intrusion of violence into the realm of the law seems to be spreading since the advocates of insurrection, who accuse the state of betraying its mission, are not those who consider revolt to be the necessary first step towards any kind of affranchisement. Where the partisans of revolution believe that violence is, in Marx's words, “the midwife of every old society that carries a new one within it” and that it is “the instrument by which the social movement sweeps it away and breaks to pieces the political forms that are fixed and dead,” the partisans of the right to resist the state do not share these hopes for political and social upheavals. Marxist theory, which praises revolutionary insurrection, stands opposed to a kind of philosophy that admits of armed opposition to the state, but can nevertheless be called liberal in two respects: formally, from its present perspective, where it appears opposed to Marxist thought, and also historically, in the evolution of political ideas, where it is opposed to absolutist conceptions of the state. For, as R. Derathé remarked, the question of the right to resist “cast light on the chasm that separated the theologians from the legal experts.” The doctrines of divine right left no room for envisaging a limitation on the duty of obedience, without turning such a limitation into the equivalent of a revolt against God. Bossuet, in his Politique tirée des propres paroles de l'Ecriture sainte, asserts that “God has made the kings and the princes his lieutenants on earth so as to render their authority sacred and inviolable.” The result is unconditional obedience to the kings and to all those who hold a parcel of authority: “Declared impiety and even persecution do not exempt the subjects from the obedience they owe to their princes.” The only possible attitude in the face of “the violence of the princes” is to submit “respectful remonstrances, without mutiny and without a murmur, and with prayers for their conversion.” It is also necessary to ban “remonstrances full of bitterness and grumbling” since these “are the beginnings of sedition, which must not be tolerated.”