Whatever its author's intention, nearly every study of the history of Soviet Russia or of the international Communist movement contributes to the continuing controversy over Lenin's responsibility for all the policies that usually are lumped together under the label of Stalinism. Irving Howe and Lewis Coser wrote in 1957 that ‘from the party of Lenin to the party of Stalin there is a fundamental disjuncture marked by a violent counter-revolution’. In a more recent exchange of views on this subject, George Lichtheim, although he did not say that Lenin would have behaved as Stalin did, said it is his considered opinion that ‘Stalin's policy, broadly speaking, was within the context established by Lenin in 1923’. Lichtheim was referring in particular to Stalin's industrialization plans, but in the same article he makes it clear that his opinion holds for Stalin's policy in its entirety.

Few countries have been as frequently described in terms of national character as Turkey. Even the earliest observers of the Ottoman Empire appear anxious to set their findings into some generalized formula of the Turkish ethos. The term used to refer to these attempts at national stereo-typing in the lingua franca of the Levant was Alia Turca behavior, an expression which has survived into modern Turkish.

The study of overseas Chinese has continued for some time as a series of somewhat unrelated monographs with little comparative analysis. One of the few important attempts at sociological generalization about Chinese communities in Southeast Asia was made by Maurice Freedman in an article entitled ‘Immigrants and Associations’, which appeared in this journal in 1960. In this article, Freedman suggested that ‘the associations which in a small-scale and relatively underdeveloped settlement express social, economic and political links in an undifferentiated form, tend, as the scale and complexity of the society increase, to separate into a network of associations which are comparatively specialized in their functions and the kinds of solidarity they express’ (Freedman, 1960: 47 f.). He proposed a continuum of types of overseas Chinese urban communities. At one end stands Kuching, Sarawak, ‘as the model of a simple and relatively small-scale overseas settlement’, while ‘Later Singapore is … the model of the most developed form of immigrant Chinese settlement in Southeast Asia’ (ibid.: 45). Singapore exhibits a great number of associations, based on criteria of recruitment that allow memberships to overlap to a great extent; the urban Chinese community in Sarawak includes fewer associations and consequently less overlap among memberships. Other studies in Southeast Asia suggest that this continuum might be a useful way of looking at the development of Chinese communities.

Following a few introductory comments on the concept ‘subculture’ and the likelihood of universally similar responses to the industrialization experience, some generalizations are offered here about a dockworker subculture and the conditions that create it. The generalizations are in the form of propositions, not operational hypotheses—certainly not verified generalizations. They are based primarily on written sources, though the author has conducted interviews in San Francisco and Karachi. In conclusion the problems involved in making this type of cross-culture, cross-time proposition into a verifiable hypothesis are briefly suggested.

By way of introducing so charged a subject as corruption we do well to remind ourselves that if the traditional rulers of the colonized areas left much to be desired in terms of present standards of public office-holding, the colonizers themselves could scarcely be regarded as models of probity. Colonial office until the twentieth century was regarded more often than not as an investment in an exclusive franchise that was expected to yield a good return to the political entrepreneur who acquired it. In Spain this conception was reflected in the practice of selling certain colonial posts at public auction. Dutch practice in Batavia, although not identical, signified a similar notion of office. Here the colonial administrator owed his superiors a regular charge that could be described as a ‘license to hold office’ in return for which he could anticipate, in addition to his small salary and a share of the district crop yield, more or less open payments from the Dutch business interests he had assisted in the course of his duties.

Latin American political thought and scholarship has historically evidenced preoccupation with the problem of self-definition. Simón Bolívar, for example, concerned with the distinctive quality of Latin American civilization, said that it was not European nor North American nor Indian, but a new synthesis. A century later Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, father of the Aprista political movement, insisted that he had spawned a new ideology derived from the unique reality of Indoamerica. The contemporary Christian Democratic movement formally acknowledges its debt to the European tradition but also highlights its differences, which stem from the disparity between industrial and emerging nations. The well-known thesis of Herbert Eugene Bolton and the ‘Atlantic Triangle’ of Arthur P. Whitaker are variations on the same theme.