CLASSICAL POLITICAL THEORY HAS BEEN PREOCCUPIED WITH TWO over-arching problems; the stability and survivaI of political systems and the rationality of political acts. Rational decisions, it has been assumed, lead to stable and successful government. The first rule of nature is to make peace, Hobbes pointed out, and it is human reason that devises means for doing this.

All the arguments, of course, have hung on the definition of rationality, and more particularly on the question of who, in practice, is to define what is rational or contribute to such a definition. The ultimate objective of the philosophers has been the ‘good of the whole community’, so the question has always resolved itself into establishing criteria for deciding which category or categories of person, under which set of rules or restraints, are most likely to make rational contributions to political decision-making for the good of the whole society. A large vocabulary of concepts – sovereignty, general will, obligation, citizenship, rights and so on – has been developed to provide theoretically satisfactory answers to this question.

EXTRAPARLIAMENTARY OPPOSTION MADE ITS APPEARANCE IN THE midst of the political upheavals of 1968 both as part of a wider phenomenon of social and political life and as the result of a specific combination of factors in certain countries, especially France and the United States. In the wider sense, it resulted from the age-old problem: are established political structures willing (or indeed able) to answer the needs of the larger socio-political communities for whose welfare they have been made responsible? The problems of the technological age—popular participation in governmental processes, the coming of age of the post-war ‘baby boom’ generation, the quality of life in the consumer society, and, perhaps most significantly, the increasing bureaucratization of administration and politics on both sides of the iron curtain—served to stoke the furnaces of scepticism and open rejection of accepted answers. As the year progressed, the collective leadership of the Soviet Union continued to pull back from the de-Stalinization of the Krushchev era, American leaders were assassinated and racial strife continued, hopes for a Middle East settlement faded, and the Vietnam war exploded in the Tet offensive. The atmosphere of hopeful progress which had permeated the early 1960s was shattered for good, and a widespread mood of frustration came to predominate.

POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS IN DEMOCRATIC STATES HAVE USUALLY COME into existence as the manifestation of a principle of political philosophy or as the result of a compromise among forces with different aspirations for the polity. Often both factors have been involved. Certainly the consequences for political behaviour of introducing any particular structure have been of concern to its architects, but many of these consequences are unforeseeable and the actual impact of an institutional change or the character of a formal role may in time become quite different from that intended.

For a political actor, such as an individual, an interest group or a party, formal structures are given attributes of the political environment. Along with the more diffuse qualities of the political culture, they constitute the framework within which political actors must compete for influence over public policy. This framework, both formal and informal, is uneven in its effects on the fortunes of the various political forces. It favours some approaches and some groups more and in different ways than it favours others. The British Labour Party, with its concentrated voting strength, is disadvantaged by the single-member district/plurality electoral system, while its counterpart in Germany is able to maximize its strength in a system of proportional representation.

VIRTUALLY ALL THE MAJOR ACCOUNTS OF 1917 IN ENGLISH TO DATE deal almost exclusively with events in Petrograd, paying occasional attention to other parts of European Russia. An admirable exception has been provided by Dr John Keep, who has written a fascinating account of the reception of the October coup in the provinces. In this essay other neglected aspects of the hiatus between the capital and the rest of the country are taken up which refer to the period prior to October. As an introduction to these aspects it would seem useful in the first place to mention some of the well-established considerations on this subject.

Historians of every political hue have tended to equate the Petrograd-centred events with the Russian revolution. Because they were initially successful in Petrograd above all, the bolsheviks have preferred since 1917 to concentrate on the political course of events in the capital in order to justify their claim to have inherited the cloak of sovereignty from the old regime.