In what must surely rank as one of the strangest episodes in the entirehistory of science, two generations of our immediate forebears in the social sciences managed virtually to ignore the “Darwinian” theory of biological evolution and to exclude from their purview any sustained consideration of the role of biological factors in the shaping of human behavior.

The study of elites, or “who's who, when, and how,” as Professor Rustow has described this field, has long been a topic of concern to scholars in a wide variety of disciplines. Social and political philosophers dating back to Aristotle and including such diverse figures as Marx, Pareto, and Mosca have written about the relationships between elites and the social order, and a host of social scientists and historians have carried out detailed analyses of the social background of highlevel decision-makers in various societies

A Striking characteristic of the literature on military rule in developing countries is the gap between theoretical expectations and political, social, and economic reality. On the one hand, practitioners of comparative social and political theory have tended to view the military, at least in the non-Latin American area, as an organization capable of playing an important modernizing role. On the other hand, empirical researchers, often the very same individuals who at a different time wear the hat of the “theoretical practitioner,” have found the performance of the military as political agents of modernization to have been rather dismal.

The strategic relations between the two superpowers have for a long time been influenced by the strategically superior position of the United States. This strategic imbalance has recently been rectified through a massive Soviet program of developing weapons systems that in effect created superpower parity. However, the concepts of strategic superiority and parity in the nuclear context are rather ambiguous. It is the purpose of this study to examine the influence of strategic parity as well as several related factors that have in the past shaped Soviet strategic doctrine and policy, and that are likely to continue to do so in the future.

If the United Nations is ever to assume the greater powers needed for effective peace-keeping and peace-making, the General Assembly and/or the Security Council will need an improved system of representation and voting. The present system of giving each country one vote in the General Assembly, regardless of the country's size, and of giving a veto in the Security Council to five big powers, is unrealistic and imperfect for many reasons, which need not be detailed here.

Ethnicity is one of the less precise terms in the vocabulary of social science. Most frequently used in reference to language, its meaning is sometimes extended to cover common social, cultural, and physical characteristics transmitted as a matter of inheritance and capable of producing social solidarities based on affect. So defined, ethnicity has both subjective and objective dimensions, for it refers both to perceptible traits and to perception whereby the former assume social relevance.

Only in the past decade has the study of political socialization grown into a central concern of political science. Although political philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have been interested in the process by which the child acquires behavior appropriate to the role of a citizen, political scientists had, as of ten years ago, devoted little attention to studying this phenomenon systematically.