SOVIET economic policy in the few years since Stalin's death has been characterized by flamboyance and ferment. In an attempt to free economic growth from the bottleneck of stagnation in agriculture, Khrushchev has sponsored some extravagant gambles in corn-growing and in expansion of the sown acreage. Policy toward the consumer has gone through two complete reversals: the regime at first experimented with offering the population an improvement in the standard of living, but is now once again asserting that abundance in the future requires austerity today. Perhaps the most startling innovation of all emerged in the past year when the regime began to develop a program of foreign economic assistance as a weapon in its economic competition with the capitalist part of the world. Because of their spectacular nature, these shifts of policy have attracted considerable attention in the West and have been commented on at length. Aware diat the Soviet Union is expanding her economic power at a more rapid rate than are the capitalist countries, Western students of the Soviet economy have sought in these policy changes-some clue as to whether its rate of growth is likely to decline or to be maintained in the future. The early indications of a rise in standards of living that would cause a reduced growth of heavy industry and so a decline in investment and in the rate of growth have now been dispelled. The inability of Soviet agriculture to provide an expanding food supply for a growing work force certainly appears to be a real threat to industrial growth, and with die failure of Khrushchev's gambles, this threat remains. Thus the evidence as to the over-all effect of these changes on the rate of expansion of die Soviet economy is still inconclusive.

THE purpose of this article is to analyze in a preliminary way some of the basic sociological problems of bureaucratic political systems—legitimation, autonomy, and political struggle. For reasons which will be specified later—not least among them, reasons of space—we shall limit our discussion to pre-modern, historical societies, such as the ancient empires (especially the Egyptian), the Byzantine, Chinese, and Ottoman Empires, and some of the European countries in the age of absolutism. By way of introduction, we shall endeavor to discern some common characteristics in all these political systems, and the main differences among them; and then inquire into some of the sociological conditions that are related to both the common features and the chief differences.

JAPAN'S response to the intrusion of the West, by contrast with the response of China and other Asian nations, has long intrigued statesmen and scholars. Generalizations about Asia, its cultural traditions, its policies, its economic development, are especially difficult to fit to the Japanese. “Japan is of course sui generis,” says O. H. K. Spate, the British geographer, and few will disagree.

“WE ARE living in an age in which all roads lead to communism,” Molotov proclaimed confidently in 1947. Kaganovich re-echoed him in 1955 by maintaining that “if the nineteenth century was a century of capitalism, the twentieth century is a century of the triumph of socialism and communism.” This serenely optimistic viewpoint sees the victory of communism as all-inclusive, leaving no room for any mutual adjustment between the Communist and non-Communist worlds. Indeed, the First Secretary of the CPSU, Nikita S. Khrushchev, has repeatedly made it clear that the concept of coexistence relates simply to a transitory phase prior to the final assertion of the Communist mode of life over the entire globe. It would be idle to dismiss these claims as mere expressions of blind fanaticism, for whatever the element of fanaticism in the thinking of Soviet leaders may be, such proclamations of faith in final victory are also supported by observation of recent trends in world affairs.

IT was once suggested that the basic trait of psychological warfare—and, incidentally, the greatest asset to those that practice it—is its lack of known positive results.1 No satisfactory method has yet been developed to measure the effects of a propaganda campaign on its chosen audience. This characteristic is at once the greatest weakness of propaganda and psychological warfare (how does the operator know whether his effort was well spent or not?) and their greatest strength (if there is no reliable evaluation of the effort, it had better be continued, or even intensified, lest ground be lost).