TROTSKY'S REPEATED FAILURE AS A POLITICAL PROPHET DOES not seem to have damaged his reputation among his devoted followers. The very pivot of Trotsky's faith – that socialism in one country is doomed to failure unless supported by revolution in other countries – has been proved palpably wrong. The only reason why ‘socialist’ countries like the Soviet Union or Poland, for example, survive at all is that they are able to bolster their own inefficient systems by vast loans and imports of food and technology from states where a free economy exists. In The Revolution Betrayed, in 1937, Trotsky foretold that a defeat of Germany by the Soviet Union would result in the crushing not only of Hider, ‘but of the capitalist system’; while in the Soviet Union one of two things would happen. The first possibility was that a revolutionary party would take over which would restore freedom in the trade unions and the Soviets, as well as the liberty of Soviet parties. It would purge the apparatus, abolish all privileges and limit inequality of payment to the minimum. It was a belated conversion to freedom by Trotsky. In 1921 the sailors and garrison of Kronstadt had risen and called for every one of these reforms. They were not only mown down as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ with Trotsky's full support, and under his overall command, but his action was unequivocally justified by him years later in exile, on the grounds that failure to crush Kronstadt in 1921 would have opened the gates to ‘counterrevolution’ – in plain words, would have put an end to communist monopoly of power. The second hypothetical future of a Soviet Union victorious in a war against Germany, according to Trotsky, was the victory of a bourgeois party, which would restore private property. Of course, all political prophets go wrong more often than not. But this particular failure reveals two characteristic weaknesses of Trotsky's power of analysis.

THE ORIGINS OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY CONTINUE TO BE AN object of scholarly dispute. It seems to be very probable that this will continue to be so forever. An enormously complex transformation occurred in a very large, diversified and intricate society, and the event was unique: no imitative industrialization can be treated as an event of the same kind as the original industrialization, simply in virtue of the fact that all the others were indeed imitative, were performed in the light of the now established knowledge that the thing could be done and had certain advantages (though the emulated ideal was of course interpreted in all kinds of quite diverse ways). So we can never repeat the original event which is to be understood, which was perpetrated by men who knew not what they did, and this was of its essence: we cannot do this, for quite a number of cogent reasons - the sheer fact of repetition makes it different from the original occasion; one cannot in any case reproduce all the circumstances of early modern Western Europe; and experiments on such a scale, for the sake of establishing a theoretical point, are morally hardly conceivable. In any case, to sort out causal threads in so complex a process, we should need not one, but very, very many re-runs, and these will never be available to us.

THE QUESTION OF DECENTRALIZATION IS ONE WHICH THE British Labour Party has always found difficult to handle because of its inheritance of contradictory traditions in relation to the British state. Labour's roots in anti-authoritarian radicalism and in the British periphery make it sympathetic to decentralist demands and this has been reinforced by the need to compete electorally for support in the periphery. However, to gain power at Westminster it needs more than peripheral support; it needs to capture power at the centre and, in order to benefit the periphery, to strengthen the power of the centre. Ideologically, the party also possesses a socialist tradition which preaches the indivisibility of working-class interests and deplores nationalism and separatism.

RECENT DEBATES IN BRITAIN ABOUT SECRECY IN CENTRAL government have become immersed in the traditional tension between espionage and secrecy. Espionage concerns spies and others who intend to help an enemy and who deliberately harm the security of the nation. Secrecy means ‘the compulsory withholding of knowledge reinforced by the prospect of sanctions for disclosure’. Leakage of official information may involve persons having no intention of damaging the nation. However, harm to the country may ensue from information getting into the wrong hands, whether by espionage or leakage. Experience of this tension in practice was a major factor leading to the enactment of the Official Secrets Act 1911, with section 1 covering espionage and section 2 unauthorized disclosure of information, with the risk of prosecution for either offence. Journalists in particular are aggrieved that they may be subject to prosecution under the Act used to charge spies and traitors. Jonathan Aitken, one of the journalists prosecuted in 1970 under section 2 of the 1911 Act over extracts from a British diplomat's report leaked to the Sunday Telegraph about the Nigerian civil war, was acquitted and published his own version of the Nigerian case in his book Officially Secret (1971), which heavily criticized the Official Secrets Act.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE INHABITANTS OF GREATER Kabylia and their Arabic-speaking compatriots constitutes one of the fundamental issues of contemporary Algerian politics. This relationship has been neither accurately conceived nor adequately taken into account in the existing literature on modern Algeria. The growth of popular Berberism in Kabylia, articulating widespread opposition to the government's Arabization policy and the demand for official recognition of the Berber language, went unnoticed by outside observers until 1980. It had been visible since at least 1974, but could not be accommodated by prevailing conceptions either of Berber society in general or of Kabyle history in particular.

DESPITE THE UBIQUITOUS PRESENCE OF JAPANESE CARS AND motorcycles in Europe and America, the products of Japan's social science have rarely been exported. In view of this, before dealing with the present state of political science in Japan, it would be better to begin with some explanation of its historical background.

THE FUTURE OF MODERN DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY APPEARS TO depend on the amount of political participation, i.e. on how much its individuals will have to participate in political interests and activities. To be sure, the way industrial society functions requires an increasing involvement of the individual in public activities. But is there a danger that the private lives and aspirations of all individuals will be increasingly absorbed by the ‘public cause’? And that the Church, the intellectuals, the artists, the trade unions, and last but not least, the media might become transmission-belts of the ideological-political organizations?

The welfare state gives in principle a due primacy to man's free choice of how to fulfil himself, for himself and not by the state and for the state. But within the welfare state, which could continue this balancing act, which is this balancing act, it is the individuals themselves who seem now to be more and more attracted, for stark economic reasons, but also because of ideological fallacies by the ‘external goods’ rather than by the ontological and interiorized raison d'être. Are we witnessing the transformation of the real man into the citizen, or comrade, of man into fan?