The oppressive regime of Nicholas I witnessed the rise of the free-lance literati in Russia. Estranged from the state and divested of status in the official hierarchy, they turned their youthful energies and talents into intellectual pursuits. The generation of the “remarkable decade” represented the crowning point of this emancipatory development. While contrasting cultured Moscow before 1812 with that which he left in 1847, Herzen's heart throbbed with joy and satisfaction:

We have made tremendous strides forward. In those days there was a society of the discontented — that is, of those who have been left out, dismissed, or laid on the shelf; now there is a society of independent people.

In “The Suggestiveness of Vestiges: Confucianism and Monarchy at the Last”, I wrote of the draining of the monarchical mystique in modern China. Vestigial monarchism, it seemed to me, was related to an equally vestigial Confucianism — really related, that is, not just parallel in some modern course of corrosion. The relation was the thing, a novel one of untroubled association (in a common, new ideology of “national spirit”), unpromising departure from what seemed, more and more, the devious, uncertain, tense partnership of pre-Western days. The loss of this ambivalence, this Confucian-monarchical attraction-repulsion, comprised the Chinese state's attrition. And if in its time that traditional state was a prodigiously hardy perennial, perhaps its vitality, in a truly Nietzschean sense, was the measure of its tolerance of tensions: their release was the bureaucratic monarchy's death.

Advancement in the provincial bureaucracy of nineteenth-century China depended slightly more on the purchase of substantive posts (chüan shihkuana), particularly posts of the highest ranks purchasable, than on any other single factor yet analyzed. This finding is based on a sample of 1,047 officials, drawn from six different directories of provincial officials (T'ung-kuan lub); Shantung, 1778 and 1859; Hupei, 1831; Honan, 1837; Anhwei, 1871; and Hupei, 1879. Among these officials neither seniority nor family background, nor recruitment path nor age at receiving the chin-shih, was quite as decisive as purchase in facilitating ascent in the nine-rank hierarchy.

During the years of independence India saw the development of a modern criminal underworld in the large cities. The country has its Chicago-style gangsters, ruffians and teddy boys who kill, rob and intimidate in the same manner as their opposite numbers in the West do. However, the largest section of India's criminal activities is still committed by the most traditional and the most romantic type of criminals, the age-old terrors of the countryside, the dacoits.

This essay will advance two interrelated hypotheses about the Latin American city. The first of them has to do with the role of the city in the settlement of the New World. The second suggests certain characteristics of the modern Latin American metropolis.

In recent years a number of investigators have been concerned with the antiquity of irrigation agriculture in central Mexico and its possible relationship to processes of social and political differentiation in the ancient urban civilizations of that region. Because of its strategic role in the prehistory of Middle America, attention has centered on the Basin of Mexico in the Mexican central plateau. The semi-arid Valley of Teotihuacan, in the northwestern part of the Basin, has been of special concern because it was the locus of the enormous city of Teotihuacan, one of the most powerful and influential centers in Middle America during a large part of the first millenium of the Christian era. Studies to date have dealt largely with historical and archaeological evidence bearing on this problem.

This occasional but substantial joumal, devoted by its title to the philosophy of history, will publish, we are told in an editorial note, material “principally in four areas: theories of history, cause, law, explanation, generalisation, determinism; historiography, studies of historians, historical figures and events which illuminate general historiographical problems; method of history, interpretation, selection of facts, objectivity, social and cultural implications of the historian's method; related disciplines, relationship of problems in historical theory and method to those of economic, psychological and other social sciences.” The distinctions here drawn seem, on the whole, to be indicative rather than analytical: “determinism” is grouped a little oddly with its neighbours, and it is not quite clear how the third area (“method of history”) is related either to the first or to the second; but all in all, there is little doubt what the province of a journal of philosophy of history is here taken to he be.To borrow words from the opening lines of the first contribution, an article entitled “History and Theory” by Sir Isaiah Berlin (a member of the editorial committee), “history is what historians do”; and philosophy of history is a mode of enquiry into what it is and how they do it. This philosophy is concerned with the explanation rather than the explicandum; its tools are analytical and its statements second-order statements. Some exceptions to this view can be found in the issues so far published and there may be more to come.