The Communists in Italy, France and Spain have banished the phrase “the dictatorship of the proletariat” from their vocabulary. That does not mean that they have abandoned socialism as an intermediate objective of their policy. They continue to fight for socialism; however, they no longer wish to establish it on the classical pattern through the dictatorship of the “proletariat” but rather through an “advanced form of democracy” in which the institutions and procedures of representative democracy, such as parliament and regular general elections and civil rights and freedoms, are respected and even guaranteed.

Richard Falk's Study of Future Worlds is the most comprehensive world order scheme to appear since the Clark-Sohn plan of the late 1950's. In fact, in terms of scope, function, plan and organization, Falk's 506-page work is probably the most comprehensive proposal in the history of world order literature.

A Study of Future Worlds is an outgrowth of the World Order Models Project (WOMP) that was created by Saul Mendlovitz in 1966. Under Mendlovitz's leadership, a series of national teams have produced several volumes, each offering a complete alternative world order model for criticism, comment and, hopefully, support as a serious political proposal. Falk's book is the American contribution to this series and is often referred to as WOMP-USA in the literature of the World Order Models Project.

Although the founder of the Catholic church said that “My Kingdom is not of this world,” one commentator correctly has observed of the church that “few contemporary institutions have been more intimately — and none more continuously — involved in the political order.” Never was the church's temporal dimension more graphically illustrated than in the June 1979 visit to his homeland of Pope John Paul II, the former Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, Archbishop of Cracow, Poland. Millions of people, many of them from other Communist countries, heard the first pontiff ever elected from a Soviet bloc nation repeatedly call for respect for human rights, for provision of religious liberties, and for the primacy of the individual over the state — demands that many regimes, including Communist ones, have been notably reluctant to grant. The pontiff also publicly raised the delicate issue of Polish-Soviet relations, asserting that alliances must be based on mutual respect and equality and that “there can be no just Europe without the independence of Poland marked on its map.”

Although several years have passed since the end of America's involvement in Vietnam, this war remains a highly controversial subject about which great reservoirs of heated emotion are easily let loose. No consensus has been reached concerning the lessons American foreign policy should have learned from this experience, and perhaps more important, how such situations should be approached in the future. Indeed, the dialogue on Vietnam that has taken place among political leaders, scholars, and the public at large has scarcely touched upon this issue at all, but has instead focused upon the question of which segment of American society's actions were justified at the time and which were not. Most recently, the study by Peter Braestrup, entitled Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington, has drawn the conclusion that the American military actually won the Tet offensive, but the media unjustifiably portrayed it as a defeat. Others, such as Robert Gallucci in his book Neither Peace Nor Honor: The Politics of American Military Policy in Viet-Nam, have described how the Pentagon continually claimed that the war was being won in Vietnam when actually it was being lost. In short, the dialogue on Vietnam that has taken place since the war has been primarily a restatement by various people of the same views they held during the war.

The hesitancy of French Catholic intellectuals to engage in public quarrels, and speak ill of their dead, has led to the forgetting of arguments and divergences of great importance to the background of Vatican II. It has been widely assumed that France's two most influential Christian intellectuals of the mid-century, Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier, worked hand in glove to promote what one historian has called a common “French Catholic Understanding of the Modern World.”* In fact, however, letters and diaries only known after the two principals were dead, have revealed deep differences between the two men at a decisive point in the evolution of modern French intellectual life. Maritain's reservations about the left-wing Catholicism and ecumenism of his younger friends remain quite relevant in our own day. In fact Maritain had, and kept, serious reservations about the new kind of Catholicism which Mounier and his new review Esprit articulated in the early nineteen-thirties but kept them private largely because of the secret danger of a known ecclesiastical condemnation for Esprit.

The highest function of criticism is to stimulate an author to think harder, to go further, to reconsider, and, possibly, to try again. At times, often unwittingly, author and critic join in a species of tacit collaboration. I regard Stanley Michalak's generally helpful critique of A Study of Future Worlds in this spirit.

The overall ambition of world order studies has been to work out an intellectual framework useful for understanding and acting upon the great global challenges of our time—the menace of large-scale warfare, the scandal of large-scale poverty, the outrage of acute injustice, the dangers of environmental decay, and the burden of inhumane and/or ineffectual governance at all levels of social organization (from family to planet).

Karl Marx and the United States is a subject which immediately elicits interest, but also surprise. Interest, because of its contemporary importance; surprise, because Marx and America have appeared so remote from one another. Marx has definitely influenced America, but that will not be the theme of this essay —instead, we will concern ourselves with the role of America in the thought of Marx. The magnitude of this role is illustrated by a statement made in Marx's letter to Abraham Lincoln, written in 1864 on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association:

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that as the American war of independence initiated a new era of the ascendency of the middle-class, so the American Anti-slavery war will do for the working-class.

Even a cursory review of contemporary scholarship on the presidency and the federal administration reveals a resurgence of interest in the political thought of Alexander Hamilton and Woodrow Wilson. Developments in the last decade involving the apparent enlargement of the authority and prerogatives of the national executive together with the popularization of the idea of an emerging American bureaucratic state have contributed to this renewal of interest in the work of both theorists. What is especially striking is that to a considerable extent the contemporary interest in the thought of Hamilton, and to a lesser but still significant degree in the political teaching of Woodrow Wilson, is rooted in the crystallization of opinion that is critical of the alleged predominance of the executive establishment and the appearance of an “imperial” presidency on the one hand, and the systematic interference of federal administration in the affairs of the people on the other. Thus, for example, a major theme in both the popular and academic press during the period of American history bracketed by the Vietnam War and the Watergate crisis centered on the illiberalism of a powerful executive. More recently, proponents of participationist democracy, particularly the devotees of the public interest advocacy movement and the self-styled Tocquevillians of the public choice school, have urged reforms to check the concentration of power in the central government in general, and the national executive in particular. More importantly for the purposes of this essay, alongside this indictment of the national government has emerged an increasing tendency to cast Hamilton, witness the work of James McGregor Burns, and Wilson, a frequent target of criticism in the writings of that wing of the public choice school which includes Vincent Ostrom, as the theoreticians of a centralized executive-administrative order.

Within the Marxist theory of history and society, the concept of class consciousness has played a major, though problematic, role. The proper interpretation of this concept, embedded as it is within the complex relational framework of the historical dialectic, has presented a perennial problem to the interpreters of Marx, both the theorists and the activists. For both logical and practical reasons, class consciousness can be seen as the Achilles' heel of the Marxist scheme.

Over the years, historians have engaged in various disputes concerning the origins, nature, and results of the progressive movement that dominated the political imagination of Americans during the first two decades of the twentieth century. No one set of categories has dominated those disputes, but much of the controversy has focused on a fundamental tension in progressive thought: the conflict between a liberalism centered in humanitarian and moral passion and one based in an ethos of scientific analysis.

I greatly appreciate the care with which Professor Falk read my essay and the time he spent in writing a response to it. His comments have helped to sharpen and illuminate the differences between us and he has clarified for me some of the points he makes in A Study of Future Worlds. I will reply just briefly to some of the comments that Professor Falk makes in his response.

1. As Professor Falk indicates, some of the major differences between us are empirical —he would say “partly”; I would say “largely.” That is, we differ on the existence and significance of rising political forces or counterelites and the likely growth and future impact that these forces will have.

A half century ago Herbert Hoover entered the presidency and the “Great Engineer” of the 1920's became, after 1930, the butt of Depression era jokes. The economic collapse which began in 1929 not only broke Hoover's presidency, it obscured his accomplishments as a key public figure in American life during this century.

In his Farewell Address, George Washington said: “'Tis substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule indeed extends with more or less force to every species of free Government. Who that is a sincere friend to it, can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric? Promote then as an object of primary importance, Institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.” With these words in mind, I sought to examine West German institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge, specifically the schools. I tried to find out whether those institutions promote, or even speak of, virtue or morality, and whether they aim at the development of enlightened public opinion. I defined enlightened public opinion as those opinions which support free, popular government. Enlightened human beings are those “who recognize other human beings for what they are, namely, persons with rights which they must respect, in order to have their own rights recognized and respected.”

Notoriously history has two principal meanings: the past itself and the historian's presentation of the results of his inquiry into it. When the latter meaning is examined, it is evident that, for all of his stance of common sense and matter-of-factness, the historian encounters his profession's form of the problem of knowledge. How and why does he select his sources? What is the validity or truth of his account? What is the relationship between fact and generalization? Does his avowed or unconscious motivation affect the historian's search, selection and presentation? Does his form of presentation affect his use of facts and his judgment?

Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), modern founding father of critical history and patron saint of devourers of archives, raised these questions and responded to them. His masterly histories of Reformation Germany, Prussia, England, France and the papacy were esteemed as the fruit and vindication of his method. In England and the United States, however, the method was identified with a few slogans and injunctions: history is primarily a study of politics and foreign policy; return to or search out the sources; evaluate them and prize, above all, the sources that present the testimony of participants and eyewitnesses; strive simply to tell things as they actually happened. So to reduce Ranke's position is intellectual primitivism, a primitivism that persisted because attempts to discuss the problem of historical knowledge were ignored or derided as futile.

Technology does not, at first glance, appear to have been a subject of importance in American political thought. One can peruse the writings of American political thinkers — from lofty philosophers to campaign agitators — and find few references to technology as such, even in the contemporary period. Political writings concentrate on other, apparently more “political” topics — liberty, equality, and justice, states' rights, civil liberties, and the distribution of powers. To argue that technology constitutes a hidden but centrally important variable in American political thought might seem to many to be elevating an esoteric personal interest into a central concern, to be rewriting the history of ideas in order to provide a track on which one's own personal hobbyhorse can be ridden.

Political scientists refer to the comparison of various governments as being the field of comparative politics. Within that category, those that deal with less-developed countries are said to be specialists in political development, a term that has long been controversial due to its value implications. But within this political development category, there is a strong tendency for scholars to either specialize in a specific country and/or a specific set of countries. The sets are generally geographic, so among political scientists one can be a Latin Americanist, an Africanist, and so forth.

Political is a ubiquitous and seemingly indispensable term in the discussion of human affairs. We use it to speak of quite different kinds of things — institutions, actions, conflicts, expenditures, a type of discourse, a branch of science, and such. We apply it to the life and thought of modern nations, ancient cities, and primitive tribes. Even the internal affairs of businesses, unions, schools and churches are sometimes called “political.” In all these cases, we assume that the term has, or at least can have, some definite meaning. Yet it is difficult to say what, if anything, “political” signifies in its various applications and how it signifies what it does.

Few documents have so influenced the course of history as has the American Declaration of Independence, now more than two centuries old. The Founding Fathers seem to have realized, with their usual clairvoyance, that no diplomacy can succeed without representing some intrinsic values, and the great Declaration established a moral basis for American international relations by announcing principles of universal validity. As Abraham Lincoln pointed out, “Our Declaration of Independence meant liberty not alone for the people of this country but hope for all the world for all future time. It means in due course the weight should be lifted from the shoulders of all men.” In the spirit of the Declaration of Independence no other human experience in the last two centuries has been so attractive to liberty-seeking people as the American experiment — called, not without warrant, “the permanent revolution.” In the early years of the Republic, Thomas Paine stated with prophetic vision:

So deeply rooted were all the governments of the old world, and so effectually had the tyranny and the antiquity of habit established itself over the mind, that no beginning could be made in Asia, Africa, or Europe, to reform the political condition of man. Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think.

An effective political ideology is invariably the result of the intersection of a number of discrete influences. In the first instance, a political leader is almost always possessed of some set of philosophic and political convictions that he has, for one reason or another, made his own. The ideas of the Epicureans and of John Locke regularly surface in the political thought of Thomas Jefferson, and elements of the thought of Karl Marx, G. W. F. Hegel and N. G. Chernyshevski are mixed inextricably in the political ideology of V. I. Lenin. As much might be said of almost every political leader who makes any pretense at ideological sophistication.

Operation Intercept was launched along the United States-Mexico border in September of 1969, ostensibly to halt the flow of marijuana, heroin, and dangerous drugs. In reality, however, it was designed not to interdict narcotics but to publicize the new administration's war on crime and force Mexican compliance with Washington's antidrug campaign. With the exception of border residents, the much-heralded operation has been forgotten by most Americans a decade later. But as President Jimmy Carter discovered during his visit in early 1979, Mexicans, and particularly their presidents, have keen memories. Hastily conceived, unilateral programs such as Operation Intercept go far in explaining why.