When he set out to form a secret intelligence agency for President Roosevelt in 1941, “Wild Bill” Donovan made little effort to curb his own characteristic receptivity to the new, the different, and even the unorthodox. Completely in character, he took up with quick enthusiasm the novel idea that scholars—those dreamy inhabitants of ivory towers—would be ideal for the job. He believed that by searching through the Library of Congress and through the files of the many government agencies these men could uncover much of the information for which secret agents risked their lives. In a sense, he dedicated the Research and Analysis Branch of the wartime Office of Strategic Services to the task of making the romantic secret agent obsolete. Since then, more and more people have come to believe that research—and the social sciences—have at last found a home within the formal structure of government.

American foreign policy has recently become a favorite target-area for attacks upon an alleged moralizing and legalistic habit which ignores or condemns national interest. The criticism runs the whole gamut of our relations with the world outside, focusing with final virulence upon our effort to find peace in the United Nations. It covers most of the nation's history, tracing the decline from “realism” to moralistic fantasy back to the moment when the genius of the Federalists began to be corrupted by Jeffersonian sentimentalism. The vast complex of today's foreign relations furnishes innumerable points of assault. A folly of self-righteousness has led us—so the indictment reads—into tragic error in China, in Korea, in the Near and Middle East, even (though here some of the accusers desert) in Europe. We give quixotically where we should sell; but our purse-strings are tied with moral scruples where we should be lavish. Shrinking from the open use of power, we enter into wasteful and entangling alliances where we should keep a free hand. Crusading in the name of democracy and disregarding the limits of our resources, we undertake to assist peoples anywhere to establish free governments in the face of intervention from Moscow. We take up arms for the utopian aims of an international organization set up in postwar zeal for a new era and maintained at our expense. A course in this literature of calamity leaves us wondering how the nation has survived. It sounds like the dirge for a fallen empire.

The events leading to the rise of Stalin to sole prominence in the Soviet Union and the general political picture of the totalitarian Stalinist regime are now familiar, but specific forms of the evolution of “Stalinism” are often not adequately understood. Evolving Soviet historiography is an unusually informative mirror of these developments, since it not only attempts to describe them, but implicitly embodies them as well. The present article is an analysis of one theme from early Soviet history, treatment of which in Soviet historiography exemplifies both the trend of Soviet historiography as a whole, and the trend of Stalinism as an emergent totalitarian ideology based on Bolshevism.

Colonialism has been a sore spot in the handling of American foreign policy in the post-World War II period largely because of ambivalent forces, domestic and foreign, which have been tugging at the United States. At the heart of the colonial problem which has faced this country is the central issue of eventual political status for colonial territories. On this question United States policy has traditionally been and continues to be one of condemnation of colonialism and in favor of independence for colonial peoples, with certain reservations added in small print—the grant of independence should not be too hurried and it should be given only to peoples who desire it and are capable of assuming the responsibilities involved.

There are fads in scholarship as well as in fashion. Just JL now, the current fad, with respect to American diplomatic history, is to belabor what is called “Wilsonianism” with all the sarcasm and dignified invective at the writer's disposal. It is almost de rigueur to expatiate upon the prescient wisdom of the Founding Fathers, to pass over most of the period between John Quincy Adams and William McKinley as relatively unimportant, and to concentrate the heaviest guns of criticism upon the “Utopianism” of the first half of the twentieth century. Only now, and belatedly, we are told, is the United States beginning to come down from the clouds of illusion and to survey realistically the true nature of the world with which its diplomatists and policymakers must cope. Only now are we beginning once again to measure possible policy decisions by the yardsticks of power and “the national interest.”

“Realism” and “idealism” are both terms which have been used in differing, sometimes opposite, senses in the history of philosophy. They must therefore be employed with great caution. Dr. John H. Herz, in his recent study of the application of these terms to politics, seeks to define the sense in which he uses them. He writes in his preface that the book was in the main finished when the last war was ended and that little which had happened since required modification of his conclusions. To the reviewer it seems that further thought on the concepts employed in a perspective more removed from the disturbing influences of the war period would have been desirable.

Seven years have passed since the UN Charter was signed in San Francisco in the month of June 1945. In that short time, events have disproved some of the most important assumptions about the postwar world on which the 1945 decisions were based.

Efforts have been made, notably in the improvisations of the Korea police action, in the creation of the Interim Committee, and in the Uniting for Peace Resolution, to adapt the structure conceived at San Francisco so that it would more closely meet the needs of the world as it emerged from the crucible of World War II.