Within the last year or so there have been signs of another attempt to halt the drift toward anarchic restrictionism in international trade. Its origins may be discerned in the conference of British Commonwealth Finance Ministers summoned to London in January 1952 to consider the third of the sterling area's postwar crises. This conference, after branding as “palliatives” the measures taken to remedy recurring balance of payments deficits, concluded that a lasting solution of the sterling area's problems was possible only“when the world-wide trade of the sterling area is on a substantially higher level than at present, when sterling is freely convertible into all the main currencies of the world, and its position need no longer be supported by import restrictions.” A year later, another Commonwealth conference reaffirmed these objections in more striking language: “The Commonwealth countries look outward to…co-operation with other countries, not inward to a closed association. It is their common purpose, by their own efforts and together with others, to increase world trade for the benefit of all peoples.” The first formal step toward widening the basis of this initiative took place in March of this year, when Mr. Anthony Eden and Mr. R. A. Butler, acting in this matter for the British Commonwealth as a whole, discussed the economic prospect with Mr. John Foster Dulles, and found “reason to hope for continued progress towards a better-balanced, growing world trade and the restoration of a multilateral system of trade and payments.” From Washington, Mr. Eden and Mr. Butler went to Paris in fulfillment of a promise to “keep in step with the Organization for European Economic Co-operation.”

“The Soviet Union is now engaged in an audacious attempt JL to upset the established balance of power prevailing in Europe.” This statement was used by C. L. Sulzberger, writing in the New York Times for March 23, 1952, to open a discussion of the Soviet offer to establish a unified and neutral Germany. It symbolizes the startling renaissance of the balance of power concept in recent years not only in the pages of learned journals, but in the daily press and in radio as well. This rebirth is probably attributable to the effort to reconsider the notions concerning international relations generally held during the League of Nations period, notions which emphasized open diplomacy, collective security, and the use of arbitration instead of unilateral force. The apparent futility of these methods seemed to call for the reintroduction of more meaningful concepts into the analysis of international affairs, and the balance of power thus reappeared as part of the general trend to re-establish the primacy of power as the key to the understanding of interstate relations. There would be no difficulty in this development if the term “balance of power” were free from philological, semantic, and theoretical confusion. Unfortunately, it is not. The term is defined differently by different writers; it is used in varying senses, even if not defined exactly at all; and, finally, it is the focal concept in several quite distinct theories of international relations. The purpose of this article is the clarification, not only of the verbal differences in meaning, but also of the applied meanings of the “balance of power” phrase as they vary in accordance with the intentions of the users. The necessity for such an attempt may be demonstrated by an introductory discussion of the variety of thought on this topic, in terms of substantive meanings no less than in terms of systems of classification.

The relations between art and politics have rarely been discussed either in contemporary aesthetics or in political science. Since Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Arts, the analysis of art styles as the sensuous objectifications of cultural attitudes has been worked out in detail. But the same method has not been applied to the sensuous objectifications of political action. The removal of art from social life to the museum has also removed it from among the integral concerns of political science. Accepting the popular dichotomy between art and politics, modern political science has long lost its senseof art as techne, as a practical instrument of communication and coercion. An older political science did indeed consider “art” an instrument of coercion, curbing what Freud liked to call “the rebelliousness and destructive passions” of the masses and binding them to their rulers. Indeed, perhaps Freud alone among modern masters of social science comprehended art as one of the weapons of coercion in the arsenal of culture. “Works of art,” Freud writes, “promote the feelings of identification” and identification is, in the Freudian theory, the modality of authority.

The first general strike in the history of England, with its mass labor action, was bound to attract strong interest from the workers' state which proclaimed as its rallying cry: “Workers of All Countries, Unite!” Soviet concern for the British working class followed logically from the active participation of Marx and Engels in the movement, and the continued attention shown by Lenin to this important “section” of the “world proletariat.”

This book is a highly professional effort to move toward a unification of concept in the fields of cultural anthropology, sociology, and psychology. The reviewer is an economic historian who, at the limit of generosity, can be described as an interested observer of these fields.

The reviewing procedure raises some difficulties. Although the obscurity of the contributions to the volume varies, it is only with sustained effort that the amateur can come to believe that he has conquered the barrier of private vocabulary which the behavioral scientists have erected, no doubt for good and sufficient reasons. But one trained in modern economics least of all has a right to complain.

The enunciation of what has since been dubbed the Point Four Program sprang from a variety of motives. There was in the aim a very generous portion of sheer American idealism and a desire to help the less fortunate; there was a note of response to a challenge posed for people who believed deeply in what Weber called ascetic mastery over the things of this world; and there was an attempt at a hard-headed realistic program that would “win friends and influence the peoples” of the world in favor of the West in general, but most especially in favor of the United States, in the struggle with the Communists of the USSR for safety and a world of peace. The history of this period and the corollary assessments of good and bad intentions will not be written for some time; for the present, we are concerned with one of the fragment arguments about how these “worthy goals” should be obtained. The goals themselves have found wide agreement in the most divergent camps. No one has effectively challenged the desirability of peace and cooperation among nations, of increased standards of living throughout the world, of improved health conditions, better education, and the like.

These two books provide an opportunity to compare the approach of the economist and of other social scientists to the problem of economic development, although neither volume can be taken as a fair measure of the contributions the various disciplines can make to understanding the growth process in particular societies.

The United Nations Report, which is the work of a group of economists appointed by the Secretary General of the organization, aims at policy more than analysis. It is also quite general in character, and a discussion that embraces the tremendous diversity of so-called underdeveloped countries must perforce maintain a distressing level of abstraction. Despite this structure, the Report remains eminently readable.