Traditional theory of international politics maintains that, other things being equal, a multipolar balance-of-power system. Arms-control theory, on the other hand, generally contends that an increase in independent nuclear powers is a direct threat to the stability of the international system. is more stable than a bipolar system. A bipolar nuclear deterrent relationship is believed to be inherently more stable than one in which equilibrium is maintained among several nuclear powers in independent or alliance relationships. Though the relatively greater stability of a bipolar system may be preferred, its stability is, nevertheless, contingent. Maintaining the stability of mutual nuclear deterrence while restraining aggression is the primary goal of arms control.

The detonation of Peking's first atomic devices in recent months has X provoked renewed widespread discussion of the dangers of the further spread of nuclear weaponry. Speculation has flourished about who would be next—Sweden? Japan? Israel? Or perhaps India, which has become the first nonnuclear country to build a chemical separation plant? Cost estimates put nuclear weapons within reach of the poorest nations within a few years. Governments have issued solemn pronouncements about the need to design further international agreements to prevent nuclear proliferation. The President of the United States made use of a high-level committee to advise him how to deal with the problem.

In attacking the problem of revolution, as most others of major significance in history, we historians should think twice before we spurn the help offered by our colleagues in the social sciences, who have, as it happens, been particularly active in the last few years in theorizing about the typology, causes, and evolutionary patterns of this particular phenomenon. The purpose of this article is not to advance any new hypothesis, but to provide a summary view and critical examination of the work that has been going on.

Two approaches to the theory of international relations at present compete for our attention. The first of these I shall call the classical approach. By this I do not mean the study and criticism of the “classics” of international relations, the writings of Hobbes, Grotius, Kant, and other great thinkers of the past who have turned their attention to international affairs. Such study does indeed exemplify the classical approach, and it provides a method that is particularly fruitful and important. What I have in mind, however, is something much wider than this: the approach to theorizing that derives from philosophy, history, and law, and that is characterized above all by explicit reliance upon the exercise of judgment and by the assumptions that if we confine ourselves to strict standards of verification and proof there is very little of significance that can be said about international relations, that general propositions about this subject must therefore derive from a scientifically imperfect process of perception or intuition, and that these general propositions cannot be accorded anything more than the tentative and inconclusive status appropriate to their doubtful origin.

Functionalism has assumed an important role in the behavioral sciences in recent years, but the employment of this method of analysis is fraught with difficulties. Some of the logical problems of functionalism are reviewed in this article in the form of a critique of Gabriel A. Almond's introduction to The Politics of the Developing Areas, entitled “A Functional Approach to Comparative Politics.” This article focuses attention upon the weaknesses of the approach. In doing so, it is exclusively negative and critical, and is not an attempt at a rounded characterization.

Political modernization involves, let us assume, three things. First, it involves the rationalization of authority: the replacement of a large number of traditional, religious, familial, and ethnic political authorities by a single, secular, national political authority. This change implies that government is the product of man, not of nature or of God, and that a well-ordered society must have a determinate human source of final authority, obedience to whose positive law takes precedence over other obligations. Rationalization of authority means assertion of the external sovereignty of the nation-state against transnational influences and of the internal sovereignty of the national government against local and regional powers. It means national integration and the centralization or accumulation of power in recognized national law-making institutions. Secondly, political modernization involves the differentiation of new political functions and the development of specialized structures to perform those functions. Areas of peculiar competence—legal, military, administrative, scientific—become separated from the political realm, and autonomous, specialized, but subordinate, organs arise to discharge those tasks. Administrative hierarchies become more elaborate, more complex, more disciplined. Office and power are distributed more by achievement and less by ascription. Thirdly, political modernization involves increased participation in politics by social groups throughout society and the development of new political institutions—such as political parties and interest associations—to organize this participation. Broadened participation in politics may increase control of the people by the government, as in totalitarian states, or it may increase control of the government by the people, as in some democratic ones. But in all modern states the citizens become directly involved in and affected by governmental affairs. Rationalized authority, differentiated structure, and mass participation thus distinguish modern polities from antecedent polities.

Peace will be achieved, virtually all Western leaders say upon issuing a general statement on foreign policy, when all men learn to obey a common law. The achievement of world peace through world law is a popular solution to the problems of world politics of our times. However, creating a viable international law that all or even most states are willing to obey has proved difficult.

The purpose of this article is to argue that the doctrine of rapid economic development coupled with organization theory is an inadequate basis for a nation-state. Our subject is Egypt, but we believe the analysis reaches beyond Egypt because the problem—the attempt to use organization theory with a doctrine of economic development as a political philosophy—can be found in a number of other countries; in a sense it can be found in most countries today. Egypt is a good case because salient aspects of the problem are writ large there and articulated with unusual clarity. While Egypt is in some ways unique, it shares with other countries certain characteristics that are basic to the analysis pursued in this article: underdevelopment, scarce resources, lack of enthusiasm for development on the part of the population, a “Western” and a “Communist” set of models to observe, a knowledge of modern organization theory, charismatic leadership, a one-party system (to the extent that there is a party in operation at all), and a lack of structural pluralism and group action.

Political theorists from Plato to the present have concerned themselves not only with the nature of the polity as we know it, but with how it came to be, what purposes it serves, and by what stages it has developed. The last item, however, has more often than not been slighted. This lack now forces itself on our attention for an obvious reason: Never before have so many “new states” come into being in so short a span of time and never before have students of politics been provided with so many living examples of states at all stages of development, many of them conspicuously failing to perform vital functions, frequently to the extent that disorder and violent change prevail.

It is becoming increasingly evident, if it is not clear already, that one of the most critical problems in the overall modernization of the developing countries is political development. In South Vietnam, in the Congo, in Brazil, in Indonesia—all over the underdeveloped world, the capacity of countries to cope with their own problems, and consequently the stance of the United States toward these nations, turns in varying degrees on the successes or failures of the political system.

Ever since all the king's horses and all the king's men were unable to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, poets and scholars have often believed that biological, social, and political wholes are somehow greater than the sum of their parts. Most severely criticized among the king's men for their lack or misuse of the relevant surgical skills have been policy scientists using the logical tools of mathematics and the research procedures of the behavioral and social sciences. As world politics has increasingly influenced both individual and national destinies, the analytical and synthetical skills of quantitative international relations theorists, in particular, have come into dispute.

Arecent commentator has suggested that the value to political science of looking at new states is that “one is forced to deal with the most basic questions of politics—the entire set of questions involved in the creation and maintenance of political societies.” Certainly this appears to be true time and again. One is forced to look at the largest questions to the smallest, both because they are vivid and apparent, and because they are also urgent. The basic problem of obligation—why we do things we do not want to do, and allow unpleasant things to be done to us by political leaders, or why we accept the authority of power—is for us either a matter of analysis or of sociological inquiry. Clearly it is more than that in a new state. There the question is a living one, sometimes for a large minority, sometimes for many small sections or groups. The state and the nation are not, as yet, one. Rousseau or Hobbes have come to life.

The consequences that flow from the collapse of empires have never been easily predicted. Seldom, however, has the demise of an imperial system been accompanied by as many systematic analyses and projections as has the current period of decolonization. Much of the recent discussion concerning the newer members of the international system has made reference to their so-called artificial political boundaries. It has been predicted, among other things, that the political boundaries of Asia and Africa, by virtue of their presumed artificiality, harbor the seeds of “many a troublesome irredenta in the future.” Frequent references are made, in the growing literature on nation-building and political modernization, to the “natural” or “unnatural” qualities of these boundaries, and the absence of careful general studies of this topic has been noted. This article proposes to examine the dominant characteristics of African political boundaries and the circumstances under which disputes over their location have so far been generated, and to deduce some general propositions about their conflict potential. The thrust of the argument to be presented is that there is a low conflict potential in contemporary African boundaries and that earlier predictions of instability are not likely to be borne out.

This paper has two closely related purposes, both of which, if accomplished, may help to accelerate the development of international relations as an empirically based discipline. One is to identify the shifting and expanding membership of the international system during the 125 years between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the outbreak of World War II. The other is to classify all such members of the system according to their attributed importance or status during the same period. In each case, the intent is not only to provide certain data which may be useful to the discipline, but to describe in considerable detail the procedures by which such data were gathered or, more accurately, “made.”

The idea that interest groups may play a significant role in Communist politics has, until recently, not been seriously entertained either by Western political scientists or by Soviet legal specialists. The concept of “totalitarianism” that has dominated the analysis of communism in the West has seemed to preclude the possibility that interest groups could challenge or affect the single ruling party as the fount of all power. The uniqueness of a totalitarian system has been deemed to lie in the very totality of its political power, excluding, as it were by definition, any area of autonomous behavior by groups other than the state or party, and still more, preventing serious influence by them on the process of decision-making. Marxist theorists, starting from different presuppositions, have assumed that the single ruling party, the organization of the working class, best knew the “real” interests of the people as a whole, and have denied the possibility of fundamental conflicts of interest within the working class, or between it and associated friendly classes such as the peasantry. Within the ruling party itself, groups or factions opposing the leadership have not been admitted in theory or permitted in practice.

Although the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development has been in existence for nearly two decades, the political aspects of its activities have received scant attention. Most of the literature on IBRD operations has been written by economists, who quite naturally emphasize the economic aspects. Political scientists, to the extent that they have discussed it at all, have described most of its operations as removed “from the sphere of international or domestic politics.” The purpose of the following analysis is to determine in what respects the activities of the International Bank may be described as “political.” Such a determination would be useful in three ways. First, it would, it is hoped, stimulate research on international organizations as actors in international politics; second, it would require revision of the standard explanations of the evolution of international development aid programs; and third, it would aid in evaluating the argument for more multilateral aid which assumes that such aid is “nonpolitical.”

Foreign conflict behavior data covering long periods of time are urgently needed for the scientific investigation of international conflict. Except in the case of the most violent behavior, war, such data in aggregate form generally are not available to researchers.

IF a central problem for any nineteenth-century thinker was that of defining his attitude toward the French Revolution, a central one for contemporary man is his appraisal of the Russian Revolution. The latter problem is even more critical, for nearly one billion people explicitly claim to be heirs and defenders of the Russian Revolution. Forces called into being by the upheaval of 1917 are even more forcefully mobilized and tangibly powerful than those called into being by the French Revolution of 1789 and the “age of the democratic revolution.” Thus, as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution of 1917 and the volume of writings threatens to reach avalanche proportions, it might be well to take a critical look at the historical studies and reflections that have been called forth in what might well be called the age of the totalitarian revolution.

The political scientist and the politician of our day both tend to be skeptical of international law. The political scientist, who is interested in studying the distribution of power, sees in the classic rules of international law neither an adequate description of the conduct of states nor an effective prescription for ordering national conduct. The politician, who is interested in the exercise of power, finds it difficult to realize what he considers vital national interests within the traditional legal framework. Both scholars and practitioners apparently feel that the older rhetoric of international law—nonintervention, peaceful settlement of disputes, the law of war—is to a great extent irrelevant to a world in turmoil. Bombings without declaration of war, illegal reprisals, campaigns of political assassination, and military intervention to crush internal revolt are accepted as part of the backdrop of world conflict. It seems increasingly clear that the classic rules of international law and the basic political and moral principles on which they rest are now used less and less by the great powers even as points of reference. Nothing sounds more old-fashioned than Secretary Stimson's remarks of less than forty years ago, in advising against the establishment of a national intelligence service, that “gentlemen don't read each other's mail.”