A great many curious things have befallen Marxism as an intellectual and political tradition, not the least of which was its adoption by the revolutionary forces under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung. Originally, the Marxism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was a eurocentric doctrine that addressed itself to a postindustrial revolution that would liberate society from the disabilities produced by intensive industrialization. For classical Marxism, industrialization produced not only the “idiocy of overproduction,” the inability to effectively distribute the abundance produced by capitalism, but generated restive populations that were “overwhelmingly proletarian.” Capitalist industrialization produced both the circumstances precipitating, and the historic agents responsible for, vast social, economic and political change.

That foreign policy is a social product, that it is in particular the outcome of a political process and an element in the national political system—these are general notions that few scholars would in principle dispute. But in practice foreign policy has been commonly portrayed in exactly the opposite way. It is viewed as some-thing with its own life, essentially cut off from domestic politics, existing primarily in the international sphere. Scholars do of course recognize that domestic factors play a role, but the implied connection is often extremely amorphous and general, with no attempt on the whole made to specify the mode of linkage in a concrete and testable way. Thus America's return to isolation after the First World War is commonly attributed to the unwillingness of her people to bear the burden of world power; British and French foreign policy after 1924 is explained in terms of the deep-seated pacifism of the masses. The actual mechanism of linkage is not spelled out. On those occasions when a specific relation is described the very language used often betrays an unwillingness to see it as a legitimate, integral part of a normal political process. Such things as public opinion and party and interest-group politics are seen basically as exogenous forces, “intruding” or having an “impact” on the policy-making system, not as regular parts of it.

In the 1970's both the theory of development and the thinking on population policy in relationship to development have undergone significant revision. The purpose of this article is to note some of the broad trends in such analysis and to illustrate how Catholic teaching relates to the development-population debate. The relationship is more complex than descriptions often given of it by Catholics and other analysts. This essay seeks to examine the complexity and to propose a way of shaping a position on development and population which can enrich the wider debate and open new avenues of approach for the church.

Houndsditch, near Bishopsgate, was once the daily scene of traffic and bustle as dealers in second-hand clothing assembled after their daily rounds to pick up what they might sell for a few pence or a shilling. In 1901, Sidney Webb praised Lord Rosebery for his “escape” from Houndsditch—his casting off of his “Gladstonian old clothes” and especially such features of the Liberal program as Irish Home Rule—and provided him with a richly embroidered collectivist cloak to hide his political nakedness. In 1918, partly at Webb's urging, the Labour party adopted a socialist platform. Thereafter, in defining their attitude towards the Empire, a few class warriors within the labor movement advocated an alliance between British workers and the colonial proletariat. The majority, however, returned to Houndsditch: they borrowed their imperial ideas from liberalism, including a variant of the Gladstonian solution for the Irish question.

Montesquieu's L' Esprit des lois, first published in 1748, was an innovative and often paradoxical work. Almost as soon as a reader opened it, he was likely to be struck by a singular typology of governments: despotism, monarchy, and republic (subdivided into democracy and aristocracy). This represented a marked departure from the traditional division of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy which Aristotle and Polybius had bequeathed to later students of government. As Robert Shackleton remarks in his definitive biography of Montesquieu, “No major political writer before Montesquieu had founded his work on such an analysis.” Several commentators have remarked on the uniqueness of this typology, and it certainly offers grounds for puzzlement. If Montesquieu had meant to distinguish regimes by the number of those who hold power, then he would have followed tradition by conflating monarchy with despotism while distinguishing aristocracy from democracy more sharply. On the other hand, if he meant to introduce a moral criterion by dividing monarchy from despotism, then he should have continued by differentiating aristocracy from oligarchy and democracy from ochlocracy. The understanding of Montesquieu's typology is made no easier when he assures his readers that the most important political dichotomy is that between despotism and all other regimes. Compared to despotism, both monarchy and republic are good forms of government, and both may be called moderate.