Of recent years American interest in France has taken a new turn, for France has become the chief Continental ally of the United States in its power arrangements to prevent Russian aggression, and a bastion in the defense of those values which are the very foundation of Western civilization. Indeed, France occupies, in spite of the events of 1940, a stronger position in the West of Europe than it held in the period between the two World Wars. Now the French have alliances in which they can put confidence and from which they can get real support if the crisis comes. And then, as Professor André Siegfried, the dean of commentators upon French affairs and upon Franco-American relations, has written in the opening paragraph of Modern France: “With the countries of Eastern Europe looking in a new direction, with a defeated Germany no longer in a dominant position economically or politically, France has of necessity become the center of the entire Continental system.” The nation has moved into a partial but temporary vacuum.

Although the term “imperialism” is gaining currency at present, social scientists in the English-speaking world continue to treat with slight interest the phenomena which the term seeks to identify. The authors of the two books under review are of continental European origin. This is hardly an unusual coincidence; the paucity of Anglo-American literature on imperialism contrasts oddly with the prolific stream of writings which has appeared in continental Europe during the last seventy years. One reason for this striking difference lies no doubt in the traditional reluctance of Anglo-American social scientists to generalize about the causation of historical events—and, without such generalization, no theory of imperialism is possible. There is a good deal to be said both for this unwillingness to generalize readily, and against the irrepressible enthusiasm with which European savants construct their sweeping theories. Yet neither can it be denied that the European tradition has produced theories of outstanding and abiding value for the understanding of social and political events. Both Marx and Freud, and many lesser lights, were of this tradition and one need not be Marxist or Freudian to appreciate how immensely their brilliant theories have enriched the social sciences in the Englishspeaking countries.

We rarely have an opportunity to study the intimate reactions of two members of the President's cabinet to a series of very recent and very important events. Both Speaking Frankly and The Forrestal Diaries cover about the same period—the period when the United States was slowly awakening to the realities of the postwar world—but they are very different in other respects. Secretary Byrnes' book was written to give a picture of the problems that he encountered during his tenure as Secretary of State and to express his considered views about policy for the future. The Diaries, on the other hand, were never intended for publication, and without connective matter supplied by the editor they would be merely a collection of memoranda of meetings and conversations, copies or summaries of documents prepared by other people, personal letters, and less frequent entries in which Mr. Forrestal recorded his own opinions or impressions.

The term “statecraft” is used here in a sense which is stronger than that of “diplomacy” as used, for example, by Harold Nicolson. In its present meaning it includes the construction of strategies for securing the national interest in the international arena, as well as the execution of these strategies by diplomats. In a day when the world is being divided between two great power blocs, when neutrality is becoming increasingly more difficult to maintain, when statecraft is invading the economic and cultural aspects of social existence, as well as the political and military, when most great problems of domestic life must be reconsidered with regard to their bearing on the international situation, few, if any, can doubt its importance. The successful or unsuccessful conduct of statecraft may settle the fate of our way of life; and, given the possibilities of modern war, it may, in a deeper sense, settle the question of whether any type of civilized life, ours or the Soviets', can survive.

Time was when a nation, at the pinnacle of its might, asked itself the question: “In the relation of states, what is the right thing, which ought to be done, and what is the wrong thing, which ought not to be done?” It was Spain, a worldconquering power, which thus approached problems of policy in the light of rational choice and raised a crop of great and lucid minds who laid the foundations for what later became international law. But the particular principles to which these men looked for their answers have been proved inadequate, first in the practice of statesmen and then in the theory of jurists. Hopes that international relations could be ordered by the relatively simple moral rules which we recognize in the organized societies of men have been repeatedly and cruelly disappointed. The failure of this one great historic attempt to apply rational concepts to international relations has evidently made us despair of any possibility even of different rational systems in this field.

The formation of attitudes and expectations in international politics—if they are to be adequate bases for action—must rest upon, among other things, a correct appraisal of the motives of the leaders of other countries and of the means by which they achieve their objectives. In a recent article in World Politics entitled “Science and Politics in the U.S.S.R.: The Genetics Debate,” Miss Pamela N. Wrinch discusses the possible ideological motives (as well as, speculatively, some of the psychological ones) which give impetus to the eradication of disapproved scientific theories and procedures, and the argumentative means employed in this stamping-out process. Though the article is fully convincing in presenting a clear picture of Soviet debating techniques, Miss Wrinch is less successful on the score of assessing the motives for the official opposition to certain theories in Soviet Russia.

It is doubtless a truism to state that Europe is on the wane, at least as a center of political power. Few would deny that a change of major proportions has taken place since the turn of the century in Europe's role in world affairs. But once this is stated, agreement ceases. The causes and mechanism of Europe's decline have received the most varied interpretations, and the bearing of this change on the future is so profound that each school of thought tends to evaluate the destiny of Europe in terms of its own political philosophy. The widest assortment of scholars and prophets have been drawn to this problem by the fascination of its perplexities, and their treatises already comprise a formidable library. Yet the solutions proposed can scarcely be said to have resulted in a clarification of the problem of Europe, and even the most distinguished and influential of these writers have found relatively few areas of agreement.