“…. Quand il se presente à nous quelque doctrine nouvelle,” wrote the greatest French skeptic, “nous avons grande occasion de nous en deffier, et de considerer qu'avant qu'elle fust produite sa contraire estoit en crédit et authorité…. Je ne change pas aisément, de peur que j'ay de perdre au change…. Je suis desgoustée d la nouvelleté quelque visage qu'elle porte.”

When Alexis de Tocqueville, a perceptive young French aristocrat, was thrown against the turmoil of the nineteenth century, he became a student of social structure and a political philosopher. By background he was Catholic in faith and of the nobility in outlook. But he faced revolution in France and everspreading social change in European society. An unwilling child of the French Revolution, he was led to see broad meaning behind the passing events of the political hour. This ability to extrapolate into the future the present incident permitted him to see many of the social trends which have come to tragic cacophony in the wars of the twentieth century. No one today is ashamed to read the provocative pages Tocqueville wrote, and all who read him find relevance to the present world.

The Russian Revolution is one of the major events in the history of the 20th century. It is one of the “turning points” not only in the history of Russia, but also in universal history. Its result, i.e., the creation, in Russia, of a Communist society, has become a challenge to the Western World, as an invitation to imitation, and, at the same time, as a threat of forcible transformation

Banal statements are not always useless. We may therefore recall that the master artisan combines in his person the factors of production: capital and labor. The shop management and the business transactions (purchase of raw material and sale of products) were so limited that he could also do manual labor. He therefore differed so little from the journeyman, who had always the chance of becoming master, and from the apprentice, who himself was a future journeyman, that a community spirit reigned among them. When we leave the handicraft economics of the Middle Ages to study modern industry, we face a dissociation of the factors of production: the functions of capital and labor are rested in distinct economic subjects and labor is divided into the specializations that we have mentioned above. The trades are many within each enterprise and the workers are hired after offering their services to the owners' representatives: hence, the phenomenon of an exchange of service for wages, which is its price. In capitalism, the factors of production meet in a market, and are united by a contract. We had to recall these obvious facts concerning the labor market, and the labor contract, because European corporativism challenges these fundamental ideas.

Almost exactly a century after August Comte inaugurated modern sociology under the flag of positivism, of progress and of mankind marching toward an era of glorious self-revelation, another sociologist directs the heavy artillery of a sweeping criticism just at that positivism and faith in progress, and at those achievements of mankind which Comte anticipated as the results of man's being himself and nothing but himself. P. A. Sorokin, an outstanding scholar, a studious analyst of social dynamics, the watchful observer of the Russian revolution and all that followed from it, presents us with an analysis of that phase of western civilization in which we have both the privilege and the anguish to exist—to live would be too pretentious a word. This analysis goes to the very heart of the crisis. And Sorokin does not mince words nor spare susceptibilities and prejudices.

“It is a great advantage to princes to have perused (military) histories in their youth, for in them they read at length of such assemblies and of the great frauds and deceptions and perjuries which some of the ancients have, practised on one another, and how they have taken and killed those who put their trust in such security. It is not to be said that all have used them, but the example of one is sufficient to make several wise and to cause them to wish to protect themselves.” For present-day democracies this advice of Philippe de Commynes, the fifteenth century French historian, has a pointed meaning. Only when the liberties of free peoples are threatened can their interest in war and armies be aroused. Tyrants and autocrats, on the other hand, never neglect the study of the role of war in statecraft. If we are to remain free the lessons of war must be studied continually. With this principle in mind the present survey of military literature is intended to suggest some of the important books that have been written since the French Revolution.