In the present issue, and the one to follow, Comparative Studies has brought together a set of papers which address themselves, in various ways, to the understanding of how peasants come to take part in political mobilization, and how they are affected by such participation. It is thus the intention of the editors to contribute further to the ongoing discussion, in history and the social sciences, about the nature and characteristics of peasantry. This discussion has a secure and venerable genealogy in continental Europe: relevant names which come to mind are those of the Frenchman Le Play, the German Riehl, and the Russian Vasil'chakov. Something of this rich legacy reached North American sociology through the influence of the Polish sociologist Florian Znaniecki. But in the United States the interest in peasantry remained marginal, until it took root in anthropology, primarily through the efforts of Robert Redfield. Drawing on the legacy of Maine, Durkheim, Tönnies, and of the German-influenced urban sociologists at the University of Chicago, Redfield elaborated the concept of ‘the folk society’, possessed of a distinctive ‘folk culture’.

Although the empirical basis for the comparative study of the history of European family life is expanding, there remain extensive areas of Eastern Europe about which almost nothing is known. This situation weakens all generalizations about Europe as a whole, especially since those localities of Eastern Europe from which family data are available reveal formations very different from what obtains in the West. The most ambitious comparative study to date, Household and Family in Past Time (1972; edited by Peter Laslett and Richard Wall) has taken a long step in the direction of providing a comparative methodology, but even in this excellent volume Eastern Europe is represented by only three essays dealing with the best known of its areas, the Balkans. In the Preface of the work, Laslett suggests that future historical evidence from the eastern regions ‘may possibly go to show that the extremes of familial organization, from the simplest to the most complex, may have once existed within the confines of the European continent itself’.

Students of contemporary campesino movements in Latin America have their analyses generally focused on two problem-complexes. One of these entails the macro-structural changes of the larger society within which campesino movements develop. Such changes are represented by the gradual imposition of the nation-state over the more remote regions of the countries, the concomitant decline in the geographic, political, and economic isolation of these remote areas, the emergence of ‘multiple-power domains’ within which ascending groups challenge the political brokerage monopolies of the traditional large landholders over the campesinos within their domains, and the development of clientelistic political structures within which campesino followings become attractive power resources for politicians at the regional and national level.

For more than a decade, the most decisive influence on the empirical study of the British class structure has been the three consecutive electoral victories of the Conservative Party during the 1950s. The widespread belief that these events reflected some underlying change in the stratification of British society stimulated a new examination of the political attitudes and behaviour of the working class. In sociology this led to the exploration of the ‘embourgeoisement’ thesis culminating in the ‘affluent worker’ study by Goldthorpe and his colleagues and it is, perhaps, a comment on the state of sociological research into the British class structure that this study, together with its associated papers, remains the centre around which much of the debate on social stratification in contemporary Britain continues to revolve. In political science, however, the investigation took a different track. Instead of seeking an explanation of the Conservative electoral successes in terms of the working class becoming more middle class, political scientists sought an explanation in terms of increased working-class ‘deference’. Bagehot was enthusiastically resurrected (a new edition of The English Constitution appeared in 1963), and a spate of studies attempted to assess the ‘deferential’ component of English political culture.

Beyond influencing generations of scholarship in American history, the paradigm of Frederick Jackson Turner has stimulated a series of monographs and articles on the role of the frontier in the formation of other societies. A synthesis of this comparative research on these frontier societies has been ably undertaken by Gerhard and Mikesell. While there have been numerous articles in both English and Portuguese on the Brazilian frontier, these largely descriptive studies have not been systematically integrated into any conceptual framework, much less the comparative tradition inspired by the Turner thesis. In this essay, I propose to test the robustness of the frontier paradigm against some Brazilian frontier experiences

There is a great deal of confusion about the history of women's work outside the home and about the origin and meaning of women's traditional place within the home. Most interpretations of either of these questions depend on assumptions about the other. Usually, women at home in any time period are assumed to be non-productive, the antithesis of women at work. In addition, most general works on women and the family assume that the history of women's employment, like the history of women's legal and political rights, can be understood as a gradual evolution from a traditional place at home to a modern position in the world of work. Some historians cite changes in employment opportunities created by industrialization as the precursors of legal emancipation. Others stress political rights as the source of improved economic status. In both cases, legal-political and economic ‘emancipation’ usually are linked to changes in cultural values. Thus William Goode, whose World Revolution and Family Patterns makes temporal and geographic comparisons of family patterns, remarks on what he calls ‘the statistically unusual status of western women today, that is their high participation in work outside of the home’.

In the sociological literature, the study of inter-ethnic relations has been dominated either by the problem of the black-white conflict in the U.S.A. or by the controversy over whether social relations in colonial and excolonial countries are ‘pluralistic’. The history of the Soviet Union provides quite a different context in which various ethnic groups, each with peculiar traditions and languages and at various levels of social, political and economic development, have interacted one with another. Study of the Soviet Union enables one to compare the role of Marxist-Leninist ideology in an ethnically mixed community with the usual examples of the impact of religious and ‘imperialist’ belief systems, and it may help to clarify whether ‘ethnic group’ is a useful analytical category or whether ‘ethnic relations’ can be explained in terms of the more traditional classifications of class, status and power.

Regionalism has always been an important component of the social structure and history of Mexico. Fortunately for the scholar interested in developing theories about peasant rebellions, regionalism facilitates the method of controlled comparison. This paper will contrast the role of the peasants of Oaxaca and of Morelos in the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20.

Certain analysts have argued in support of liberal democratic rule that this method of structuring political power through parliaments, mass political parties and specialized interest groups is both responsive to mass needs and imbued with high capabilities for public welfare and resource redistribution. Critics2 of this view contend that liberal democratic government merely provides a facade of mass legitimacy that obscures and masks the control of public policy and decision making by privileged and affluent classes that own or control the means of production. This paper attempts to examine these conflicting views on the policy responsiveness of liberal-democratic rule to mass welfare needs in the context of the mainly capitalist societies of Latin America.

The statement above, by the former rector of the National University of Mexico, which serves as an epigraph to this essay, expresses a position, the very point of view to which most sophisticated students of Indian affairs in Latin America are today accustomed to subscribe. During the past twenty-five years, social scientists throughout the world have asked themselves and one another why poverty, disease and illiteracy persist in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Despite concerted efforts to promote general prosperity and improve public welfare, despite the expenditure of huge sums by national and international agencies, the problem is unresolved. In order to explain this paradox, they argue that underdeveloped countries do not possess the economic and political institutions which, in Western Europe and the United States, facilitate the growth of industry and the expansion of commerce. As a result, it is said, these countries find them selves largely incapable of ‘self-sustained’ economic development, of solving their demographic problems, of accumulating the capital which might permit them a greater degree of economic freedom.

In recent years, institutionalization has become one of the key concepts in comparative politics in general, and in the study of political development in particular. This elegant and almost geometrically tidy theory of political order best articulated by Huntington has been acclaimed as a major new school, one that will be able perhaps to narrow what La Palombara called the ‘widening chasm’ between ‘macrotheories and microapplications in comparative politics’. Indeed, Huntington in his book attempted to apply his theoretical tenets to the analysis of such important phenomena as military intervention in politics, corruption and violence, all this via the usage of a few major variables. In the notoriously slippery field of theorizing in comparative politics, this constituted a welcome influx of fresh air. No wonder, then, that Huntington's theory and concepts have been widely prevalent and frequently referred to—again a relative innovation in the easy-come-easy-go world of theories in the study of political development.

The study of imperial rivalries is progressing at a rapid rate as more national archives become available and more researchers enter the field. But this progress tends too often to be a linear one, teaching us more about the aspirations, strategies and accomplishments of the rival powers but little about what took place within the actual pieces of territory over which they contested. And this is understandable, because whereas the former domain can be discussed with an increasing degree of precision, the latter tends to be more intractable. After all, colonial possessions were the ‘objects’, things to be fought over and about. The intention of this paper, however, is to look at the other, perhaps more problematic, dimensions of imperial rivalry, viz., the awareness and activities of the inhabitants and residents of one colonial territory with respect to the keen international competition over their country. By inhabitants and residents I mean to include not only the indigenous peoples of Cameroun but also the French administrators who were present in the territory during the interwar period.

Since 1952 the elaboration of Egyptian ideology has constituted a source of conflict between the regime and the left/right opposition. In trying to capture the ideological center, the regime has inevitably drawn itself into the maelstrom of public contention characterized by mass conformity, intimidation, purges, arrests, show trials and incarceration of all who fundamentally question the principles of the leadership. Democratic cooperative socialism (‘Arab socialism’) is the official ideology, and a spate of books and articles have been published on its significance for Egyptian politics. Despite all these efforts, confusion still tends to reign over this concept, both among Egyptians themselves, and outsiders studying it.

The problems created by rapid expansion of educational systems in the underdeveloped states of Asia, Africa and South America are the subject of a large and diverse literature.1 Familiar to even the most cursory student of this literature are several themes: (1) the ‘devaluation’ of elementary education, which no longer affords entry into white-collar positions as it did in the late colonial periods; (2) the persistent and diffuse ‘elite’ connotations of higher (and even secondary) education, the supply of which, while increasing, remains relatively short; (3) the skewed distribution, within higher education, toward ‘traditional’ disciplines—notably law and the humanities—reflecting the values of the colonial system and running against perceived needs for technological skills; and finally, the concern over the ‘destabilizing’ consequences of a growth in educational access and aspirations disproportionate to the economy's ability to ‘fit’ much of tne-educated-manpower into the system.

If only everybody meant the same thing by ‘bureaucracy’—or ‘feudalism’, ‘Old Regime’, ‘capitalism’, and so on, ad nauseam. If we all agreed on what these terms meant a good deal of paper might be saved. Since this is not even remotely the case, I had better begin by saying something about how the term ‘bureaucracy’ is to be used in the pages that follow. A government shall be said to be bureaucratized to the extent that it has come to resemble the organizational portrait drawn by Max Weber in Economy and Society. Weber's so-called definition is a list (or lists) of characteristics whose relative importance and relation to one another have stirred much debate.

The contents of sacred texts are not simply reproduced in the doctrines of the religions which venerate them; there must be interpretation and selective emphasis. This is most obviously true when the corpus of sacred literature is large, as in Christianity and Buddhism. Historians of these religions may therefore ask why certain doctrines and certain scriptures have been emphasized at the expense of others.

This paper argues that the experiences of colonialism in Africa have led to the emergence of a unique historical configuration in modern postcolonial Africa: the existence of two publics instead of one public, as in the West. Many of Africa's political problems are due to the dialectical relationships between the two publics. I shall characterize these two publics and attempt to explain some of Africa's political features within the matrix of these publics. In order to give some empirical content to the distinction drawn here, I shall illustrate the issues raised with examples from Nigeria.