The widespread reaction against secret diplomacy which followed the First World War led to demands that statesmen conduct their affairs openly and be responsive to public opinion. The specific forms that Open Diplomacy might take in the post-war world were hard to envision, even for the most ardent advocates of change. At the Paris Peace Conference several hundred newsmen discovered that ‘open covenants openly arrived at’ did not mean that negotiations would be held in public. Similarly, the whole process by which governments were supposed to determine domestic or world opinion on a given issue and then formulate policies in accord with it was easier to talk about than to implement. If supporters of Open Diplomacy wanted simplicity, they were in fact getting a host of new complexities in their quest for a more democratic foreign policy.

Like differing versions of Vishnu, the same difficult problems continuallyreappear in the scholarly literature on India. The nature of caste, itsresiliency or dissolution in the face of modernization; the quality oftraditional Indian civilization, its adaptation or collapse in response toeconomic development and industrialization, are two questions whichcontinue to haunt the specialist on South Asia. What hangs in the balance is not only our understanding of social change or non-change in industrializing societies, but the validity of anthropology and the other social sciences as adequate methods of description and analysis in the contemporary world. If the ‘ethnographic present’ always remains only the past, then is not the value of anthropology and social science immeasurably diminished?

Few sociologists would quarrel with Dr. Allen's use of the term bureaucracy in his analysis of the Malayan colonial government. Nor could one argue that he has failed to come to grips with certain central sociological issues in the analysis of bureaucracies. On the contrary, Dr. Allen has given us an excellent case study that illuminates some of the dynamics of the bureaucratic processes.

The General Prologue is often called a picture of its age and, frequently inthe next breath, a satire. In English Lit. this usually draws a stern lectureabout confusing the distinction between literature and history, but in thisessay, unobserved by my sophomores, I propose to talk about the General Prologue as a picture of its age and then, tentatively, about some uses suchhistory might be put to by historians and literary students.

Students of peasant society recognize the importance of the market economy for understanding decision-making processes within the house- hold and the nature of articulation between the peasant sector and the national society. We intend to describe market behavior in Northeast Brazil and to relate such behavior to changes in the agricultural economy in general. The ultimate goal is to understand how peasants are integrated into the national economy as commodity producers and consumers of manufactured goods. By concentrating on the internal marketing system for food staples in Northeast Brazil we hope to refine earlier views of peasants and to suggest a definition of peasantry based on economic integration rather than on partial participation in the national culture.

While the Washington Conference of 1921–2 was not the first occasion on which public opinion had exercised an impact upon great power diplomacy, it seems to have provided one of the more dramatic illustrations of a process already well under way. In his Discourses, Machiavelli (p. 248) had already noted the dangers of building policy on the opinion of the people:

And if you propose to them anything that, upon its face, seems profitable and courageous though there be really a loss concealed under it which may involve the ruin of the republic, the multitude will ever be most easily persuaded to it. But, if the measure proposed seems doubtful and likely to cause loss, then it will be difficult to persuade the people to it, even though the benefit and welfare of the republic were concealed under it.

The agricultural organization that has long characterized the Central Italian hills, the mezzadria system of share-farming, is today ‘in crisis’. Overtly, the crisis is manifested in an increasing antagonism between landlords and peasants, large-scale withdrawal of peasants from the system, and political agitation directed towards it.

For the first and only time in dramatic history, ‘Man’ as a generalized type appears on the stage as the central character of the early fifteenth-century English morality plays. The morality play itself, in contrast to the earlier mystery plays, which presented the Biblical drama of world history, represents the story of the individual Christian from birth to death and final salvation.‘Mankind’ represents all social classes at their lowest common denominator, an emphasis reinforced by the marginal situation of the wandering players who performed these plays and who themselves belonged to no recognized class within the social order. The appearance of Mankind as central actor resulted partly from the individualist and voluntarist emphasis of nominalist thought and partly from the renewed emphasis on the individual associated with social changes of the time. In the earlier morality plays, Mankind was guided about the stage by overwhelming supernatural figures; in the later moralities, like Everyman, ‘Mankind’ lost his generalized characteristics after about 1530 and became a historical personage or a personification of only one social class. We shall attempt to describe some of the reasons for ‘Mankind's’ appearance at this point in dramatic history and his development as a character from 1420 to 1520.

This paper has two aims. The first is to remark about a book: E. C. Banfield's The Moral Basis of a Backward Society; the second is to restate, with particular reference to Southern Italy, some common principles of social organization and structure. The success of Banfield's book is attributable to a number of factors. The author has a high reputation in the discipline of political science. For a long time it was the only sociological book about Southern Italy in English; in default of other works it has been taken up by American and British universities as an introduction to the sociology of South Italian peasantries. Finally, there is its appeal to practical men, such as social workers and community development experts, who find that the attempt to explain individual bits and pieces of behaviour sets up sympathetic harmonies in their hearts. The book is, however, subject to criticism on several grounds: first, on the basis of inadequate method; second, on the grounds of inadequacies of formal argument; finally, on the grounds of omissions and commissions in the presentation of the material itself.

Mr. Davis finds The Moral Basis of a Backward Society subject to criticism on three grounds: (a) inadequacies of method, (b) inadequacies of formal argument, and (c) omissions and commissions in the presentation of the material itself. Let us examine his bill of particulars on each count.