J-P. SARTRE HAS WRITTEN AT LENGTH ON THE QUESTION OF HOW THE myth of the French revolution is possible. The intelligibility, let alone the truth, of his answer need not detain us unduly. But the question is a good one. The past two centuries or so have indeed been the age of myth of the Revolution. As in philosophical logic, the definite article has distinctive and powerful implications and gives rise to very interesting problems. In this case, they are not merely logical, but also, and above all, moral, epistemic and political. The definite article seems to imply existence; and it also seems to imply uniqueness. Even more disturbingly, it seems to suggest, in this case, moral rightness and political authority. The Revolution is necessary, unique and inevitable, legitimate and authoritative. But to claim these traits, it must also be identifiable; and it can only be identified, hailed and revered, if it carries some manifest stigmata. But what are they? Can they not be counterfeited? Are there not peddlers of fake stigmata, or, worse still, of false theories concerning what constitutes the stigmata?

GOVERNMENTAL DECISIONS AND NON DECISIONS AFFECT THE LIVES AND interests of their citizens. More so with the expansion of governments’ role in modern industrialized societies. In every society, therefore, the citizens have found it necessary to organize groups according to different membership criteria in order to defend and/or advance existing interests or simply to articulate emerging interests in the face of governmental resistance and/or societal opposition. Organized groups may compete among themselves not only in order to catch government's attention and favours but also in order to obtain a more favourable distribution of societal resources from each other.

THE SWISS AND THEIR POLITICS: THIS TOPIC HAS ALREADY BEEN AND still is of concern to many citizens as well as to social scientists. Although it has been the subject of several studies, it has however never generated any empirical research using opinion polls. This has now been done. This study is part of a series based on the results of an opinion poll – the first in Switzerland – carried out in the spring of 1972. The survey was designed to elicit the Swiss citizens’ image of the country's democratic system as well as their attitudes toward important issues. It consisted of a questionnaire lasting about one hour and it was given to 1,917 male and female voters selected by scientific methods which guarantee their representativeness.

INTERPRETATIONS OF THE MEANING AND THE EFFECTS OF THE CONFERence on Security and Cooporation in Europe (CSCE) and its product, the Final Act signed at Helsinki in August 1975, are of sufficient variety to suit anybody's taste. Governments on both sides have hailed the Final Act as a great landmark, the opening of a new era of international relations in Europe based on high principle. Some of the same governments and their spokesmen, mainly on the Eastern side, have also called it the ineluctable result of the changed balance of forces in Europe; and among observers in the West who have agreed with that proposition some have argued that the Soviet Union has by Helsinki prepared the way for the domination or ‘Finlandization’ of the nations of Western Europe, and that the latter are too stupid or too complaisant or too scared to do anything about it. Then there are those in the West who feel neither satisfaction nor alarm but see the whole negotiation as much ado about nothing, changing neither the existing balance nor the outstanding differences.

DESPITE ITS WIDE INFLUENCE, THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF KARL POPPER has received, until recently, remarkably little systematic attention from academic political theorists. Hailed by Isaiah Berlin as the most formidable of Marxism's living critics and reviled by Marxists as a prominent luminary of that White Emigration whose pernicious influence is mainly responsible for the ideological rejuvenation of a moribund reactionary culture, canonized as a prophet of freedom and enterprise and lumped together with such despised conservatives as Oakeshott, Namier and Butterfield as one of those who want only ‘to keep that dear old T-model on the road by dint of a little piecemeal engineering’, Popper incontestably has been a storm centre of several major ideological controversies. Equally, Popper's dissident reinterpretations of the thought of Plato and Hegel, like his defence of value-freedom and methodological individualism in the social sciences, have generated massive and subtly ramified literatures, while the form of critical rationalism which has been developed by some of his disciples has been seen, both by its proponents and by its enemies, as the foremost contribution to the contemporary struggle against irrationalism.