I INTEND TO FOLLOW AN ABSTRACT LINE IN ANSWERING THE question why political systems change. That is, I am not concerned with the infinity of descriptive reasons why change occurs in any concrete case. It may be argued that now is not the time to bother with such a trivial approach, particularly when the language of crisis is what must be used, and also understood, and not the language of abstraction.

I think the answer to this is that for too long the evaluation of politics, and of government in particular, has become a ‘pseudoactivity’ in which descriptive categories like ‘parliamentary control over the executive’, or ‘reform of the committee system’ are comforting shibboleths which, although meant to contain some inner profundity have lost much of their original meaning. The truth is that the balance between normative givens and structural conditions is becoming so altered that the common-sense foundations of the discipline seem almost irrelevant.

THE WAY THAT THE TERM ‘POLICE STATE’ ENTERED THE ENGLISH language is curious. It is simply the transliteration of the German term Polizeistaat. In German constitutional and administrative law the Polizeistaat was one of the triad of categories used to describe the characteristics of particular states. The other two categories were the Rechtsstaat and the Justizstaat. The Polizeistaat was the creation of 18th-century Prussia. The devastation of the Thuty Years War led the Prussian leaders to conclude that only a state based upon internal discipline, rigorously controlled, and economically self-sufficient could provide a proper basis for survival. This involved breaking the feudal powers of the aristocracy, substituting for them as the principal instrument of government a civil service wholly obedient and responsive to the rulers of the state, and creating a powerful army capable of protecting the heartland of Prussia, if necessary by wars of expansion. The permanent possibility of war became the basis of stable government, and stable government, even at the price of war, was the major blessing a state could bestow on its citizens.

THE PROPHETS OF DEPOLITIZATION ARE CONFOUNDED. IN THE last year or so, politics have come back with a vengeance. Indeed, what is characteristic in this new political activity is that, anticapitalistic though it may be, its immediate motives did not spring from urgent economic problems. In France, for instance, trouble erupted out of a blue economic sky.

For those who, convinced that the political conflict is perennial and ubiquitous, regarded the theories of depolitization with due scepticism, this was a ‘new wave’ of political conflict though with a noticeable change in techniques and mentalities. The change was so considerable and so abrupt, the methods so different, that one could not but wonder if they did not herald also the coming of another code of political behaviour. Once more the need to study the modernization of politics, by which is meant broadly the synchronization of the political process with the evolved economic and social processes, seemed even greater.

IN CHAPTER XVIII OF THE CONSIDERATIONS ON REPRESENTATIVE Government (1861) which discussed ‘The Government of Dependencies by Free States’ John Stuart Mill wrote that ‘It is always under great difficulties and very imperfectly, that a country can be governed by foreigners; even where there is no extreme disparity, in habits and ideas, between the rulers and the ruled. Foreigners do not feel with the people. They cantlot judge, by the light in which a thing appears to their own minds, or the manner in which it affects their feelings, how it will affect the feelings or appear in the minds of the subject population.’ This to Mill was a disadvantage; but reflection may lead us to conclude that there may be solid advantages in such a state of affairs; for we will remember that government, whether by foreigner or by native is exercise of power; and power, it is commonly and rightly said, sets up barriers, isolates, puts him who exercises it in a Merent world from him who is subject to it. Those who have power and those who do not have power are different species of men. It is therefore safer and more prudent for distances to be kept , and for the governed to approach their governors with cautious and mistrustful circumspection. An ancient Chinese sage declared it a mistake to compare the ruler to a father; for, he said, the ruler does not (or at any rate should not) feel affection towards his people. Again, the story is told of another wise Chinese, a ruler who, recovering from an illness, heard that his subjects had sacrificed an ox for his recovery.

ISRAEL IS MORE SUI GENERIS THAN OTHER POLITICAL SOCIETIES not so much in virtue of the nature of its political arrangements and postures as in virtue of what underlies them. To highlight some basic issues of Israeli politics from this point of view is to take one's cue from the most fundamental question of Jewish existence: To be like or unlike, any other nation? If Zionism prevents Israelis from distinguishing themselves in the manner in which other nations distinguish themselves from each other, a major reason is that Israel's neighbours deny her the right to realize within sovereign boundaries the resurgence of a Jewish state and nation.

HER MAJESTY'S JUDGES ARE BY NATURE CONSERVATIVE BECAUSE their function is to apply existing law, to uphold a system not to subvert it. But they are not by nature reactionary, do not have any necessary opposition to new ideas, must indeed seek to fit political novelties expressed in statutory terms into the existing order. But, by their background and more importantly by their training, they are cautious, have seen it before, and in interpreting Acts of Parliament still work on the basis of certain assumptions which are also widely shared by those in the street below their windows, along the embankment at Westminster, and by the man in the passing Clapham omnibus. These assumptions are that Parliament does not intend to enact anydung so radical as to upset the constitution, or to deprive private persons of life, liberty or property by inadvertence but only by express words, and that Parliament generally enacts within what the judges regard as the fundamental political and economic structure of contemporary Anglo-Saxon society.

‘HISTORIC’, ‘MOMENTOUS’ AND ‘REVOLUTIONARY’ ARE ONLY A FEW OF the epithets freely bestowed upon the case of Baker v. Carr. By that justly celebrated judgment of 26 March 1962 the US Supreme Court implied for the first time that the weight of an American's vote might no longer depend on whereabouts in the country he lived. It did so by ruling that a scheme of apportionment which permitted inequalities of population between electoral districts represented in a state's legislature could be challenged in federal (not merely state) courts, which had competence to protect the right in question. The tide of ensuing litigation attained a new level on I7 February 1964, when the Court in Wesberry v. Sanders held that a like symmetry must prevail among US Congressional districts also. High-water mark was reached on 15 June of that year with Reynolds v. Sims, where the constitution was held to require