In recent years there has been a marked revival of Marxism in the intellectual life of western societies. This has resulted not only in some impressive synoptic studies dealing with the structure of contemporary capitalist societies, but in a renewed concern with social change in these societies, and specifically with the role of the working class in the future transformation of capitalist society. This paper questions the importance attached to the proletariat as an actual or potential agent of revolutionary change. It asks: why did Marx and Engels see the proletariat in this role? What historical and theoretical considerations led them to this view? How plausible is it? The paper concludes that on the historical and sociological evidence Marx and Engels drew unwarranted inferences concerning the future role of the working class as an agency of the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society.

This article illuminates the existing gap between situation-specific and actor-specific approaches to the study of international bargaining. According to game-theoretically inspired situation-specific models, situational factors determine the playing and outcome of bargaining games regardless of who the actors are. Actor-specific models, on the other hand, focus on actor idiosyncrasies as explanatory variables. Certain actors or groups of actors are assumed to negotiate in characteristic ways. Examples of hypotheses derived from each of the two approaches are given, and the lack of rigid empirical tests by which these hypotheses could be validated, invalidated, or modified is noted. The thesis of this article is that the gap between situation-specific and actor-specific approaches could, and should, be bridged, and that this requires better coordination than hitherto of theoretical and empirical research in the field of international bargaining. One possible synthesis of actor-specific and situation-specific models, based upon the findings of an empirical study of Soviet negotiating behavior, is suggested.

This paper investigates the determinants of social inequality in a quantitative cross-sectional analysis of developed Western nations. The underlying dimensions of these determinants are classified as political and economic development on the one hand and cultural homogeneity coupled with class politics on the other. It is found that the homogeneity-class politics dimension explains a considerable proportion of the cross-national variation in social equality, but that the development dimension has little discernable impact upon degree of equality.

The psychology of Scottish Nationalism has been little explored. Using a mainly student sample, Britton (1971) showed S.N.P. voters to be low on authoritarianism where theory would predict them to be high. The Ray (1976) Directiveness scale and 10 items from the Wilson (1973a) conservatism scale were applied to 100 randomly sampled Glaswegians. The S.N.P. voters were neither authoritarian nor conservative. The S.N.P. was identified as being supported by voters of the political centre.