Ernst Nolte, Professor of History at Marburg University, challenged the attention of all students of recent European history as well as specialists on totalitarian dictatorship some years ago by a new and intersting interpretation in his Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (1963). In it he undertook to see the Action Française group of Charles Maurras and his friends, Fascism, and National Socialism as cut from the same cloth.It was a view based upon a strong emphasis on the ideological features of these movements, rather than their conduct of politics. Like all syntheses, it encountered sharp criticism by specialists in the three national histories and cultures, with their vested interests in their particular specialties. I myself considered it a very valuable contribution, having always stressed the kinship of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, in conduct as well as ideology—in opposition to Hannah Arendt, who inclined to an ideal-typical restriction of the notion of totalitarianism to Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia on the ground that “the essence of totalitarianism is total terror”; this has always seemed to me like restricting the concept of absolute monarchy to Louis XIV and Peter the Great.

The study of developing areas has, in recent years, caused political science and theory to be increasingly aware of realities of non-Western government and politics. Comparative politics and its theory no longer, therefore, can avoid utilizing the results of the research of anthropologists and ethnologists in a way comparable to the use of historical data if they wish to be comprehensively empirical. Since the political theorist will not, as a rule, be able to become a practising anthropologist, the basic problem of such cooperation turns upon whether the investigating anthropologist asks the crucial, the basic questions in the first place. A broad survey of their reports and writings, such as the Human Relations Area Files afford, shows that this is by no means generally the case. Nor is this easy to achieve, for political scientists and anthropologists differ in their objectives. It has been suggested that the anthropologist is primarily interested in diversity, in how many ways something could be done, whereas for the political scientist and theorist such divergencies are important mainly as they lead to political insight and verifiable generalization.

The utility of the writings of anthropologists for the political scientist is seriously impeded by the over-simplified and misleading understanding of the nature of power and authority held by many of them.

When President Roosevelt proclaimed the “Four Freedoms” in 1941, he accepted a new conception of human rights far removed from the natural rights of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The conception of rights which inspired the British Bill of Rights (1689), the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) is grounded in simple natural law notions. Man was believed to have a fixed and unalterable nature, to be endowed with reason, which gave him certain rights without which he ceased to be a human being. These natural rights, summed up in the Lockean formula of “life, liberty and property” (later broadened to include the pursuit of happiness), were largely concerned with protecting the individual person against governmental power. Each man was seen as entitled to a personal sphere of autonomy, more especially of religious conviction and property; the inner and the outer man in his basic self-realization and self-fulfillment. These rights depended in turn upon the still more crucial right to life-that is to say, to the self itself in terms of physical survival and protection against bodily harm. This right to life was recognized even by absolutists, like Thomas Hobbes. It was believed immutable, inalienable, inviolable. Locke exclaimed at one point that these rights no one had the power to part with, and hence no government could ever acquire the right to violate them.

The term charisma and its derivatives, introduced into sociology many years ago by a German sociologist, has lately been spreading into political science here and abroad. The intellectuals' desire to sound profound by the use of unfamiliar words may have a share in this fad, but it would seem that the term also responds to a very real need. One recent writer goes so far as to define charisma as “the right to rule by virtue of what they (the leaders) have been and are.” Needless to say, such vagueness is a far cry from the original usage.

The communist regime in East Germany, which calls itself the German Democratic Republic (DDR), weathered the frenzied weeks of political change in Poland and abortive revolution in Hungary with an inflexibility that has made it a paragon of satellite stalwartness. Neus Deutschland, organ of the dominant Socialist Unity Party (SED), entered into vituperative and aggressive inter-changes with Polish advocates of “humanitarian socialism” who had rallied around Gomulka. The Hungarian uprising was from the start condemned as the work of “counter-revolutionary bandits.” The Central Committee of the SED issued a special declaration welcoming the intervention of Soviet troops in Hungary as a “service to peace” and greeting the formation of the Kadar government with profusions of “fraternal solidarity.” National communism was denounced as a policy conceived by the National Security Council in Washington to split the socialist camp and to isolate the Soviet Union. The SED served notice that the power of the secret police would be employed, if need be, to secure the continued allegiance of the regime to the USSR and of the SED rank and file to the Ulbricht leadership. In the words of the Minister of State Security, Ernst Wollweber,