Munich marks the end of an epoch, a “turning point in history,” as Arnold J. Toynbee recently states in a most suggestive article. In fact, these decisive events were foreshadowed long before September 1938, by actions almost necessarily leading the road to Munich. If one can speak of the end of a period, one might better say: Hitler's march into the Rhineland, March 7, 1936, was the real water-shed between two political continents. Indeed what had been said about the World War, that it merely precipitated a development of political and social forces which were moulding the twentieth century, could be repeated of this greatest diplomatic upset of our time too. It had its roots in the history of post-War Europe, and it may be that even the more we win distance from this “water-shed of Munich” the clearer it will become that the currents of history are running in the same old beds and in the same directions as before September, 1938.

The newly awakened interest in the comparative study of politics is part and parcel of a silent revolution that has taken place in the social sciences during the last decades. Such a re-orientation in turn is in part due to the radical social and political transformations in this era of total wars and revolutions. Because as Aristotle knew all too well, and peaceful periods in history all too often tried to forget, the social sciences are disciplines of “ethics”, spelling out man's deep involvements and demanding decisions at critical turning points of history.

In the beginning was Comparison. Or in the words of our centenarian, Woodrow Wilson: “I believe that our own institutions can be understood and appreciated only by those who know somewhat familiarly other systems of government and the main facts of general institutional history. By the use of a thorough comparative and historical method, moreover, a general clarification of views may be obtained… Certainly it does not now have to be argued that the only thorough method of study in politics is the comparative and historical.” What has happened to comparative politics since those very early days of our Association and especially since its official birth in 1903, when the society was founded as “an outgrowth of a movement looking toward a National Conference on Comparative Legislation”?

This is the age of revolutions. No longer are they the domain of the theorizer or the peripheral plotter. They have moved into the center of the average man's daily thought. They are on everybody's mind and in every newspaper's headline.

No continent is exempted. The whole of Europe is in upheaval. Her political parties are aligned in the name of, or in opposition to, revolution. China's four decades of civil war, India's final attainment of independence, the awakening nationalism of the Near East and South Eastern Asia spell not only the end of historical empires, but also call into action socio-revolutionary forces that break the frame of established society. Even those areas that are not engulfed by revolution are confronted with its threat. Fascism and National Socialism, though they proved in the test of history to be mere pseudo-revolts, were nourished by grievances of modern society that are not overcome by military defeat and—as long as they remain unanswered—still represent a challenge to our democratic world.