Sweeping and remoulding Europe in the 19th Century, nationalism has swept on in equally revolutionary guise to remould Asia in the 20th, and is now penetrating Africa. In the study of its impact and development almost every aspect of human society is involved, positively or negatively, and at least every social science discipline has its part to contribute to the analysis of an exceedingly complex whole. In the Asia of today and of the recent past we have a whole series of new nations coining forward to assert their claims in the world. A laboratory has been made available in which we can observe and analyze the growth of nationalism, catch it in its earliest stages and trace it through to its maturity, as well as at least noting in passing the countervailing forces of the past and present. The raw material, vibrant with a new and dynamic life, is there for our taking, and it would be tragic if we were to let it slip through our fingers without gathering it and subjecting it to the closest possible investigation.

Karl Marx is responsible for the famous if inaccurate dictum that while previous philosophers had been interested in explaining the world, he was interested in changing it. Yet the fact remains that Marx was passionately interested in explaining the world. The drive to explain is presumably intimately bound up with the drive to change and yet one cannot help but feel that as Marx becomes involved in some of the more complex problems of social history the desire to explain often becomes for a time at least the overriding end.

In Sung and Ming intellectual life, idealist philosophies came to the fore. Later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to a number of Chinese thinkers, that predominance of idealism seemed a disaster, and they formally disavowed it. Is there an indication, perhaps, in the early existence of this group of materialists, that the seemingly stable, traditionalistic Chinese society had the capacity to develop under its own power, without a catalytic intrusion of Western industrialism, into a society with a scientific temper?

It is said that the best European scholars are after their deaths given chairs at American universities. The saying holds true, at any rate, for Max Weber: many of his most important writings have been translated into English only in recent years, making it possible for his theories to gain a broader acceptance in English-speaking countries.

It would probably be an exaggeration to mention the young Dutchman Jacob Cornelis van Leur among the best European scholars. Killed in the battle of the Java Sea in 1942 at the age of 34 after having worked as a civil servant in the Netherlands East Indies, Dr. van Leur was not in his lifetime to hold a university post in either the Netherlands or the Indies, let alone the United States.

The basic unit for economic and social activities in rural Japan is the buraku, a cluster of houses, surrounding rice fields, and, very often, a small acreage of forest land. Although the buraku has had no legal status, since the war, it remains as the focus of loyalty and in-group feeling beyond the level of the household. It is within the buraku that the Japanese farmers cooperate with each other to meet and to solve their immediate problem. The lowest level of formal government in the farming countryside is the mura or son (village). It is at this point of contact that the Japanese farmer as a buraku inhabitant meets government in the actual administration of law. The Japanese farmer regards village administration in two ways. On the one hand, it provides him with formal machinery for the solution of the immediate and personal problems he faces in his community.