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The argument of this paper is that the emergence of military dictatorships, such as the Brazilian regime of 1964, is not caused by an economic crisis of dependent capitalist development. Rather, it results from a polarization and radicalization of the democratic regime by which it is preceded. Democracies handed down from above, like that in Brazil and other South American democracies, lend themselves to polarization and radicalization. They therefore favor the emergence of modern forms of autocracy.

In spite of conditions of socio-economic and occupational traits similar to those of young French people belonging to the lower strata, second generation young North Africans display specific political attitudes and behavior. At the same age level and level of instruction, they show more political interest and commitment than their French-stock counterparts and are massively oriented to the left. While attachment to the Muslim religion persists, it is defined above all as a cultural and family heritage and appears weakly linked to politics. The role of French-North African girls is singular : their left-wing radicalization and political activism are even more manifest than those of boys, and they display less attachment to their cultural and family background.

A reflection on the meaning of limited government illuminates both its theoretical limits or boundaries and its practical limitations. The full rationality of the Lockean argument for narrowing the scope of politics to bodily self-interest may be questioned from two apparently opposite standpoints: because of its aggressive materialism or because it seems to rest upon a distinctly Christian dichotomy between spiritual and secular concerns. This paradox is further represented in the religious liberalism of the American Revolution, and a consideration of Calvin's theology suggests that this spiritual secularism is not simply an eighteenth-century confusion, but may derive from a radicalization of the Christian idea of transcendence. Thus both religious and secular sources of the ideal of limited government rest on unlimited claims for the unity of private self-preservation and universal Truth. This faith does not, however, exhaust the meaning of the Founding.

This article concerns the military assistance relationship between the United States and Ethiopia, especially during the early years of the Ethiopian revolution, from 1974 to 1977. The interaction between the outbreak of the uprising and American military assistance and the impact of one upon the other are our main concerns. Besides the objective needs of the revolution to reorient Ethiopia's domestic and external politics, other important forces contributed to the abrogation of the U.S.-Ethiopia Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement that had tied the two countries together for nearly three decades. Both the process and substance of the assistance relationship are analyzed-from the moment the Ethiopian armed forces intervened in the unfolding revolution to the time Menghistu Haile Mariam captured the political leadership. Such forces as the radicalization of Ethiopia's domestic politics, the American shift of its assistance policy from grant aid to foreign military cash and credit sales, the Soviet decision to embrace Menghistu, and American perceptions and reactions to the revolution were all important contributary factors to the MDAA's demise. In the face of new political realities in Ethiopia, the assumptions upon which the U.S.-Ethiopia relationship was built could no longer hold.