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The virtually simultaneous appearance of new editions of Hannah A Arendt'sThe Origins of Totalitarianismand Carl Friedrich's and Zbigniew Brzezinski'sTotalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracyaffords an opportunity to reopen the question of the utility of the classical theory of totalitarianism in systematic comparative political analysis. The original editions of these two volumes went far toward shaping lay and academic understandings of totalitarianism in the 1950's; in addition, most subsequent general scholarship on totalitarianism has been written implicitly or explicitly in the light of—if not in reaction to—these two earlier works.

With The growing academic and governmental interest in quantitative research on nations, it is becoming increasingly important to separate substantive findings from the technical arcana in which they are embedded. In recognition of this need, this report extracts and consolidates the major results of the Dimensionality of Nations (DON) project.The Don project (6) has been in existence since 1962 and is now in its second phase. Phase I of DON defined the major dimensions of variation among all nations for the mid-1950's and the grouping of nations on these dimensions. During this phase much of the methodological underbrush surrounding the use on cross-national data of its major mathematical model—factor analysis—was cleared away, and some measure of control was developed over problems of error and noncomparability in the data.

A useful consequence of America's deepening involvement in Asian affairs is the widespread questioning of the premises that arc assumed to underlie United States policy, but debate stressing the weaknesses of American strategy in Vietnam without placing present dilemmas in a broader perspective is deficient. Similarly, discussion that ignores the distinctive features of the American historical experience, especially its influence on the processes of policy-making, courts irrelevance. Failure to look beyond the confines of the Vietnam predicament may prove as detrimental to observers as to officialdom, yet both find the process of distinguishing the relative importance of internal and external constraints increasingly arduous. In an era of contagious domestic unrest in industrialized countries and ambiguous conflicts in less developed geographical areas, both may be tempted to generalize too broadly from a dominant though still restricted series of events. Such, such are the joys of appraising American foreign policy during the Vietnam anguish.

Throughout the 1950's, students of communism almost invariably emphasized the "totalitarian" characteristics of Communist states, a conceptual orientation that coincided with and reinforced the foreign policy of the cold war. T h e doctrines of containment and massive retaliation could be justified most easily if the targeted enemy was considered the embodiment of the unremitting evil suggested by the totalitarian label.

There is broad agreement among Western scholars that under the Communists the criminal process in China1 is arbitrary, highly politicized, and responsive to class and status differences among its targets. It is frequently pointed out, quite accurately, that China has no criminal codes and no public-reporter system of judicial decisions and that important substantive laws often are unpublished or, if published, very vague. Theorists of totalitarianism even doubt the existence of legality within such systems.

Much of the most interesting work in political science in the last decade or so has been concerned with processes of modernization, institution-formation, and sociopolitical change at large. In fact, modernization and political development have been, along with system analysis, the most important themes of the new political science. In this article we are addressing ourselves to this developmental revolution in political science. We propose to argue that the idea of analyzing and classifying nations on the basis of the stage of modernization reached has long-standing historical connections with a tradition that goes back to social Darwinism and beyond. But it must be emphasized from the outset that this argument is not intended as a criticism of the new political science.

Agap seems to exist between present theory of international regional integration and political reality. The theory explains, generalizes about, or predicts regional integration almost exclusively on the basis of processes and factors internal to the region under consideration. When theory considers phenomena outside the region, they usually appear as residual categories which are left insufficiently examined and about which we know little. Moreover, theory has remained relatively silent about the role of the superpowers.

The Vietnam teach-ins are passé, but severe questioning and criticism persist in both the popular and semipopular press and, significantly, in the imposing array of books issued by commercial publishers. Unlike the realist-idealist dichotomy of the late 1940's and early 1950's, which was confined to the academic community, the result of our present involvement in an Asian war is a debate of national proportions, not only about Vietnam but about the nature of America's role and responsibility in international life and about priorities in domestic and foreign policies. Inevitably, much of the literature is polemical, hammering on the major theme: the Johnson Administration has led American foreign policy astray; thus alternatives must be sought.

Developments in the Cuban revolution between mid-1959 and early 1960 demonstrate both the interaction between the international and domestic systems and the bargaining process involved in Cuban efforts to secure Soviet support. Until the dispatch of First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan to Havana in early February 1960, the Soviet Union had been hesitant about revolutionary Cuba. The radicalization of the revolution which preceded Mikoyan's visit, therefore, stemmed not only from Fidel Castro's perception of opposition to his regime and from his need to ensure revolutionary momentum, but also from his efforts to increase Cuba's bargaining leverage with Moscow. In turn, the Cuban Communists served as a key linkage with Moscow and, most important, as an aggressive negotiating agent for Castro. In formulating their response to revolutionary Cuba, the Soviets were thus forced to contend with covert and overt pressures from Castro and his Communist allies.

The concept of state is not much in vogue in the social sciences right now. Yet it retains a skeletal, ghostly existence largely because, for all the changes in emphasis and interest of research, the thing exists and no amount of conceptual restructuring can dissolve it. The present article develops a conceptual approach in which no violence is done to historical or empirical fact, but which offers a means of integrating the concept of state into the current primacy of social science concerns and analytical methods. It is hoped that this approach not only will provide a convenient conceptualization, but will contribute to attacking a substantive problem of some consequence. Since the relevant area is potentially huge, no more than a brushstroke configuration can be attempted.