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Robert C. Tucker died on July 29, 2010, at the age of 92. He was an outstanding teacher and mentor at Indiana University from 1958 to 1961, and from 1962 to 1984 at Princeton University. He had a special gift for encouraging and assisting former graduate students, whom he viewed as colleagues and friends. His generosity and graciousness were much appreciated by the present writer and many others.

Administrative theory as developed in the West by social scientists is repressive by nature. Its utilization in Communist states as a set of techniques for organizing work has had a subversive effect on the Communist goal of creating a more humanized society. Administrative theory is not the value-free, apolitical set of neutral, scientific, objective instruments that its advocates & practitioners claim, but rather a product of a world-view based on the assumption that human beings are infinite consumers who achieve fulfillment through competition for scarce commodities. The Bolsheviks constructing the Soviet state failed to develop an effective cultural opposition to bureaucratic hierarchy, & V. I. Lenin mistakenly assumed that Taylorism could be harnessed for socialist development. Classical Marxism, Leninism, & Soviet dogma have focused on the abolition of private property, but have neglected the issue of personal possessions & consumerism, raised by Marx himself as part of the "fetishism of commodities." The basic problem for revolutionary movements is not how to seize power, but how to distribute or dissolve it. In People's China during the Cultural Revolution, an antibureaucratic drive led to the formation of "triple combinations" of workers, technicians & administrators who jointly controlled production decisions in order to "maximize collective initiative & responsibility in the maximization of social production" & not just increase productivity. In Cuba, the emphasis has been on attempting to prevent an extremely narrow DofL & to rely on moral incentives. Although these experiments in the newer socialist societies may be reversed, they have demonstrated that the notions of administrative social science that counterpose means to ends, rationality to revolution, ideology to functionality, production to politics, or modernization to revolutionization as incompatible are clearly false. A. Karmen.

Perhaps the most dramatic finding of recent research on the political socialization of children is that youngsters appear to be overwhelmingly favorably disposed toward political objects which cross their vision. Officers and institutions of government are regarded as benevolent, worthy, competent, serving and powerful. The implications of such findings are striking indeed. Childhood political dispositions may represent the roots of later patriotism; we may be observing the building of basic regime-level supportive values at a very young age.These findings are by no means new; in fact, they might be classified as part of the conventional wisdom of the discipline. Moreover, they are extremely well documented, and the study of childhood political socialization has advanced to consider far more than basic regime-level norms. Despite all this, however, there are still many empirical questions to be asked about such norms. Perhaps the recent assertion that the political scientist's model of socialization is "static and homogeneous" is particularly apropos here. Consider two closely related characteristics of the appropriate literature: 1) the "positive image" which children have about politics and political figures has been synthesized from data gathered largely in the United States and to some extent in urban, industrialized communities within the United States; and 2) empirical explanation of the favorable disposition which children manifest has not progressed very far. Though there may be hypotheses about how children get this way, there has been little systematic testing of the relationships between variables.