Of the possible ways in which economic growth of the underdeveloped areas of the world might be furthered, one that has received considerable recent attention is via the inflow of capital from the advanced nations to develop the supplies of raw materials which have not, as yet, been intensively utilized in many of these areas. This attention has grown out of an increasing awareness, particularly in the United States, that the industrialized nations are faced with rising raw-material costs in many important lines unless alternative cheap sources of supply are developed.
If the power of atomic retaliation keeps pace with that of the offense, atomic war may conceivably come only from communist economic and political penetration. The conviction has been growing that such penetration can be decisively defeated if we adopt the industrialization of the strategic countries in other continents as our new foreign policy. What we seem to need for a decisive victory in the economic rivalry is a rate of industrialization of India that exceeds that of communist China, a rate of economic integration in Europe that permits a productivity increase exceeding that of the Soviet Union.
Since 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by atomic bomb, mankind has been afraid of the destructive power of nuclear weapons in modern warfare, and there is now widespread fear that unrestricted warfare would result in the extinction of the human race. But several recent inquiries--outstanding among them the reports of the 1955 meetings of the British Association--have indicated that a complete destruction of man and his societies is extremely unlikely under present technological conditions.
Nothing substantial has changed in Russia, say our diplomatic journalists. Stalin has gone to his reward, and it has seemed good to his associated to smear his memory with blood and tar. But the new Russian rulers say they are for world communism, as ardently as Stalin ever was. They repudiate the cult of indispensable personalities, but as a group hold as tight a rein on the masses as Stalin ever held. Marxian ideology is an infallible for them.
The first German republic was not--as its opponents asserted--a foreign importation made possible by Germany’s military defeat, but had roots in older German history at least back to 1848. Therefore present-day German democracy is linked up with the Weimar Republic more closely than is usually admitted. I do not overlook the differences between the Bonn and Weimar Republics, nor would I hesitate to say that the indigenous strength of German democracy appears to me greater today than thirty years ago. But if this is correct it is at least partly explained by certain achievements of the Weimar Republic which Bonn inherited.
When men first began to transform the theological virtues into secular ones and to transfer the concept of salvation to the world of man's pilgrimage, they probably held to their faith with the same passionate seriousness as the Christians. Today it is often true that political faith may be lightly plighted and lightly renounced, but it is not always necessarily so.
Review of book by Inis L. Claude Jr. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1955. 248 pp.
Review of book by Ely Chinoy. New York: Doubleday. 1955. 139 pp.
Review of selected writings, edited, with introduction, by John B. Carroll; foreword by Stuart Chase. New York: Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and John Wiley. 1956. 278 pp.
Review of book by Helge Pross. Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt. 1955. 69 pp.