Politics in a New Key

THE PROPHETS OF DEPOLITIZATION ARE CONFOUNDED. IN THE last year or so, politics have come back with a vengeance. Indeed, what is characteristic in this new political activity is that, anticapitalistic though it may be, its immediate motives did not spring from urgent economic problems. In France, for instance, trouble erupted out of a blue economic sky. For those who, convinced that the political conflict is perennial and ubiquitous, regarded the theories of depolitization with due scepticism, this was a ‘new wave’ of political conflict though with a noticeable change in techniques and mentalities. The change was so considerable and so abrupt, the methods so different, that one could not but wonder if they did not herald also the coming of another code of political behaviour. Once more the need to study the modernization of politics, by which is meant broadly the synchronization of the political process with the evolved economic and social processes, seemed even greater.