James K. Feibleman. The Reach of Politics : A New Look at Government. Pp. xi, 335. New York: Horizon Press, 1969. $10.00

Abstract

One of the major assets of Professor Duchacek's scholarly analysis is the careful attention he devotes to psychological and emotional issues that regularly complicate and often resist processes of &dquo;social engineering,&dquo; and go far beyond the mere accumulation of behavioral and quantitative data. In his &dquo;Ten Yardsticks of Federalism&dquo; he offers, for example, a lively discussion of critical disagreements between Western Europeans and Americans on contemporary political issues. Western Europeans, he suggests, often criticize Americans for their impatience with problems that resist immediate and needed solutions.Quoting Henry A. Kissinger, he further notes that &dquo;Americans live in an environment uniquely suited to an engineering approach to policy making; as a result, our society has been characterized by a conviction that any problem will yield if subjected to a sufficient dose of expertise.&dquo;In contrast he then cites a French sociologist, Michel Crozier, who, when addressing an American audience, warned: &dquo;Beware of the temptation-difficult to resistof the arrogance of rationality.&dquo; These emotional disagreements and points of conflict often play a more significant role in the shaping of world political trends than all the legalistic &dquo;yardsticks&dquo; of Federalism or territorialism that are discussed in such length in other chapters.The only possible criticism that could be leveled at this volume is that it attempts to cover too much. Its scope is so broad and some of the geopolitical complexities are so involved, particularly chapters 9 and 10, that it is difficult to visualize this work as a textbook even for our most advanced courses in comparative politics and government. On the other hand, its impressive documentation and enormous survey of the available literature for the past twenty years assure Comparative Federalism a safe place among the most distinguished recent works in modern political science.