Dear Editor

...That is why they are all-important...

...Agreed that the history of the Western world in the 20th century is criminal folly —is man to learn nothing from it...

...In any case, even where imprisonment was involved, the incidence of indigenous political violence in Black Africa has been comparatively low—lower, e.g., than in France, Italy...

...Now we turn to the very interesting letter of Professor Spiro...

...Fortunately, "the ordinary American," said to be "irked most by the staleness of it all," has too much common sense to accept the uncomparative sensationalism of the distorting laundry list of African events, at the end of which the Ritners ask: "This is a "new constitutional form...

...Perhaps these days in the Groves of Academe disagreement and murder amount practically to the same thing...

...Presidents X. Y. and ? can rely on the encouragement, or at least the silence, of the most sophisticated American students of their affairs so long as they keep building highways and dams, or keep talking about building them...

...The fact that many African politicians have, presumably gives them a different view of the matter...

...Such a critique might be useful, but a properly sympathetic and full-bodied job could not be held to the bounds of a New Leader article...

...Wallerstein's political dynamics are upside down...

...In our piece we do not dispute the need of "strong government," as Wallerstein says we do, but rather the need of one-man, one-party, totalitarian government...

...The one assessment demands next to no moral evaluation...

...here we are simply questioning Spiro's idea that Africans are somehow above such things...

...But in Africa they do not...

...He, moreover, thinks clearly and does not distort his adversaries' statements, so that we were able to have a fruitful argument...

...In other words, self-government can mean anything from Caesar to Brook Farm...

...Government Organization Manual, issued by the Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Service...

...The Ritners are distorting my interpretation beyond recognition by attributing to me espousal of coercion into "'nationhood' for their own good...

...To begin with, neither Wallerstein nor Spiro chose to note something we took pains to emphasize: that our piece did not undertake a critique of African politics per se...

...That the charge of Western parochialism is not a red herring seems backed up by the Ritners' article and Mr...

...That the history of the West over the past millennium has given us little to crow about ourselves has nothing to do with it...

...The inter-African system that is being created comes closer than the inter-American system...

...What a ridiculous notion it is that a totalitarian government which goes to any length to jail its political opponents will "create loyalty to the state...

...In my judgment, the United States comes much closer than the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom somewhat closer than the United States...

...There is a difference, after all, between lefferson Davis, who tried to secede from the state President Lincoln headed, and McClellan, who opposed Lincoln in the 1864 election...

...There's a plot upcountry, says President X, and we shot the plotters, who by coincidence turned out to be the bosses of the minority party...

...Through a neat trick of guilt by association, the Ritners suggest that I am a "totalitarian liberal," and that Immanuel Wallerstein, who replies to the Ritner's in the same issue, is an admirer of Dr...

...What of Spiro's point that up to now there has been a promising lack of violence and destructive nationalism in African politics...

...I agree that "an independent judiciary, and relatively inviolable constitutional guarantees" are needed, and I stressed, in this connection, the advantage of Ghana and Nigeria, with about 200 and 800 lawyers, respectively, at the time of independence...

...There was the Mau Mau...

...Well, that is not really what we tried to do...

...Hitler and victims of the Gestapo...

...apparently, disagreement is equivalent to murder...

...When are these political academics going to study the history of what really happened at least as carefully as they do the interpretive verbiage of Durkheim...

...It is Spiro, not we, who coined the odious pejorations "Anglophile fallacy," "already archaic constitutional categories," etc.: he must himself defend them or qualify them...

...POINT OF INFORMATION James Donaghue's article, "The Academy Lobby" (NL, July 8), states that the proposed National Foreign Affairs Academy "would be open to all government employes involved in foreign affairs," and adds that "In today's Washington that covers just about everything but the Fish and Wildlife Service...

...May I point out that the Department of State has a "Special Assistant to the Under Secretary for Fisheries and Wildlife...

...In both books, the basic value is individual responsibility, to whose realization the political system contributes by combining stability with flexibility, efficiency with acceptability...

...One of their confusions is between new "constitutional forms...

...We'll take vanilla...

...is suggested by, inter alia, addition of the suffix "P.G.," for Prison Graduate, to such names as Nkrumah or Banda...

...The reference is on page 63 of the 1962-63 U.S...

...Ritner's book, both of which often read like parodies of parochialism...

...It is most understandable, indeed just, that Africans should detest South Africa...

...How close any system comes to achieving a dynamic equilibrium among these basic goals can be ascertained by comparison...

...Senator Goldwater has never had to sit in jail...

...In the point about Tshombe, the Ashanti...

...We don't need courts and juries, says President Y. The American academic apologist writes it all down in his book like a stenographer, and inevitably, perhaps unconsciously, his "objective explanations" come to read precisely like justifications...

...If this conclusion made any sense at all, the "ordinary African" might answer that he prefers chocolate...

...A friend of ours, a well-known scholar and writer, happens to agree more with Wallerstein and Spiro than with us...

...In other words, it was not Nkrumah and Nyerere we proposed to scrutinize, but Wallerstein...

...The errors and confusions in Wallerstein's response vindicate our impulse to write the piece...

...And 3), in no new African state is the population culturally homogeneous, so that cultural nationalism (the Ritners write of "shades of the Teutonic comitia") is improbable...

...In another place Wallerstein permits himself to wonder whether the Ritners have ever braved the personal perils waiting to ambush the Africanist professor on duty in the field...

...More relevant to our article, there is the developing apparatus of internal violence in so many of the new African states—the secret State Security courts, the executions of excabinet ministers and political opponents on nebulous "sedition" charges...

...The most destructive phase in political development may, therefore, be skipped in the course of setting up communities of wider scope...

...This is all backwards...

...This last aspect led me explicitly to deny parallels between nation-building in the West and political development in Africa today...

...Though author of a book on African politics, I am no "Africanist...

...But let's follow the train of thought...

...How do you rate a self-government which strives to exterminate the selfgovernments of all the societies around it...

...You cannot know what is meant by it until you are given the concrete specifics of the society behind it...

...But liberals know what they mean by good government (or they ought to...

...Wallerstein cites a remark dropped in the 1830s about the Washington cult...

...each reader himself must go to Spiro's articles and books to decide whether we did him an injustice in citing them...

...etc., Wallerstein confounds "secession" with "opposition...

...There are the secessionist movements referred to by Wallerstein...

...That arrests, "especially in cases of political detention prior to independence," appear in different lights to the jailer "and his detainees and, say...

...Furthermore, as everyone knows, when Washington was alive the nascent Washington cult inspired the noisiest kind of public misgiving and disgust—even while the President himself remained the hero of an overwhelming majority of Americans...

...Were I as irresponsible, I could suggest that they favor Salazar's repression in Angola jnd Verwoerd's apartheid in South Africa...

...If these are grammar-school cliches, we wish there were more grammar-schools...

...No one called me a "Germanist," "Europeanist" or "Americanist" because of my books on German...

...But in the 1830s Washington was dead...

...the dawn coups...

...There are the verbal attacks and ferocious threats aimed at colonialist Portugal and the Republic of South Africa...

...which are undoubtedly being created by the Africans, and particular policies with the Ritners, and others, do not like...

...called those Western constitutional categories "already archaic" which are derived from the historic sovereign nation-state now in the process of transformation...

...2) They do not consider territorial frontiers sufficiently important to generate wars or to constitute insurmountable barriers to the creation of greater unions...

...When Nkrumah goes on and on with his "emergency measures of a totalitarian kind" do we not know where sooner or later it will lead...

...The irony is that in both Alabama and Ashantiland men are plenty intelligent and civilized enough to act legally and decently if they have the will to do so, if they are given a fair chance to do so...

...These are important issues, and I discussed them in Politics in Africa, out of whose context the Ritners lifted some of their citations...

...Cannot these things also be "placed in context...

...The one act can be classed as treason, the other not...

...Napoleon, or the British rule in India either—or, for that matter, the Palmer raids...

...Speaking of South Africa, is it likely that Africans will be able to take over that country without resorting to the extremes of violence...

...Must not all this be accounted violence...

...First we want to brush aside the familiar cry about our quoting him out of context...

...And this loyalty then can and will be used or abused by politicians, depending on their wisdom and their ends...

...Now what if President ? orders the members of his Youth Army to report on disloyalty among parents, or directs every East Indian in the country to wear a distinctive badge...

...The apologist interprets everything the Great Man does as some form of necessity...

...Another confusion arises from their use of the term "Africaniste...

...Political principles are passé, parochial...

...Ghana comes closer than either the Gold Coast or South Africa...

...As they apply to Southern Africa, they are debated by Joseph J. Spengler of Duke University, myself and others in a book soon to be published under the editorship of Leonard Thompson by the University of California Press...

...There are assassinations of public men like Olympio...

...But anyhow we cannot see that Africa is very free of violence...

...Wallerstein permits himself to characterize the United States under Thomas lefferson as a "one-party system," a description which would have startled any number of sturdy contemporaries, John Adams and Charles Pinckney among them...

...It is plural structures which create complexity, interdependence and, one must add, political stability and safety in a society...

...We would not expect American academics to apologize for Stalin...

...What is, is necessary— and if you knew as much about my subject as I do you would understand why"—this is the academic principle...

...Anyone who compares colonial with post-independence politics in Black Africa, or contemporary African politics with parallels elsewhere in the world, including other "developing areas," notices certain differences...

...For him...

...But must we accept it...

...The Ritners' attack is so confused and confusing that it is unlikely to generate fruitful debate...

...To start with, you wonder whether Ghana made the choice to free herself peacefully, or did Britain make the choice to get out of Ghana before Ghana had the opportunity, or suffered the necessity, of developing a revolutionary army...

...My special field is comparative politics...

...And because, according to the current intellectual fashion, economic development requires bully governments...

...the politicization of the army, etc...

...Is there a substitute for law and decency, in Alabama or Ashantiland...

...Wallerstein cannot accept the propriety of this...

...European and American politics...

...Well, at least one of the Ritners is willing any day to match I-got-out-of-townjust-ahead-of-the-poisoned-darts stories with the professor, screened in Africa or anywhere, but perhaps this is neither the time nor the place for the contest...

...Judged by this value, good government is no substitute for self-government...

...An African may defend every such measure as necessary...

...What is the real issue here...

...Our article dealt exclusively with individuals or groups who might differ with their government about this or that policy, and who might like to form an opposition political party the more effectively to express this dissent...

...Sukarno, Nkrumah, Touré must be left virtually unchallenged in their definition of their states, their needs, the needs and rights of their fellow-citizens...

...He can evaluate these differences as he pleases, on the basis of whatever values he believes in...

...Spiro, and Company—American academics who empty the barrel of "interprétatives" and "explanations" i ? justifying the increasingly brutal strong-arm governments of the current generation of African leaders...

...Compare, e.g., past and present troubles among the constitutional democracies of Western Europe...

...By assuming that political principles fitted for Africa are categorically different from everybody else's political principles, men like our friend put themselves in a position where they must uncritically swallow everything the totalitarian African politician says about his own predicament...

...Obviously the deification of a dead lion implies a very different practical state of affairs from the deification of a living, power-hungry lion...

...Nkrumah is alive...

...Here we can only jot down the points which bother us most, and which confirm us in our judgment that there is a powerful and unsuitable apologetic element in Spiro's writings...

...Loyalty, of course, comes first...

...How do you rate a "self-government" which leaves no room for individual responsibility anywhere, save that exercised by Sukarno or Louis xtv...

...Next, look at the notion that "plural structures" will only arise in a "society sufficiently complex and interdependent that the governmental structure cannot afford, in terms of its own objective, to crush these other institutions...

...If this a condensed criterion, how do you apply it...

...Canada the Middle East, India, or Indonesia...

...Amherst, Mass...

...Washington, D. C. New York City Norman J. Powell AFRICANISM I take it that Susan and Peter Ritner, with their article, "Africanism's Constitutional Malarkey" (NL, June 10), tried to stir up debate of certain issues involving the liberalism, honesty and reliability of governments and politicians in the new African states...

...A really adequate gloss on the remainder of Spiro's letter would exhaust another article, perhaps a book...

...Goebbels...

...But does it seem reasonable for an American academic to defend them...

...Herbert J. Spiro The Ritners Reply: As this is the first opportunity we have had to discuss Immanuel Wallerstein's article replying to our article, we thought it sensible to merge our comments on this with those we have on Herbert Spiro's letter...

...I noted three remarkable and hopeful aspects that distinguish the new African polities: 1) They did not achieve independence through the use of organized force and are not now pursuing their most valued goals by means of violence...

...General Services Administration...

...Professor Spengler is regarded as a conservative economist, but compared to him the Ritners seem positively reactionary...

...Upon reading our article he sent us a note saying that it was "absurd" to apply the "principles of J. S. Mill" to Africa...

...Take this troubling sentence: "Judged by this value [individual responsibility!, good government is no substitute for self-government...

...I make no such suggestion because I assume, from their confused statement, that the Ritners adhere to the same fundamental values that served as my criteria in Politics in Africa, which, as noted in the preface and elsewhere, was an application of the approach worked out in my Government by Constitution...

...Some of these issues have occasionally been discussed in journals like Africa Report...

...Economic development" is the only course they have to pass...

...How do we know when to stop...

...As it has worked out in practice...

...the other demands nothing but moral evaluation: they are not at all the same kind of thing...