Playing with Fire: The 4th Duke of Hamilton's Jacobite Politics and the Union

James Hamilton, duke of Hamilton and the Scots jacobites are generally linked in analyses of the final years of the Scots polity. Indeed, Hamilton is often presented as the leader of the jacobite party in the Scottish parliament. Yet both contemporaries and historians have been unsure what to make of his on-again, off-again, conduct with respect to the exiled Stuarts and France. This has fuelled an ongoing debate about Hamilton's erratic and highly enigmatic behaviour during the winter of 1706–7, when the Union was passing the Scottish parliament. Was he genuinely opposing the Union? Was he duped by the court? Or was he, ‘bought and sold for English gold ’? This essay takes a fresh look at the duke and his part in the Union crisis in the light of new and previously underused jacobite sources with a view to better understanding Hamilton's aims, objectives, and influence with this crucial group. Only the jacobites and the Cameronians were potentially willing to take their opposition to the Union to God's Acre. But neither party immediately flew to arms in response to passage of a union they both believed was a betrayal of everything they held dear, and Hamilton was a major factor in their failure to do so. This essay thus takes a close look at the duke's part in preventing a major national uprising against the Union in the winter of 1706–7 and advances a new interpretation of his conduct and significance throughout the Union crisis.     

Social,economic and political dilemmas of reform in Yugoslavia

All of the communist party‐ruled states of Eastern Europe, from the elder brother of the ‘socialist family’, the Soviet Union, to non‐aligned, sui generis Yugoslavia, are in some degree of economic crisis. Gone are the once loudly trumpeted assurances that the socialist ‘economic formation’ by its very nature — its centrally planned and directed economy, its leadership by a communist party armed with the ‘scientific’ social and economic theory of Marxism‐Leninism and its foundation on the principles of proletarian social justice — excluded the possibility of economic ailments such as sluggish growth rates, inflation, social inequality and unemployment. It is now admitted that precisely these problems currently threaten virtually all communist systems. The principal issue for the political elites in these countries (with the perhaps temporary exception of relatively prosperous East Germany and Czechoslovakia and perennially contrary Romania) is not whether radical reform is necessary, but how to implement the requisite economic, social and quasi‐political reforms without undermining the foundations of ‘socialism’ and of the communist party's domination that they identify with it Yugoslavia is a valuable test case of the general project of reform in communist systems, since it consciously undertook to dismantle the of Stalinist system it had been establishing under Soviet tutelage at the end of World War II in response to Stalin's ostracism of Tito in June 1948. From its inception the Yugoslav reform process was informed by a commitment to return to the sources of Marxian social and economic theory in order to build an authentic socialist system untrammeled by the structures and immoral practices of Stalinist ‘etatism’. Worker self‐management, ‘market socialism’, the decentralisation of political and economic decision‐making, periodic rotation in office, and a number of other formally democratic, participatory socio‐political processes, most of which Gorbachev and his supporters have been discussing under the rubric of perestroika, glasnost’ and demokratizatsiia, have all been tried in one form or another in Yugoslavia during the past four decades.     

FLPMA: A Decade of Management Under the ELM Organic Act

This article assesses the impact on public land management policy in the west following a decade's experience under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA). The assessment first describes the political and institutional forces that converged to produce the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) Organic act and then identifies three major policy innovations found in the Act. In conclusion, the article assesses the impact of these policy innovations of FLPMA on management of the public lands.     

Book reviews

Derek McDougall, Harold D. Lasswell and the Study of International Relations. University Press of America, Lanham, USA, 1984, pp.370. $16.50.

John W. Burton, Global Conflict: The Domestic Sources of International Crisis. Wheatsheaf Books, UK, 1984, pp.194. $54.00.

K.J. Holsti, The Dividing Discipline: Hegemony and Diversity in International Theory. Allen and Unwin, Boston and Sydney, 1985. pp.165. $39.95.

Hedley Bull (ed.), Intervention in World Politics. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984, pp. viii + 198. $31.00.

Hedley Bull, Justice in International Relations. 1983–84 Hagey Lectures, University of Waterloo, 1984, pp. iii + 36. No price given. (Available from University Publications Distribution Service, Dana Porter Arts Library, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario N2L3G1, Canada.)

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso Editions and NLB, London, 1983, pp. 160. £15.00.

Chalmers Johnson, Revolutionary Change. Second edition. Longman, London, 1983, pp.xii + 217. $13.85.

Peter Calvert, Politics, Power and Revolution. An Introduction to Comparative Politics. Wheatsheaf Books, Brighton, 1983, pp.208. £5.95.

John Walton, Reluctant Rebels. Comparative Studies of Revolution and Underdevelopment. Columbia University Press, New York, 1984, pp.xii + 230 $US36.00 (cloth), $US10.00 (paper).

E. A. Tiryakian and R. Rogowski (eds), New Nationalisms of the Developed West. Toward Explanation. Allen and Unwin, Boston, 1985, pp.xii + 394. $69.00.

Peter H. Merkl and Ninian Smart (eds), Religion and Politics in the Modern World. New York University Press, New York, 1985, pp.276. No price given.

Richard Lowenthal, Social Change and Cultural Crisis. Columbia University Press, New York, 1984, pp.viii + 252. $US29.50.

Dietrich Fischer, Preventing War in the Nuclear Age. Rowman and Allanheld, Totowa, N.J./Croom Helm, London, 1984, pp. x + 236. $27.95.

F. Dyson, Weapons and Hope Harper and Row, New York, 1984, pp.340. $24.95.

John Langmore and David Peetz (eds), Wealth, Poverty and Survival. Australia in the World. George Allen and Unwin, Sydney, in association with the Australian Labor Party, 1983, pp. 225.