This volume brings together essays and reviews written
over a period of some fifteen years and covering a wide range
of topics and books. The title is not an attempt to define the
subject matter but rather to suggest the angle of vision from
which the various pieces were written. Everyone knows that
the present will some day be history. I believe that the most
important task of the social scientist is to try to com-
prehend it as history now, while it is still the present and
while we still have the power to influence its shape and out-
come. I hope that collecting these essays and reviews in a
single volume will make a contribution to that end.

Three of these papers are here published for the first
time: "Science, Marxism, and Democracy," "A Crucial Dif-
ference Between Capitalism and Socialism, and Peace and
Prosperity. For the rest, place and date of earlier publication
are given in introductory notes which in some cases add com-
ments that have seemed necessary or helpful on the occasion
of republication. I have edited the entire volume as though it
were an original manuscript, cutting unnecessary verbiage,
improving the formulation here and there, inserting an oc-
casional cross reference, and imposing consistency in matters
of punctuation, capitalization, and the like. But I have not
added or eliminated or changed anything of any substance.

The quotation which I have chosen as an epigraph is taken
from Georg Lukacs, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein
( Berlin, 1923, page 173).

I want to thank John Rackliffe for encouragement and
assistance at all stages in the planning and production of the
book.

P. M. S.

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