«Ideology» means here a collective project, immanent to society, «religion», a collective committment towards an absolute, a transcendent source of meaning and value. To day the ideological belief that we could, by destroying present social structures and the use of new technics, enjory happiness, brotherhood and justice at once becomes a substitute for the absolute of religion.Absolutized ideologies destroy the conditions of meaning in life by dissimulating «the perfect imperfection» of human condition. Ideological eschatology expects «an end of history» located in future time, to be reached under the scientific guidance of political ingenieurs. For religious eschatology, the end of history is transcendent, «beyond time», in eternity. Christians and marxists in search for understanding and common action are usually confusing the future with eternity, immanence with transcendence.Even in a fight to death, transcendence allows a beyond, a dimension of possible brotherhood or communion. After its destruction by absolutisation of an immanent project, there only remains total war and technical power.

Sex has become to-day a sort of secular religion, i.e. a mass-belief in a new world entirely redeemed from its evils by revolution. Hope in revolution presupposes the ideas of man's original innocence and of society'sresponsibility for evil (as theorised by Rousseau and Nietzsche, Saint-Simon and Marx). As no political or economical revolution can entirely liberate man from his aggressiveness (Freud), the sexual revolution isproposed (by Wilhelm Reich and his followers) as the basic step towards the new world. But a totally free sexuality, breaking the dialectics between Eros and Thanatos, gives way to the deathinstinct (Freud) and therefore to a world of struggle for domination, not of liberty.

Religion, that globalising influence par excellence, constitutes the most powerful known factor of political, economic, social, and national integration. However, religion can also at times be a factor of disintegration ornon-integration, because of its historic vision. The lesions of millenarianisms prefigure the hopes, problems, failures and the illusions of society. Time has, in itself, an ideological dimension that varies according to the perception that one has of it: positive or negative, turned toward the past of the future, inevitably neutral or progressive.

The restructuration of municipalities which has been decided by the Belgian government, is not only a purely technical operatzon but rather, and in the first place, a social problem. The shape and duty-profile of a local authority should not, indeed, be attuned only to fast changing expectations as far as services are concerned, but to consultation and participation as well.Public administration research cannot keep aloof from this debate, but is considerably hampered by the institutional confusion and the insufficient explicitation of the aims of the present reform. A starting-pointcan, however, be found in the mergers of municipalities that were realized in 1964 and in 1970/1971. In 67 of these municipalities an inquiry was held concerning the consequences of the merger, and moreover, in twotest-cases (Oudenaarde and Brugge) this inquiry grew to a full-scale systematic policy analysis. This research shows that, as a rule, the former municipalities are reasonably represented in the new entity's council, but it also reveals that few efforts are made to give this representation a broader impact along formal or informal participation-channels. Integration of employees has not caused insurmountable problems. However, in large sized municipalities, resulting from mergers, one could notice a drastic increase in municipal personnel, not only with regard to new duties and objectives but to traditional administrative and police duties as well. Such a phenomenon points to the far-reaching changes which a substantial scale-increase provokes in a municipality's structure and policy profile. A large municipality resulting from mergers is no langer a simple sum of component parts, but a completely new entity, wishing to catch up as fast as possible with comparable municipalities that passed through a progressive growth process. Therefore, scale-increase is not only a means of economizing or an intra-administrative matter, but rather a way of creating chances for further development or wealth and well-being.

Political science in the West has long dealt quasi-exclusively with the experiences of the stable two-party systems of the Anglo-American type and the so-called continental European polities (France, Italy, Germany). The smaller European democracies have been neglected. Belgium too was terra incognita to most political scientists. In the late sixties the tide has turned. A vast literature on the political processes of countries such as Belgium has come into being. This article deals with studies on Belgian politics which have been published in the United States and in Britain between 1965 and 1975. Two themes in particular were selected: «verzuiling» and « he politics of accomodation». The main conclusion is that the studies under review have added a considerable amount of insights, findings and hypotheses to our knowledge of political processes in Belgium. We might impute this positive balance to three characteristics which mark most of these studies: a strong tendency towards comparative analysis, the use of fruitful theoretical concepts, and the use of sophisticated techniques for handling empirical data.