Collected here in convenient article form is a generous sample of recent and ongoing research projects by several young scholars on student politics in developing nations. Of the eleven studies, four deal with Latin American countries—Brazil, Chile, Cuba, and Venezuela. And of these, Robert Myhr’s pioneer survey of Brazilian students and William Hamilton’s well-constructed analysis of the Venezuelan student movement are especially well done. At the end is a judicious summing up by Donald Emmerson, whose nicely drawn conclusions are bolstered by rich notes on the available literature.

Emmerson does not claim more for his collaborators than they in fact deliver. The authors do not break new theoretical ground; they do properly stress the importance of institutions and of national contexts in determining student political behavior. Thus this useful volume dovetails with Seymour Martin Lipset’s more ambitious, but no more successful collection entitled Student Politics (New York, 1967). If we are no closer to a theory of student politics, we are now more fully aware of its complexity and its many contexts. In Emmerson’s words, “the quality of a nation’s modernizing experience . . . is a critical factor in student politics.”

Students in society comprise the author’s perspective. They prefer to relate student politics to something—to definite conditions in the schools and job markets, to the status of students as intellectuals, to the setting of local and national events. Explanations based on youth cultures or generational conflict do not impress these scholars, all of whom are in their late twenties and early thirties. In the developing countries at least, they see the students as deeply involved in vocational and practical struggles. However courageous, the activist minority rarely exerts a direct influence on national policy, and in the toppling of governments, not students but army officers play the central roles. True, students can and do act, but in conditions and circumstances which these authors are careful to define.