FIVE IDEAS THAT CHANGE THE WORLD

The source of this new book by a world economist who has a facility in putting over real concepts and her suggested solutions of the world problems is ant to the understanding of what she has achieved here. There are the Aggrey- Guggisberg lectures, delivered for the University College of Ghana. Although she has at no point written down to the somewhat limited audience of a young, ambitious nation, where democracy is being tried in new soil in Africa, now and again she points up her theses by specific references to the application to Ghana....Her ""five ideas"" refer, presumably, to the five divisions of her material:-nationalism, industrialism, colonialism, communism and internationalism. She has packed an immense amount into a slim book, as she approaches the indispensable factors for world peace. She surveys- under her headings- the historical import, the current developments, the challenge of tomorrow. She is thoroughly realistic in accepting the challenge of Communist expansion, the pitfalls into which the Western nations are prone to fall, the tendency to think that one solution applies equally to Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. She sees Ghana's achievement of freedom as the first act in the drama of African independence, and charts the brief thirteen years in which Western colonialism has virtually disappeared. It would be impossible in a paragraph to summarize her approach, her findings, but she states unequivocally that war is a private violence on the human race, and that the progress made in cities and countries for their own maintenance of a peaceful society must be expanded and reinterpreted to apply to the uncommitted nations in whose hands the future lies. Communism must need abandon their picture of world order; the Western Powers need to acquire a picture. They must repeat on an international level the acts of justice, vision and generosity they apply at home, if freedom is to survive.