Synopsis In this book Democracies of the East 'A Study in Comparative Politics' observes that Communalism in the east is not a new experiment but an old and established tradition in political pluralism. In its consonance with the natural and instinctive bases of group formation, it resolves that unfortunate dualism between the state and the individual which had been the overgrowth of the mechanical state of the nineteenth century. In its ideal of the free choice of the individual in shaping the aims and policies of diverse autonomous groups local and functional to which he belongs, it rescues democracy from its identification with political democracy, which, indeed, is responsible for most of its failures in the west. It carries the state, as it were, on the wings of the Individual's desires and feelings to those humanistic ideals which the world associates with the east, and which will more and more govern the politics of the future.