None of the classic definitions of the liberty and responsibility of the press is more eloquently simple than the Declaration of Rights of 1789: “The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights of man. Every citizen may therefore speak, write and publish freely, except to answer for abuses of that liberty in conditions duly determined by law.” Despite many vicissitudes France has remained one of the handful of countries where these phrases are more than empty rhetoric. Even there though, they were unable to prevent freedom of information from becoming one of the earliest casualties of the Algerian war.

When Averell Harriman became Governor of New York on January 1, 1955, the Democrats assumed power in Albany for the first time in twelve years. With Harriman came his newly appointed Secretary of State, Carmine G. De Sapio, leader of Tammany Hall, Democratic National Committeeman, and widely described as the architect of the Democratic resurgence. Harriman, however, had only barely won the election, and such unity as the party had achieved during the campaign was evanescent at best. The Democratic Party was very much alive, but its energies were woefully centripetal. The cleavages ranged from the most primitive thrusts of tribal warfare between Italians and Irish to the most elegant ideological concerns of middle- and upper-class liberal Protestants and Jews. The election had deepened some conflicts, raised others, and settled none. The ancient Irish hegemony was giving way before pressure from Italians within the regular party organization and reform liberals as yet outside it. The very ticket on which Harriman ran was symptomatic of the times—for the first time in decades it had no Irish Catholic running for a major executive office and, at the same time, a magic name in New York politics—Roosevelt—had been relegated to a subordinate place on the list after a bitter, clamorous effort by young liberals (who later were to be the backbone of a major reform assault on Tammany) to win the gubernatorial nomination for the son of the former President.

In addition to the legal and political implications of the case, the United States Supreme Court's decision in Baker v. Carr brought sharply into public focus the technical problem of how to measure legislative malapportionment. The case itself exemplifies these various dimensions of the issue, for the majority opinion of Mr. Justice Clark and the dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice Harlan disagree not only regarding the law and the public policy of judicial intervention; they are also in manifest disagreement concerning “the facts” of malapportionment in Tennessee as of the time of the decision in March 1962. Our survey of the scholarly literature on the subject of apportionment, during the past decade, convinces us that the contributions of political scientists (and other commentators on the question) have made less than satisfactory progress thus far in the direction of devising an adequate metric to assist in the evaluation of what all concede is today a major problem in the theory and practice of democratic politics. In the absence of a reliable and valid method for measuring differences in apportionment along a common dimension, it is difficult to see how rational consideration of the normative aspects of the issue may be possible.

It is not customary to regard Thomas Hobbes as a theorist particularly concerned with representation. Hardly any of the traditional commentaries on his thought even acknowledge that he mentions the term; and the index to Molesworth's standard edition of Hobbes's English works contains no reference to it. But the fact is that representation plays a central role in the Leviathan; and Hobbes's analysis of the concept is among the most serious, systematic and challenging in the history of political philosophy. It is an analysis both temptingly plausible and, as I hope to show, peculiarly wrong. And the ways in which it is wrong are intimately related to what is most characteristic and peculiar in the Hobbesian political argument.

The notion of power is often said to be central to the analysis of politics. But while that analysis is a very ancient activity, the conceptual clarification of the notion of power has been undertaken only in the past generation. The reason for this discrepancy I leave to the historians of political ideas. In this introduction I merely observe that the clarification has not proceeded as far as is needed, so that we are still not at all sure of what we are talking about when we use the term. Nevertheless there is light ahead, owing especially to some formal definitions that have been offered in recent years by Shapley and Shubik, March, Dahl, Cartwright, and Karlsson. By reason of the formality of these definitions the issues of meaning have been more sharply delineated than was previously possible. Hence we have reached the point, I believe, where we may confront definitions with each other and specify precisely how they differ. In so doing we may be able to resolve some of the ambiguities remaining in the concept of power. In that hope this essay is written.

The ancient Greeks rarely fail us when we turn to them in a receptive but cautious spirit for conceptual clarity, and their treatment of the abstraction “power” and terms related to it is relevant and suggestive. In Greek, a root contained in several words associated with political power has two meanings. The verb archein means both “to rule” and “to start”; the noun arché means both “sovereignty” and “beginning.” J. L. Myres, in his analysis of Greek political ideas, suggests:

It is now clear that in compounds the prefix arkhé (as in our words “architect” and “archbishop”) describes not merely the first or chief man of a company or organization, but the initiatory function of him who “starts” the others to work, and originates the design which they are to complete. And this appeal to Greek practical life confirms the view that what is essential in the notion of arkhé is just this initiatory “push” or “drive” with which the gifted man imposes his will-and-pleasure on the rest.

The belief that consensus is a prerequisite of democracy has, since deTocqueville, so often been taken for granted that it is refreshing to find the notion now being challenged. Prothro and Grigg, for example, have questioned whether agreement on “fundamentals” actually exists among the electorate, and have furnished data which indicate that it may not. Dahl, reviewing his study of community decision-makers, has inferred that political stability does not depend upon widespread belief in the superiority of democratic norms and procedures, but only upon their acceptance. From the findings turned up by Stouffer, and by Prothro and Grigg, he further conjectures that agreement on democratic norms is greater among the politically active and aware—the “political stratum” as he calls them—than among the voters in general.

Since the Chinese invasion of India a good deal of effort has been devoted to a reappraisal of the policy of neutralism which has long been considered to constitute a cornerstone of India's foreign policy. As that policy and reappraisal is by no means confined to India, it might be of more than local interest to examine the concept of neutralism itself on which that policy is grounded. Indeed, the reappraisal has not been sufficiently intense or agonizing because the examination has been too long delayed and “neutralism” has been allowed to slumber undisturbed, tacitly assumed to be an unassailable term in the vocabulary of the foreign office. We shall deal with the related concept of non-alignment at a later stage in the discussion. In order to put both these concepts in proper perspective it will be necessary to say a few words on the logic of foreign policy formulation.