If two men of similar talents, identical training, shared values, and common interests were to study the same phenomena it would not be at all remarkable if they approached the phenomena in the same way, described them in the same terms, employed the same logic in analyzing them, drew the same conclusions from them, and formulated the same theories about their causes.

If, however, two men of similar talents but of rather divergent training, professing differing objectives, and displaying varied (perhaps even conflicting) concerns were to pursue studies of phenomena each believed to be quite distinct from the other's field of inquiry, it would be most astounding if their findings and inferences should turn out to be closely parallel in many important respects, particularly if there were little evidence of communication between them.

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.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. On May 17, 1954, nine judges, sworn to defend a Constitution which guarantees equal protection of the laws, speaking for a country which declared its independence on the proposition that all men are created equal and which is fighting for moral leadership in a world predominantly populated by people whose skin color is other than white—these nine men unanimously concluded that segregated educational facilities are “inherently unequal.”

Most of the members of this audience can probably still recall their feelings when they heard what the Supreme Court had done. Even those who were in full sympathy with the holding must nevertheless have been awed by the responsibility the Supreme Court had undertaken and shaken by some doubts whether the judicial institution could engage in a controversy so charged with emotion and bitterness without running the risk of political defeat and possible permanent impairment of judicial power.

Kautilya is believed to have been Chanakya, a Brahmin who served as Chief Minister to Chandragupta (321–296 B.C.), the founder of the Mauryan Empire. Chandragupta gained his first successes, soon after the death of Alexander the Great, in campaigns against some of the satraps the Macedonian conqueror had established west of the Indus. He then turned against the Nanda Empire and succeeded in destroying it. The victory over the Nandas and his subsequent conquests gave him control over a large part of the Indian subcontinent, including the Ganges and Indus valleys and parts of the Deccan.

Our concern here is with the nature of the individual's attachment to the body politic and, more particularly, with the value premises underlying the choices made by certain classes of voters. Our hypothesis is that some classes of voters (provisionally defined as “subcultures” constituted on ethnic and income lines) are more disposed than others to rest their choices on some conception of “the public interest” or the “welfare of the community.” To say the same thing in another way, the voting behavior of some classes tends to be more public-regarding and less private- (self- or family-) regarding than that of others. To test this hypothesis it is necessary to examine voting behavior in situations where one can say that a certain vote could not have been private-regarding. Local bond and other expenditure referenda present such situations: it is sometimes possible to say that a vote in favor of a particular expenditure proposal is incompatible with a certain voter's self-interest narrowly conceived. If the voter nevertheless casts such a vote and if there is evidence that his vote was not in some sense irrational or accidental, then it must be presumed that his action was based on some conception of “the public interest.”

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.

“All philosophers, of every school, imagine that causation is one of the fundamental axioms of science, yet, oddly enough, in advanced science … the word ‘cause’ never occurs …. The Law of Causality, I believe, like much that passes among philosophers, is a relic of a by-gone age, surviving like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.”—Bertrand Russell (1928)

Causality is an invention of the formal reason, a product of philosophers and scientists. As an idea, however, “cause” finds its basis in ordinary experience. Objects move. How? By being acted upon by other objects or by human agency; exert a pull here, create an effect there. In the world of experience unrefined by science or philosophy, it sometimes seems as if every thing is connected in some way with every other thing, all are parts in a cosmic puppet show. A simple string model appears natural and true and is a prototype of common-sense notions of causality. Even in science, at least until recently, such notions were given expression as well. The string model, for instance, was to be found equally in the simplest interpretations of Newtonian mechanics as in the implicit theories of the carpenter, the plumber, or the agriculturist. Particles exist and forces act between them as causes, producing change. The very idea of force introduces a feeling of compulsion and the causal connection between events seems a physical necessity, reinforcing the lessons taught by every-day experience.

In the literature on political parties in the United States Congress two points are usually stressed. First, it is said that the political party label lacks a precise programmatic content because “party government” in the British sense is absent in the American Congress. Second, however, it is contended that the party label is the single most important and reliable attribute in predicting the voting behavior of a Senator or Representative.

Between these two contentions lies a sizeable area of unexplored territory. If party is the best predictive device in analyzing voting behavior in Congress then, despite the lack of “party government,” the party machinery in both houses must have effects that deserve study. Professor Huitt has suggested the necessity and importance of this kind of study: “… the preoccupation with reform has obscured the fact that we have no really adequate model of party leadership as it exists in Congress, and that none can be constructed because we lack simple descriptions of many of the basic working parts of the present system.” Huitt himself and a few others have filled some of these gaps.

Recent applications of more elaborate quantitative methods (e.g., bloc cluster analysis and Guttman scale procedures) to legislative politics have sharply improved the ability of political scientists to specify significant dimensions of voting behavior. Party affiliation, constituency characteristics and cohesion within state delegations have been correlated with the congressional vote in a number of subject matter areas. Because of the masses of data to be handled, however, even the best of these studies have been limited in scope to a single year or to one Congress. This restriction has not prevented the authors of these works from demonstrating clearly the utility of their methodology, but it has limited correspondingly either the generality or the reliability of their conclusions. The present study, limited to the single issue of congressional voting on foreign aid, is an attempt to discover, by the application of quantitative methods to votes over longer time periods, how far the relationships previously suggested persist over time or are peculiar to the individual sessions in which they occur.

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.

The nuclear age has ushered in a novel period of history, as distinct from the age that preceded it as the modern age has been from the Middle Ages or the Middle Ages have been from antiquity. Yet while our conditions of life have drastically changed under the impact of the nuclear age, we still live in our thoughts and act through our institutions in an age that has passed. There exists, then, a gap between what we think about our social, political, and philosophic problems and the objective conditions which the nuclear age has created.

This contradiction between our modes of thought and action, belonging to an age that has passed, and the objective conditions of our existence has engendered four paradoxes in our nuclear strategy: the commitment to the use of force, nuclear or otherwise, paralyzed by the fear of having to use it; the search for a nuclear strategy which would avoid the predictable consequences of nuclear war; the pursuit of a nuclear armaments race joined with attempts to stop it; the pursuit of an alliance policy which the availability of nuclear weapons has rendered obsolete. All these paradoxes result from the contrast between traditional attitudes and the possibility of nuclear war and from the fruitless attempts to reconcile the two.

A major theme in political literature since the nineteen fifties has been a “unitotalitarian” approach to the study of modern dictatorships. The principal totalitarian “isms”—Fascism, Nazism and Communism—have been viewed as examples of one common species, containing no doubt some variations and differences; but practically, or operationally, the divergencies have been thought considerably less important than the similarities. The emphasis has been heavily on the structure and methods underlying the exercise of political control by the “Leader” and the “Party.” In what is undoubtedly the outstanding modern study of the subject, Friedrich and Brzezinski have attempted to extrapolate predictive hypotheses from the common pattern of totalitarian dictatorship expressed in a familiar syndrome of six interrelated characteristics.

In chapter sixteen of the Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes develops a quite peculiar concept of representation, which he then applies in the political argument of the rest of the book. He maintains that a man is a representative insofar as he has been authorized, that is, given the right to act. The representative freely exercises this right, while the represented is bound by his action and responsible for it. That this definition is an incomplete account of what representation means, and in what ways it is incomplete, I have tried to show in a previous essay. It remains to demonstrate the relationship between this peculiar, one-sided definition, and the political argument in which it is applied.

In a revolutionary century political science as a discipline has been transformed along with its subject matter. In no more than a generation the discipline has gone through at least three theoretical ages, from a naive Jeffersonianism to a mongrelized Madisonianism to a kind of liberal Burkeanism. It has been going through still another transformation in methodology. The failure of one democratic institution after another has bred uncertainty, and uncertainty has encouraged a vast expansion of the apparatus of inquiry. Even if all the questions might be found in the Great Books, the quest is new—for conditions rather than truths, for degrees rather than absolutes.

The legal or customary requirement that legislators reside in the districts they represent is one of the principal structural respects in which American legislatures differ from those of most other democracies. Our legislators and party leaders commonly defend the local residence rule by claiming that it ensures that each legislator will know the special problems and desires of his constituents and thus be equipped to represent them faithfully.

Some academic commentators, on the other hand, have argued that the rule is a prime cause of the parochialism which, they say, prevents Congress and state legislatures from formulating consistent and purposive general programs. These critics customarily contrast American practice unfavorably with that in Great Britain, where the last local residence rule for M.P.s was repealed in 1774. In Britain, the argument runs, the absence of the rule not only minimizes localism but, even more, it enables the national party leaders to allocate their personnel resources in the most effective way.

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.

Useful studies of Canadian political parties are available, and doubtless others will be soon. I am not trying to add another specifically Canadian study nor even to contribute new information helpful in understanding Canada. Instead I want to use what is known about Canadian parties in order to change the comparative perspective in which we ordinarily view American parties. More particularly I am attempting to put in a new light the well-worn view of the uncohesive and nonresponsible character of American parties in contrast to British parties. The Canadian party system, itself so often described as an Anglo-American hybrid, may help explain why American parties differ from Britain's.

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.

Pragmatism and the group theory of politics are closely related both historically and philosophically; and both have a continuing importance for contemporary political science. Yet these two intellectual traditions have seldom been related in a systematic fashion. This failure to examine both the tree and the branch—the parent tradition of pragmatism and its offshoot, group theory—has foreshortened and distorted theoretical perspective. In this article I have tried to amend this situation by relating the two traditions, setting both in a larger historical and theoretical perspective, and examining their common philosophical suppositions.

By nature men are free, but left to their own devices they will inevitably enslave each other. Of all the “bipolarities” in the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau none is more striking than this tension between natural freedom and the spontaneous march to inequality and oppression in which all men participate. None aroused more conflicting reactions in his own mind. If men are the sole authors of their ills, and not the mere victims of some external force, be it original sin, a malevolent nature or a hostile environment, then there is always hope for self-improvement. On the other hand, if men were alone responsible for inventing and maintaining their own social misery, they could scarcely be expected to overcome conditions they had themselves chosen to create. One could hardly hope that those who had devised and imposed their own chains, would either wish, or know how to liberate themselves. Jf there was no need for cosmic fatalism, there was every reason to despair of mankind's own social powers.