That politics and economic life have much to do with each other is a remark matched in self-evidence only by the parallel observation that political science and economics are of mutual interest. All the more striking then is the difficulty one meets in attempting to state with precision how politics and economic life, or how political science and economics are related.

Consider for example the view that politics is the ceaseless competition of interested groups. Except under very rare conditions, as for instance the absence of division of labor, economic circumstances will preoccupy the waking hours of most men at most times. Their preoccupations will express themselves in the formation of organizations, or at least interested groups, with economic foundations. Politics, so far as “interest” means “economic interest” (which it does largely, but not exclusively), is the mutual adjustment of economic positions; and to that extent, the relation between politics and economic life seems to be that political activity grows out of economic activity. But the competition of the interests is, after all, an organized affair, carried out in accordance with rules called laws and constitutions. So perhaps the legal framework, the construction of which surely deserves to be called political, supervenes over the clashing of mere interests and even prescribes which interests may present themselves at the contest. Thus politics appears to be primary in its own right.

Of the spate of articles on interest group behavior and interest group theory which have appeared since the “rediscovery” of Bentley, only a few have been mildly critical. Two American commentators have criticized the vagueness of certain terms and a British observer has noted that, somehow, empirical research on group behavior rarely makes use of the theoretical schemes which have been devised.

But surely if we are to accept the claim of the group theorists that this is indeed the key to a science of politics, it is legitimate to ask that they submit their propositions to the tests imposed by science as a method. Perhaps the gap between research and theory stems less from a lack of data than from some limitations inherent in the group approach itself? This, in fact, is the argument of the present essay. The failure of group theory to serve as an adequate guide to research is the result both of the logical inconsistencies of its propositions and of its inability to explain what it purports to explain. The two weaknesses are related, for in their empirical work group theorists are constantly forced into inconsistencies as a result of the inability of the theory to deal with certain dimensions of experience. The ability of those who use the approach to ignore these consequences stems both from a certain looseness of vocabulary and a tendency, not limited to American scholars, to universalize their own political experience.

Recent decades have seen a vast increase of research in international relations, as in all fields of political and social science. We have more facts and many more expressions of opinion, and we are facing increasingly serious problems of reorientation. We know that much in the world of relations among nations has changed and is still changing, but what is the nature of this change? Is the world becoming more international? Is it turning into one world in which even the United States and the Soviet Union are influencing each other ever more, or at least into two worlds of two rival and ever more tightty integrated Communist and non-Communist blocs? Is the nation-state being superseded by the rise of new continent-wide or ocean-wide treaty organizations or federations?

And what is happening within most of the old and new nation-states, as they enter upon these new arrangements? Are their governments becoming more stable or less? Are their political and administrative capabilities rising or declining? Are power and prestige within these states shifting toward the elites or toward the masses of their populations? Are political controls of economic life in the long run growing or receding? Are we moving toward a world of “garrison states” or toward a world of “open societies,” or is the world moving in uncharted directions for which not even images have yet been found?

Surely, these seem sweeping questions. Scholars and men of affairs might be tempted to put them aside, and to turn their attention to the immediate business at hand. They may prefer the study of some particular conflict between two countries, or of the interests of this or that state, or of the merits of this or that policy at some particular moment. All serious questions, it has been argued, are particular and perhaps unique, and any broader and more general answers might be neither warranted nor wanted.

Such a retreat into the exclusive study of small-scale and short-range problems is based upon a fallacy. We cannot think about particular problems without making assumptions about the general context of the world in which they occur. Usually these assumptions are intuitive and vague. We form some indefinite conception of how states of a particular size and type of government and culture are expected to behave at particular times and places, and we feel surprised when some particular country departs strikingly from these half-formed expectations.

A good deal has been heard in recent years concerning the “liberation” of peoples living under totalitarian rule, but the question of who are the men who succeed to the leadership of a state after the fall of its totalitarian rulers has received relatively little attention. Such observations as have been made on the subject, whether by political opponents of a totalitarian regime or by professional social scientists, have tended to follow implicitly—if not explicitly—the theory of alternating elites. There is assumed to be, on the one hand, a more or less homogeneous totalitarian elite, and, on the other, an actual or potential counter-elite, representing the political antithesis to the totalitarian elite. The stability of the rule of the former is said to vary inversely with the degree of organization of the latter. The totalitarian elite is variously identified with the holders of high positions in the totalitarian system, with the “responsible leaders,” with an entire ruling class, or simply with those individuals who are said to be influential in the determination of national policy. The counter-elite is identified with the active overt and covert opponents of the totalitarian elite—resistance leaders, the “vanguard of the proletariat,” prominent exiles, and “men on whose backs in concentration camps the lash has written the new gospel in blood and tears.” Both elite and counter-elite are thus seen as directly, actively involved in the totalitarian system, either as its leaders or as its opponents.

Revolution, in this schema, is identified with the destruction of the totalitarian elite and its replacement by the counter-elite. Or, conversely, the destruction of the totalitarian elite is an act of revolution and will result in the emergence of the counter-elite to power. It is an attractively simple thesis, and it warrants investigation.

Reviewing the accomplishments of three years of American occupation in Hessen the military governor wrote in 1948 that “the time is not yet ripe for a final appraisal of the effects of Denazification. There can be no doubt, however, that…it was not as effective in its ultimate objective—weeding out anti-democratic elements—as it should have been.” Although the quotation implies a basically negative purpose for denazification, American military government had a positive purpose as well: to provide conditions under which a more democratic life could grow and flourish. To achieve the positive aim, political parties, trade unions, and other democratic institutions were encouraged to develop, with the enforced condition that they be, and stay, purged of Nazis. To achieve the negative goal, military government liquidated the Nazi Party and its affiliated organizations; arrested and detained influential Nazis and “other dangerous persons”; removed and excluded Nazi Party members “of more than nominal importance” from schools, public offices and private enterprises; eradicated Nazi symbols from public places; seized and blocked Nazi property; eliminated Nazi teaching materials from the schools; and punished those Nazis who had taken an active part in the organizations declared to have been criminal by the Nuremberg Tribunal. Both a transfer of power and a transformation of the political climate were intended; each seemed a necessary condition for the other.

Studies of the American program of denazification that have so far appeared are devoted chiefly to top-level analyses of the policy and its administration. The present study complements these by examining its impact at the lowest level in the military government's administrative hierarchy, in a single locality.

The North Atlantic Treaty is unique among alliances in embodying a degree of peacetime military integration, strategic collaboration, and political cooperation that few wartime coalitions have achieved. This unprecedented degree of interdependence constitutes a great part of NATO's strength but also a great part of NATO's problems—especially those that spring from the dual task of combining the external security with the internal collaboration of its members. Certain military and political developments that were not foreseen when the alliance was created have seriously aggravated these problems. The prospect of several allies acquiring independent nuclear capabilities challenges the basic foundation of the alliance and calls for a reappraisal of its underlying assumptions.

In the world of today the existence of a common humanity has been established, negatively at least, by a common fear of a common extinction. Only rational beings fear thermonuclear annihilation; only rational beings can create such means of annihilation. An unprecedented danger supplies a new kind of evidence for the oldest thesis in political philosophy: man is by nature a rational and political animal. The roots of man's humanity, as of his inhumanity, are in the political community, and in the political community's capacity for making war or peace. As the growth from the roots reaches what were once the heavens, the problem of reconciling the origins with the ends attains an acute proportion. Can the new awareness of the commonness of our common humanity cause the fashioning of institutions and men equal to the problem that that very humanity has created? Can the particularity that characterizes individual races, nations, creeds—the particularity that has, from the known origins of political life until the present, provided the substance of political life both in its misery and in its glory—can that particularity transform itself into universality, as the finest and ultimate fruit of human reason? Or may the consummation of rationality, as it is given us to know it, be found in its own self-extinction?

In pondering these ever new questions we turn again to the oldest wisdom of our kind. We have too long neglected the understanding of Shakespeare, perhaps because the brilliance of his art has blinded us to his political genius. Shakespeare lived through a decisive period in the emergence of modern society and thought; and he presented in living tableaux the human problems created by the new world opening before him. That he does not offer solutions nor formulas does not justify ignoring him. Before political scientists can proceed to the suggestion of policies, they must perceive the problems in the fullness of their complexity. In Shakespeare's works is to be found as complete a range of human types as any man is likely to meet in his lifetime, and they are viewed with an eye that penetrates more deeply than that of any common observer. The art of the poet brings to consciousness psychological depths that have not been fathomed by any other method.

Recently the Review has extended its hospitality to studies which are not, technically, within the discipline it serves. A new school of Shakespeare criticism may be in the making; and since everyone deplores departmentalization, one should like to welcome, without misgivings, APSR publication of two Shakespeare interpretations. But I, for one, do have misgivings. It may be that the views of the authors are useful and needful for political theory; of that I am no judge. But I am sure that to present these views as Shakespeare's can serve neither political theory nor Shakespeare criticism. The study of Shakespeare can profit from a knowledge of the history of political theory; and we on the belletristic side of the quad like to think that we are not the sole beneficiaries of the exchange. But the two articles in question go beyond this simple form of barter; they are interpretations of dramatic poetry. They do not accept and retail what Shakespeare criticism has concluded about the poet's political philosophy; they are ambitious attempts to discover this philosophy by taking a direct and novel look at some Shakespearean texts. That is a praiseworthy ambition; but it demands something the authors do not have nor even know they lack: an adequate concept of the specificity of literature as a mode of discourse different from other modes. They have a worthy aim: to give a great poet a voice in the great concerns of practical life. But they have not yet learned to distinguish between the poet's voice and their own—so that, though I greet the aim, I must withhold the applause.

There was one change in the personnel of the Supreme Court during the 1958 Term. Justice Harold H. Burton of Ohio, who had been appointed by President Truman late in 1945, retired on October 13, 1958. For his place President Eisenhower selected 44-year-old Potter Stewart, a Cincinnati Republican whom he had appointed to the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in 1954. A graduate of Yale College and the Yale Law School (1941), Justice Stewart was given a recess appointment on October 14, 1958, but it was not confirmed by the Senate until May 5, 1959. The vote was 70 to 17, all Senators voting against confirmation being Southern Democrats. This experience underscored once more, as in the case of Justice Brennan, the risks involved in recess appointments to the Court, since Justice Stewart sat there for most of the Term before confirmation was had. Whether this affected his votes on cases is a matter of sheer speculation, but the occasion for it is highly regrettable. A new Justice should be as independent as an old one, from the very beginning his service.

Public controversy over the Court's recent decisions, particularly in the security field, continued during the 1958 Term. Pressure for legislation designed to overturn specific Court decisions or to curb the Court's powers continued in the First Session of the 86th Congress, but was less intense than in the previous Congress.