For two generations American political and economic life has been moving swiftly toward “bigness,” toward monolithic organization. We live by, in, and among bigger and bigger corporations, bigger and bigger unions, bigger and bigger governments. On all sides individual freedom and responsibility have shrunk. Absorbed into organizations bigger than himself, the American tends to be overpowered by these organizations, whether of industry, labor or agriculture. And whatever his orientation, he must operate in and under an ever-expanding multilateral network of occupational and governmental regulation.

In the shadow of such manifold giantism modern men—practically all of them employees who rate themselves “middle class”—seem but puny figures. Man's own handiwork has become a Frankenstein monster, destroying his initiative and individuality. In the grip of forces he has created, helpless single-handed to control, he suffers from loneliness, from not belonging, from impersonality. Millions who live in great cities, hundreds of thousands employed in assembly-line factories and organized in industrial unions, thousands of stockholders who can only endorse management's policies governing “their” billion dollar corporation —all these experience frustration, helplessness.

The French Communist Party emerged from the national elections of 1951 with a greater number of popular votes than any of its competitors. Since the preceding elections of November, 1946, it is true, the party has lost close to 500,000 voters, and its proportion of the total number of registered voters has declined from 21.6 to 20.1 per cent. Yet the Communist Party (CP) remains not only numerically, but also by virtue of its geographical distribution, the most important of the French parties. In none of the election districts did less than 5 per cent of the voters cast their ballot for the communist lists, while all other parties parade a considerable number of blank spots on the electoral map of France. In twenty-seven districts the CP can boast of a support larger than one-fourth of the total electorate, while the next strongest party, de Gaulle's RPF, is similarly represented in only eleven districts.

A comparison of the present communist vote with that of 1946 shows that five years which affected deeply the political constellation of Europe and the world have not changed significantly the distribution of communist sympathies among the French electorate. The greatest concentration of votes for the CP is still to be found in the region situated between Paris and the Belgian border, reaching in the East to the départements of Ardennes, Marne, and Aube, in the West to those of Somme and Seine-Inférieure.

The theoretical models developed to deal with the interaction of sociological and psychological factors in the formation of political behavior indicate a wide divergence of opinion. At one extreme area group of scientists, mainly psychiatrists and anthropologists, who see most social phenomena as deriving from the subjective experiences of the individual. The specific traumata inherent in different methods of upbringing and in the resulting renunciations imposed upon the child are regarded by them as the formative basis for customs, religions, social attitudes, and so forth. Some specific examples of their point of view may be found in attempts to explain war as an expression of the destructive instincts, or capitalism as a manifestation of the anal syndrome. But at the other extreme are proponents of the view that the social structure is independent of the single individual and that individual behavior can be explained and predicted in terms of membership in classes and groups as they have developed historically, mainly on the basis of mode of subsistence.

Failing to agree with either of these extreme points of view, one may argue that any speculation about the causal interrelation of sociological and psychological factors in the group and in the individual must recognize the fact that these factors have been artificially isolated and abstracted and that no exclusive factual primacy can be given to any of the aspects in a pattern so closely interwoven.

Government in the United States is in considerable part local government, and of all local governmental units the county is most widely prevalent. Every state has counties (they are called parishes in Louisiana); in all states but Rhode Island the county is organized for governmental purposes; and, not with standing the existence of some areas without county organization, county government may be said virtually to blanket the nation. A generation ago, in a sub-title to one of the earlier books on the subject, the county was characterized as the “Dark Continent” of American Politics. Now, at mid-point in the century, it seems appropriate to reëxamine the county with a view to determining the extent to which the backward institution of the early 1900's has since been modernized and the directions in which further improvement may reasonably be expected in the future.

Perhaps most striking, in a comparison of present-day counties with those of a half-century ago, is the fact that, in total number of organized units (now 3,051) and in geographic outline, the county setup remains practically unchanged. Most present-day counties were established well before the turn of the century and, by and large, subsequent boundary changes have been few and of minor nature. A map of the nation's counties as of today would be scarcely distinguishable from one portraying the counties as of 1900 or even earlier.

The following essays in American political thought are presented in honor of Professor Francis W. Coker, who recently retired from active service in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. It was the original intention of a group of his former graduate students to do something on a more elaborate scale, but the project foundered on the shoals of the tensions and insecurities of the cold war, with normal work schedules disrupted by the military call-up and by transfers into and out of the civil service. Professor Coker has had a long and distinguished career in American political science, as a scholar and author, as chairman of his department, and as an active member of the American Political Science Association, of which he served as President in 1935. But he is best remembered by his graduate students as a relentlessly intelligent teacher, as a constructive critic, as a kindly gentleman, and as a friend always interested in their work and in their progress. They often recall his seminar in political theory, its range and depth, its careful scholarship, and above all, its concern with moral questions. It is hoped that the publication of these essays will convey to Professor Coker some small measure of the respect and affection which his former students acquired during their pleasant years in New Haven.

In recent years various theories of “democratic administration” have been developed. These theories differ in their origins, their motivation, their sophistication. Some have been crudely forged in the heat of administration; some are finely-machined products of scholarship. Some pertain especially to private administration, others have been developed for public administration, while still others cut across this conventional division.

These theories of democratic administration constitute a significant development in political thought. However crude and limited some of them may be, they open new areas to be explored in the development of democratic ideology; whatever their limitations, they are constructive efforts to adapt an ethic in which we believe to the contemporary world. If administration is indeed “the core of modern government,” then a theory of democracy in the twentieth century must embrace administration. I wish to sketch the background of administrative thought and history against which theories of democratic administration are seen in perspective; to review briefly some of these theories; and to comment upon the prospects and problems of the further development of theory of democratic administration.

About the American tradition of individualism much has been said and written—so much, indeed, that this country has come to be regarded as the stronghold of individualism. That the ideal of the free individual has long pervaded American thought cannot, of course, be denied. Yet while it is true that this tradition is clearly discernible throughout American political development, its role has been grossly exaggerated. Along with individualism there has existed in America, from the earliest days of colonization, an equally strong and an equally significant collectivist tradition. The New Deal and its presumptive successor, the Fair Deal, regarded by so many as new and dangerous departures, actually are like their predecessors, the Square Deal and the New Freedom, the Granger and the Populist movements, merely episodes in the development of a venerable American tradition of collectivism.

In a study of recent political thought in the South, it is necessary to delimit the area called “The South.” Howard Odum included fourteen states in his practical design for the “southern regions.” The President's Committee which reported in 1938 on economic conditions in the South covered thirteen states. The southern governors of fifteen states joined in the regional educational compact. The Manufacturers' Record, published in Baltimore as the industrial organ of the South, reaches out to sixteen states. V. O. Key limits his study, Southern Politics, to those eleven states which have consistently stayed with the national Democratic party. This author in the main refers to the eleven states which once seceded to form the Confederacy; coincidentally, these are the same eleven states that Key found to be “solid” in national politics.

By a turn of legal fate, the first case between two American states to be decided by either the International Court of Justice or its predecessor, the Permanent Court of International Justice, is one which involves the controversial practice of diplomatic asylum. One can choose to regard diplomatic asylum as a principle of American international law or as a “permissive local custom,” though in no sense a principle of international law, or one can agree that “the fact that asylum is not exercised in the territory of the leading states, and is mainly resorted to in the ‘backward’ countries of the Near and Far East and of Latin America, suggests that it is a practice followed only in relation to states who are not fully civilized in the Western sense of the term, and that as such it is a temporary exception to the system of international law which obtains in the community of civilized nations.” Whatever the viewpoint, the fact remains that the practice has been indulged in for a long time, with and without formal legal sanction, and in more places than Latin America. The Colombian-Peruvian Asylum Case brings to attention the issues of the validity in international law of diplomatic asylum and of its desirability in international relations. A short sketch of the origin and development of diplomatic asylum will indicate something of its nature.

While the personnel of the Court remained unchanged during the 1950 term, it became abundantly clear that the Roosevelt Court was being supplanted by the Truman Court. Certainly the voting behavior of President Truman's last two appointees bore little resemblance to that of the men they replaced, the late Justices Murphy and Rutledge. Students of the Court were glad to note, during the period covered by the term under review, the publication of a number of biographical and analytical studies of different justices, particularly a first full-length history of Chief Justice Hughes. The increasing productivity of scholars in the field of judicial biography promises much in the way of an enhanced understanding of one of our most interesting, complex and powerful national institutions. In addition, attention should be drawn to the publication of a number of books dealing with important aspects of the Constitution.

Following the pattern of the previous year, the Court disposed of an unusually small number of cases during the 1950 term, and exercised its power of denying certiorari in a larger number of cases than has been customary in recent times.