When President Roosevelt proclaimed the “Four Freedoms” in 1941, he accepted a new conception of human rights far removed from the natural rights of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The conception of rights which inspired the British Bill of Rights (1689), the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) is grounded in simple natural law notions. Man was believed to have a fixed and unalterable nature, to be endowed with reason, which gave him certain rights without which he ceased to be a human being. These natural rights, summed up in the Lockean formula of “life, liberty and property” (later broadened to include the pursuit of happiness), were largely concerned with protecting the individual person against governmental power. Each man was seen as entitled to a personal sphere of autonomy, more especially of religious conviction and property; the inner and the outer man in his basic self-realization and self-fulfillment. These rights depended in turn upon the still more crucial right to life-that is to say, to the self itself in terms of physical survival and protection against bodily harm. This right to life was recognized even by absolutists, like Thomas Hobbes. It was believed immutable, inalienable, inviolable. Locke exclaimed at one point that these rights no one had the power to part with, and hence no government could ever acquire the right to violate them.

It has been a quarter century since the President's Committee on Administration Management, chaired by Louis Brownlow, blessed by Franklin Roosevelt, heralded a major innovation in our constitutional arrangements: substantial staffing for the Presidency distinct from other parts of the executive establishment —in Edward Corwin's phrase an “Institutionalized Presidency.” The Executive Office, which throughout our prior history had been essentially a “private office” in the English sense, was to become a “President's Department.” So it did. Presidential agencies have filled the building which in 1937 housed the State Department (and in 1913 had housed War and Navy, too). Presidential aides outrank in all but protocol the heads of most executive departments.

We date this development from Brownlow's Report. In the sphere of presidential staffing, its proposals for the most part were put into practice with promptness and fidelity. And practice, for the most part, has been kind to the proposals, has sustained—indeed has vindicated—key ideas behind them. What a rare experience for an advisory report! It gives the work of the Committee special standing which we properly acknowledge as we meet professionally in 1963, the Silver Anniversary of their devoted service to the country and to our profession.

This clause of the First Amendment, recently applied by the Supreme Court to invalidate certain religious practices in the public schools, has called down a new storm over the Supreme Court. The storm has not consisted merely of the political bombast of predictable critics. Rather, it has included Dean Griswold of the Harvard Law School who perceived in the first school prayer case an unyielding and unwarranted absolutism in the position of the Court. It includes also highly regarded church figures, such as Episcopal Bishop Pike, who has called for a constitutional amendment to alter the Court's mandates. It has percolated within the law schools, and within the Court itself where lengthy separate opinions were composed to clarify what has and what has not been done. Yet, even within the Court, as within the larger academic and public forums, wide disagreement remains as to the applied meaning of the opaque language of the religion clause.

This article cannot quiet the storm over the Supreme Court, but it can make clear which parts of the storm are entitled to be taken seriously and which are merely bluster. Beyond this, there are more significant purposes to be served. The first of these is to make sense of existing cases in terms of some coherent doctrine, responsive to the First Amendment and possessing substantial predictive value: to describe the standard of church-state separation which the Supreme Court applies in fact. The second is to demonstrate that a number of open questions remain to be answered before a more precise boundary of church-state separation can be known.

When during the debate on a motion of censure in October 1962 Paul Reynaud challenged the government from the rostrum of the National Assembly with a scornful: “Here and nowhere else is France!”, the issue was well joined. To Reynaud, perennial deputy during three republican regimes, General de Gaulle's projected referendum appeared as a two-fold attack upon French republican traditions. If adopted, the proposal to elect the President of the Republic by popular suffrage would divest the Assembly of its role as the sole bearer of national sovereignty. Moreover, to seek approval for such a change of the constitution of 1958 without a prior vote of parliament deprived both houses of any participation in the amending process.

In 1958, as President of the Consultative Constitutional Committee, Reynaud had insisted that the possibilities of any direct appeal to the electorate be carefully circumscribed and hedged by parliamentary controls. He had obtained official assurances that the referendum would never be used by the executive as a means of arousing popular opinion against the elected assemblies. The final text of the constitution had incorporated proposals by the Consultative Committee which strengthened the position of parliament whenever either a referendum or presidential emergency powers might create a plebiscitarian situation.

The existence of blocs in the General Assembly of the United Nations and the importance of their activities have been widely recognized ever since its establishment. Special attention to the phenomenon of bloc politics dates roughly from the ascendancy of the General Assembly over the Security Council after 1950, and the consequent importance of votes in the General Assembly. Because the various blocs and groups of states play a conspicuous role in the decisions of the Assembly, the operation of these blocs is well worth study.

Among the many aspects of bloc politics in the General Assembly needing careful analysis, two of the most basic questions are the identification of blocs and the measurement of their cohesiveness or bloc-like behavior. The purpose of this essay is to review and evaluate the manner in which students of the United Nations have treated these two fundamental questions, and to suggest an alternative method not handicapped by the weaknesses of the techniques so far employed. The advantages of the proposed alternative method will also be demonstrated by applying it to a specific instance of bloc voting: the alignments on the colonial issues which arose in the 1956, 1957, and 1958 sessions of the General Assembly.

John C. Calhoun's Disquisition on Government is that rarity in American political thought-a work that explicitly declares itself a theoretical study of politics. By purporting to give a comprehensive and systematic account, by claiming to have explored new territory beyond the range of American discoveries, Calhoun in effect put his Disquisition in a class of which it is almost the sole example: an American political theory. But this claim to esteem and originality has been disputed; and in the subsequent debates among his interpreters, we have yet to find a satisfactory solution to the problem that Calhoun represented in such clear shape. Those who have rated him as a statesman and thinker—be that assessment high or low—and those who have accepted or denied his claim to originality have all failed to solve the peculiar problem of how to study and interpret the writing of a man of theory-and-practice. Until that problem is met, our understanding of the Disquisition is not clear and we remain without a way of evaluating Calhoun's merits and originality.

How, then, ought Calhoun's Disquisition, or his high theoretical pretensions in general, best to be understood? Reducing his theory to practice, or saying in effect that the Disquisition was only another string to his pro-slavery bow, forecloses the question of what Calhoun can teach us. Reducing his practice to theory places what is almost a superhuman burden upon a man who was at or near the center of the national political stage for forty tumultuous years. A more moderate procedure would seem to be indicated.

The following notes deal with three aspects of American political science in which the trends, we believe, will be of particular interest to members of the profession. The findings presented here have been taken from a much broader study of the discipline currently in process. Given the present spatial exigencies, we have made some arbitrary decisions in selecting the topics to be dealt with here. It may be desirable, therefore, to indicate the scope of the larger investigation and the relationship of this paper to the parent study.

We had originally planned to base our analysis of trends in American political science primarily upon the biographical and professional data contained in the 1948, 1953 and 1961 editions of the Directory of the American Political Science Association. While the data in these volumes were both useful and suggestive, we soon realized that this information alone was not sufficient for our purposes. We became increasingly convinced that any meaningful discussion of the state of the discipline required a reliable knowledge of the attitudes and views of the profession on a number of current issues and problems. Lacking this type of information, the authors of recent studies of American political science have been forced to treat their personal beliefs as reasonably representative of the membership at large; to speculate, however shrewdly, as to divisions of opinions in the discipline; or simply to ignore the topic altogether.