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.

It is a paradox of British politics that, while party discipline is such that no government has to depend on Opposition support in order to pursue the foreign policy of its choice, this very fact has been one reason for the normal consensus on questions of foreign policy between the two front benches. The greater the prospects of Opposition leaders forming the next government the greater the discipline they tend to exert over their ranks, and the more international realities are imposed upon the kind of fantasy-thinking to which a party denied power for many years is especially prone. These tendencies have been notable in British politics since the war; they are likely to continue, given that the Labour Party can control the forces of disruption unleashed by its recent defeat. In the five general elections since the wartime Coalition Government foreign policy issues have not merely occupied a minor role; they have been regarded by party leaders, though not always by the rank and file, as though they were primarily questions of personal qualifications for conducting policies the main outlines of which were not in dispute. At the general election in the autumn of 1959, although disagreements between Government and Opposition had undoubtedly grown since the quiet accords of 1955, the campaign turned, if on international issues at all, on the eligibility of Right or Left to represent the country in negotiations in which the likely British position was largely agreed on both sides. The Leader of the Opposition recognised that this was so, although his explanation for it was that Ministers had been forced to accept Labour's policy recommendations.

During the annual sessions of the General Assembly of the United Nations the policy and budget of the Office of Public Information (OPI) of the organization have been the perennial center of a complex debate. Instructions first given the Secretariat in 1946 provide some elements of this debate, while others depend on the professional expertise of the international civil service and on its influence and support in a General Assembly divided several ways. As a whole, the outcome demonstrates once more both the durable force of an attractive idea and the truth of the maxim that secretariats have great weight in the policy processes of international, as of other, organizations. For despite repeated debate and attack OPI has proved enduring and resilient.

During the last 15 years the many-faceted program of the agency has shrunk somewhat, to be sure, under the economizer's knife. In particular, it was under unusually severe criticism in 1957, when the General Assembly established an expert committee to investigate UN public information activities, and also in 1958, when the results of the inquiry were discussed. This committee, appointed with the unenthusiastic concurrence of the Secretary General, and made up of six governmental nominees not all of whom had experience with public information, directly challenged some of the working assumptions of OPI and called attention to difficulties with others. Their report struck a blow, too, at the internal balance of OPI, accused it of substantive failures and urged it to design new programs.

This annual ceremony of our non-partisan Association is being held at a time when most political scientists are preoccupied with the events of a fateful national election. To avoid any implications of partisanship, it seems best on this occasion to eschew politics in the conventional sense and to concentrate on institutional analysis not applicable to the current conflict. This discussion will therefore deal with the Supreme Court and with the Court primarily as an institution, rather than with problems of changing personnel or the political implications of particular decisions. It will assume that institutions are important in terms of their intrinsic nature and that the kind of institution to be used for a particular governmental task depends largely on the kind of task to be performed, with room for exceptions in exceptional circumstances. So it is that the Court will be presented not in isolation but as a part of the judicial system at whose apex it stands, and will be discussed in terms of the assumptions which lie back of and dictate its rituals, routines and procedures, and which have a great deal to do with determining its efficacy for the tasks allocated to it.

Because analysis of hallowed institutions and ritualized performance is often incorrectly identified with the expression of hostility or disrespect, with only deference permitted on the part of him who would leave the ritual or the institution with the stature it had when he approached it, let me emphasize that the purpose here is not to attack or to disparage but to analyze and to encourage further analysis, with creative ends in view.

World War II and Cold War I have influenced the moral appraisal of diplomacy much as they have influenced all systematic analysis of international relations. Commentators are now more aware that the wide gap between what is and what ought to be cannot be nullified by exhortation or legal formula or inexorable institutional evolution. They appreciate more profoundly the structure and function of power. They have learned from Mukden, Wal-Wal and Munich that accommodation can be more costly than resoluteness, and that an ethic dissociated from the world in which men live cannot give adequate moral guidance for men's living. Nevertheless the commentators remain reluctant, on both political and moral grounds, to accept Realpolitik's ethical outlook on the use of force. The shortcomings of yesterday's total victory have been too sobering; and Hiroshima's destruction has left a scar upon the conscience. Moral judgments on diplomacy are accordingly less simplist, less absolute, more troubled and uneasy than in the pre-war decades.

The moral theories that have attracted most attention among students of international politics are either Protestant Christian or secular humanist in their basic orientations. This is not to say that these orientations are clearly distinguishable in any particular statement; more or less of them can be found in Niebuhr, Wolfers, Butterfield, Lefever, and Osgood among others. Less well known is a view that can be classified as Catholic or Scholastic. In the hope that this could illuminate, if it does not modify, the problems and the answers as conceived by the better known theories, the present study will put forth such a view. The position will be stated first, with such explanation as might be needed for understanding it, and some indication of differences from the Protestant and humanist conceptions. The theory can then be applied to varying hypothetical projections of the contemporary international scene.

Most students of British parties have accepted the view that the mass organizations are decidedly subordinate to parliamentary leadership. Mainly this has meant rejection of the idea that policy is imposed by a party conference, or its delegated executive, in the Labour party as in the Conservative party. But it may also lead one to ignore or depreciate the role of the constituency units which compose the national organizations. That it is a mistake to do so is now suggested by the activities of local party associations during the Suez crisis of 1956–57. Research material derived from this experience provides the bases for altering the common model of the constituency party as a unit in the mass service organizations sustaining the parliamentary leadership. True enough, the association of dues-paying partisans is primarily service rather than policymaking. However, the Suez experience indicates that this service includes a partly selfgenerating function in relation to the maintenance of parliamentary party cohesion, going beyond the well-known earlier instances of local Labour units simply following national orders to drop candidates who were suspected Communists.

This study deals with one reputed value of federalism, its service in the cause of freedom or liberty (both terms are used interchangeably here to mean an immunity from arbitrary governmental action). In particular, I shall examine one aspect of that sort of freedom in our federal system, namely, the right against self-incrimination. The general case for the peculiar virtue of our constitutional system as a means of assuring such a right was summarized by Madison:

In the compound republic of America the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.

Passing over argument about the contribution of the separation of powers and judicial review, our attention will center on the complexities introduced by the federal division of powers. William Anderson posed the broad question some years ago: “Does federalism imply not only a division of powers between national and state government, but also a subtraction of powers from both in favor of the individual? Will there be less government in a federal than in a unitary state, or possibly even more?” And we might add—what his formulation leaves partly open—if more government, then necessarily less freedom? More explicitly, Franz Neumann has suggested recently that “whether the federal state does increase freedom cannot be abstractly determined. We have some evidence that the federal state as such (that is regardless of the form of government) has not fulfilled this role.”

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.

This paper results from a larger study of capital budgeting and programming in Philadelphia. Our intention here is to present some findings bearing upon the role of long-range planning primarily, though not exclusively, in metropolitan governments.

Much, though surely not all, of city planning today is directly related to capital programming. This is especially so in large cities for at least three major reasons: basic physical plant and utilities are often run down or obsolescent for a complex of historical reasons; many routine programs are “capital-intensive” and are becoming more so under the impact of new technology and professional standards; and urban renewal has entailed an increasingly entrepreneurial approach to land-use planning. Capital programming itself is a process of separate budgetary decision on capital items, however defined. The rationale for the separate decision process values “planning” highly and emphasizes fiscal planning of outlay that is loan-financed and physical planning of projects distinguished by “lumpiness” and/or longevity. It follows from these considerations that the planning and programming of physical improvements cannot be sharply separated from the remainder of municipal policy. City planning as applied to capital programming has to do not only with land use but with most functional programs and with fiscal policy.

While some long-range municipal planning will probably take place in the line departments, the focal point of planning is likely to be the review and assembly of the overall capital program, at which point fiscal, programmatic and land-use planning all come into play even if the principal competence and concern of the planning agency is in land-use planning. The planning agency can be conceived as performing any or all of the four roles of research, integration, allocation, and provision of the long view. While conceptually distinguishable, these roles tend to merge in the practice of capital program review.

The National Security Council constitutes the most ambitious effort yet made to coordinate policy on the cabinet level in the American federal government. An examination of the experience of the NSC, together with the assumptions and expectations that went into proposing, establishing, and developing it, should help to clarify the problem of policy coordination under the President.

Various proposals for a special war cabinet in the United States, usually called a Council of National Defense, date back as far as 1911. The National Defense Act of 1916 established a body by such a name, headed by the Secretary of War. The statute was so watered down from the original proposals, however, that its uses were negligible, except later as a convenient peg for the National Defense Advisory Council (NDAC) and its subsidiaries that Roosevelt called into being in 1940. After World War I, both armed services revived the idea of a more powerful Council in an effort to find some base of support for their military policies, and as a counter to proposals for unification, proposals which they both opposed because these were founded on unrealistic expectations about the sums of money that could be saved through reorganization of the service departments.

Africans in French Tropical Africa have recently been called on to make several farreaching political decisions. Two basic questions have been at issue: the nature of the relationship between France and the African territories, and the nature of relations between the African territories themselves. On the first question, the Referendum of September 28, 1958 on the Constitution of the Fifth French Republic gave Africans the choice between total independence and internal autonomy within “The (French) Community.” With regard to their mutual relations, the territories which made up the federations of French West and French Equatorial Africa could remain tied together politically, or they could sever all formal political connections among themselves; in French African political terminology, the second issue has been whether or not the individual territories should form “primary federations.”

The issue of total independence or internal autonomy within “The Community” was temporarily decided at the 1958 Referendum, when eleven of the twelve territories of French West and Equatorial Africa voted to remain with France, Guinea alone choosing immediate independence. Since then several members of “The Community” have initiated negotiations with France for the full transfer of sovereign powers to local African governments, and the indications are that all French-speaking West Africa will be fully independent within the near future.

The outcome of the second question—political relations among the African territories–is not so clear. The trend up to now has been against the re-creation of primary federations.

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.

American political parties are often regarded as “brokerage” organizations, weak in principle, devoid of ideology, and inclined to differ chiefly over unimportant questions. In contrast to the “ideological” parties of Europe—which supposedly appeal to their followers through sharply defined, coherent, and logically related doctrines—the American parties are thought to fit their convictions to the changing demands of the political contest. According to this view, each set of American party leaders is satisfied to play Tweedledee to the other's Tweedledum.

In the past seventy years, lasting reorientations of the national electorate have taken place in two periods, centering about the presidential elections of 1896 and 1918. Most other presidential elections have involved relatively uniform swings of states or counties toward one party or the other; Louis Bean summarized this phenomenon in his chapter title, “As Your State Goes, So Goes the Nation.” But the occasions when this uniform swing does not occur are of special interest, because if the reorientations persist they can mark the injection of new issues into national and state politics for a generation. Lubell noted the importance of the “Al Smith revolution” which preceded the “Roosevelt revolution”; and Key, naming these phenomena “critical elections,” went on to show that Bryan's candidacy in 1896 marked an earlier major reorientation of the electorate. He defined a critical election as one in which “the depth and intensity of electoral involvement are high, in which more or less profound readjustments occur in the relations of power within the community, and in which new and durable electoral groupings are formed.”

This paper is concerned with the behavior of members of a Congressional committee in their role as overseers of an independent regulatory commission. Congressional committees seem periodically to become aware of the presence of the regulatory agencies and after a more or less spectacular examination of one or another of them, allow them to slip back to an undisturbed and unnoticed routine. Their status as “independent” agencies leaves to Congress the formal responsibility both for checking on the fulfillment of their legislative mandates and for preserving them from domination by their clientele and the President. Too little notice has been taken, however, of the nature of the control of these regulatory agencies emanating from Congress.

This study results from an examination of the House Education and Labor Committee as it reviewed the performance of the National Labor Relations Board in 1953. My sources are the public hearings of the Committee in the 83d Congress and interviews with Committee members over a two-year period thereafter.

The Leviathan has been described as “original, persuasive, solid, coherent.” General commentaries on Hobbes usually single out his logic for special praise; more detailed critiques generally unearth a mass of confusions and inconsistencies. Confusions and inconsistencies there certainly are; more, I believe, than one would expect to find in the work of a man of such undeniable logical powers. Speculation upon the psychological explanation of this fact is intriguing, but no part of the purpose of the present article. It is part of my purpose, however, to contend that Hobbes's passion for clarity and certainty may have played a part in leading him to adopt perverse definitions, to which even he did not consistently adhere and which constituted a major source of confusion. Conversely, I disagree with those who say his analytical system is sound and only his empirical assumptions about human nature are open to serious criticism.

More specifically, one may profitably inquire whether there is some central concept that serves as a focal point for many of these difficulties. For example, it is often suggested, with merit, that Hobbes's perversion, or inversion, of the traditional meaning of “jus naturale” plays such a role. Without making any exclusive claim or denying the insights that may be gained by concentrating attention upon other focal points, my hypothesis is that understanding of Hobbes may be deepened by an examination of his use of the word “liberty.” I shall deal first with his definitions of the term, and then in turn with his applications of it to natural right and natural law, to sovereignty by acquisition, and finally to the social contract. I shall argue that his method, as illustrated by his definitions, leads him occasionally into confusion or inconsistency, and more frequently tends to confuse the reader and so to enable Hobbes to make an unsound conclusion appear sound, by means of specious reasoning. In particular, I shall contend that Hobbes's treatment of liberty (1) leads him into self-contradiction regarding the extent of natural liberty, (2) enables him to argue persuasively but speciously in support of the obligation to obey a sovereign who has attained his position by violence, and (3) prevents him from developing an acceptable theory of political obligation.

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.

Attacks upon administrative secrecy are a commonplace of congressional politics. By resolution, investigation, and the threat of even more punitive sanctions, Congress has repeatedly asserted its belief that executive officials should not be allowed to withhold documents and testimony at their own discretion. The most graphic recent evidence of this legislative concern has been provided by a House Special Subcommittee on Government Information. Over the past three years, this group, headed by Representative Moss of California, has made far-ranging efforts to expose and dramatize the evils of executive secrecy.

The long-standing congressional resentment against administrative efforts to conceal information has very visible roots in considerations of institutional self-interest, since the performance of legislative functions in central areas of policy-making and administrative oversight demands frequent access to facts that only executive officials can supply. In the field of defense policy, especially, congressional dependence upon executive information is acute, and bitter controversy has been sparked by executive refusals to release data bearing on such matters as the missile program, foreign-aid expenditures, and differences within the high command over the best way to spend the defense dollar.

Attempts to establish a “morphology of civilizations” seem to continue in spite of dire warnings from scholars. Indeed, while rejecting Toynbee and Sorokin with one hand, many a scholar has beckoned with the other to adventurous young men to leave the barren tracts of specialization and re-enter the broad panoramic fields of Weltgeschichte. Current interest in “comparative feudal institutions” illustrates the case in point.

The notion that “feudalism” is a “form of society,” especially a “stage in development,” can be traced back to Marxist historiography, and from there back to eighteenth century French thinkers. But instead of becoming thoroughly discredited, the notion has recently led to new thinking on the subject which may turn out to be fruitful. In Feudalism in History for example, Rushton Coulborn, has combined eight separate papers on feudalism in various parts of the world by different historians, with his own critical and synthetic studies. Though he fails to find even one “fully developed” feudal society according to his own definition—a not unexpected result—his study contains an amazing amount of suggestive analysis.

His suggestions are particularly valuable in the construction of “working models” or “ideal types” as research tools. Even when we remain safely within our own “fields,” if we are to go beyond highly specialized fact-gathering and at the same time avoid “presentisi subjectivism,” we will need such tools.