The excessive entanglement standard is part of the Supreme Court's three-pronged test for determining the constitutional validity of government aid to religion. This article challenges in turn the validity of that standard and its two components, namely the criteria of administrative entanglement and political divisiveness. The administrative entanglement criterion is flawed because it violates the principle of equality. The political divisiveness standard, on the other hand, not only misreads the intention of the Founding Fathers but also ignores the value of religious conflict in a democracy and the strategy for handling such conflict proposed by James Madison.

The Soviet Union confronts grave needs for reform because it achieved impressive progress upon old foundations, struggles with a systemic economic slowdown, faces fundamental social and spiritual infrastructured problems, wrestles with a costly overextended empire, and must adapt to the age of knowledge that challenges its centralized control. Soviet leaders recognize the need to restructure the economic and political system, but they consider innovation an ideologically unacceptable hazard to its values, and its control. Change would threaten the primacy of the military share of economic resources, the high priority foreign policy receives to provide legitimacy, and control of Eastern Europe. Only corrections and minor repairs in the economy are likely in a system that lacks a reform mechanism.

In this paper Althusser's concept of overdetermination is examined from two distinct but related perspectives. The first is the more empirical aspect. Althusser uses this concept to explain the relation between the Marxist “base” and “superstructure.” While Althusser has made a novel and perhaps even profound contribution to Marxist theory, his explanation stumbles on an unresolved tension between the twin principles of the determination “in the last instance” by the base and the “relative autonomy” of the superstructure. The second aspect is the more philosophical. If the concept of overdetermination is correct, it can only be so because the self has been dissolved into a set of social relationships in which there is no room for such traditional human attributes as free action, purposiveness and responsibility. The result renders meaningless the search for any permanent core of the self which is thought to define our common humanity. It is this second theme which makes Althusser one of the most powerful postmodern critics of the Western humanistic tradition.

Lot is a possible alternative to election as a democratic means of selection. The prime historical instance of its political use is classical Athens. Lot was an important expression of the Athenian democrats' commitment to equality, more egalitarian than election which assumed equality of opportunity rather than desert. Lot also had certain important political effects, such as reducing factionalism and maintaining the authority of the assembly. It helped to make the Council and the courts representative cross sections of the assembly. Election, however, was preferable when important decisions were to be entrusted to only a few people. In modern democratic societies, lot is not uncommon as a distributive device but is rarely used for selecting political officials. Election remains more democratically efficient for large polities, but lot could be seriously considered in communities which approach the small size and intimacy of the Greek city-states.

Contrary to those social scientists who posit a close relationship between corporate interests, the capitalist state, and the nonpartisan research establishment, this paper challenges the linkage thesis through an examination of the early history of the Brookings Institution. As the nation's oldest and most prestigious “think tank,” the Brookings Institution played a multidimensional role in the public policy process. Robert S. Brookings, the capitalist who founded the institution in the aftermath of World War I, played little role in the subsequent history of the institution. Instead, the less reform-minded professional social scientists who staffed the organization shaped the character of the institution. In their defense of the market economy, Brookings economists emerged as leading opponents of the new liberal state.