What social conditions are prerequisite for given forms of community-wide political behavior (“democracy,” “dictatorship,” etc.)? What transitions are possible between one such form of power exertion and another? What social conditions are necessary to, or determinate of, a given type of transition? Working hypotheses for the exploration of these problems are presented in this article.

An understanding of the factual limits on the effectiveness of political aspiration and exhortation has suddenly become essential in the struggle for survival of the free areas of the world against totalitarian domination. The discussion and appraisal of foreign policy is dangerously confused because of the failure of political knowledge authoritatively to define the real areas of choice. We no longer have time to embark upon policies merely because they are sentimentally acceptable, if it is possible to determine in advance their probable failure. With the accelerated transformation of age-old social structures caused by industrialism and by the spreading specialization of tasks, a similar necessity for political knowledge is bound to arise in domestic policy as well. The time is here when the broader policy choices must be confined within a practicable range by established theories correlating power behavior with social conditions.

The Need for Factually Defined Concepts. Most political utterance is necessarily normative in import since it occurs in the process of motivating human behavior. Popularly employed political concepts, appropriately, are frequently of the ideal type in that they tend to denote an hypothetical situation toward conformance with which actual human institutions are being impelled. Ask any student to define a state or a government and he is almost certain to bring in some such notion as “operation in the public interest,” which might or might not be judged applicable to an actual situation. It is safe to say that ninety per cent of the time such concepts as state, government, court, law, administration, political party, and many others are used in this normative sense, not only popularly but in learned circles.

Without desiring the exclusion of the normative from the social sciences, the writer believes that rigid conceptual clarity in distinguishing norm and fact is necessary for the progress of these disciplines. To attain this goal, the technical requisite is a system of concepts having an understood reference of a purely factual character. The absence of such factually defined concepts is noteworthy in political science, and largely unrecognized. Although most of our studies are factual in nature and the intended reference of concepts is usually factual, definition is largely subconscious and when brought to the surface is likely to have normative form, particularly a form borrowed from legal norms.

True definition is appropriate in such disciplines as logic and mathematics and in physics, which has attained since the seventeenth century to the explanation of phenomena by hypothetical systems employing purely postulated entities like electrons and atoms. A set of pure definitions gives postulates from which theorems are derived by rigid deduction. What is put into the definitions comes out in the theorems.

Contrary to expectation, widespread when the Fascists acceded to power, no notable retreat by the national government from the field of economic undertaking has been witnessed under the present Italian régime. The theoretical advocacy of public ownership of business concerns as a goal in itself has, indeed, passed entirely from the political stage with the suppression of the once powerful Socialist party, but the enterprises already operated by the Italian government have for the most part been continued under Mussolini's administration. Fascist theory concedes the private entrepreneur to be the normal and proper producer and distributor of economic goods. The Fascist attitude toward the government in business is expressed in the doctrine of state intervention. When any phase of the national economy fails to operate properly, the state has a right to intervene, even to the extent of becoming an entrepreneur itself. In the ninth declaration of the Charter of Labor, the Fascist social creed, the doctrine is expressed thus: “The intervention of the state in economic production takes place only when private initiative is lacking or is insufficient or when political interests of the state are involved. Such intervention may assume the form of control, assistance, or direct management.”