TYPICAL STATEMENTS ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CIVIL servants and ministers include the following which I have come across myselc ‘it is the Civil Service mandarins who really run the country’, ‘a strong minister must frequently reject his department's advice to prove he is master’; ‘all decisions by government are based not on the merits of the case but whether they are likely to attract votes at the next election’. The first of these implies that a minister is powerless in the grip of his department and the last that a minister ignores all departmental advice unless it suits his short-term political objectives. The actual relationship between politician and civil servant cannot be explained in such simple and extreme terms. It is also in most cases a relationship which develops and improves as those concerned get used to working together. This is fortunate because if any of the above statements was entirely true, it would be difficult to have much confidence in the future of our particular democratic system.

BENEATH THE ACTIVISM OF THE 1960s AND THE SEEMING QUIESCENCE of the 1970s a silent revolution has been occurring which is changing the infrastructure of Western politics in two ways: first, the values of Western publics have been shifting from an almost exclusive emphasis on material and physical security toward greater concern with intangible aspects of life; and secondly, there has been an increase in the political skills of Western publics that enables them to play a more active role in making important political decisions. Both processes tend to broaden the political horizons of these people and have important implications for supranational political integration.

PARLIAMENTARY REPRESENTATWE DEMOCRACY IS ABOUT THE relationship of individuals to the state. It commonly invokes mechanistic metaphors about the relationship between these individuals and their governments. Corporatism is about the relationship of certain, apparently relationship indispensable, functional groups to each other in the society which, collectively , they comprise. It is commonly referred to in organic metaphors, specifically it holds that each function is organically related to each other function and that each is irreplaceable. None can be dispensed with and each can do its appointed task provided all others do theirs.

IT IS INCREASINGLY COMMON TO FIND ANALYSES OF BRITAIN AS A corporate state, or more circumspectly as developing a tripartite system of economic and industrial policy-making. Unfortunately, such work is often marked by a lack of definitional rigour and an inadequate consideration of relevant empirical material. In view of these limitations in the literature our article has two aims. Initially it examines the relationship between corporatism and tripartism, showing that in many ways tripartism can be viewed as a variation on one strand of corporatist thought, and what is more that it is the strand which appears most relevant to discussions of Britain. Subsequently, against this background, we examine empirical evidence to establish how far Britain can be described as having a tripartite system of economic and industrial policy-making.

HISTORICALLY AND CONCEPTUALLY CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT IS presented as the antithesis of absolute sovereignty and the prophylactic to tyrannical oppression. The paradigm form for absolute sovereignty is rule by one man and, since everything turns on the character of that man, such rule is inherently liable to collapse through incapacity, or to degenerate into tyranny. Tyranny is an ill against which necessarily there can be no protection under conditions of absolute sovereignty. Constitutional government may, therefore, be conceived as an attempt to provide built-in safeguards to prevent, or at least reduce the chances of, absolute sovereignty assuming the corrupt and perverted form of tyranny. Such safeguards inevitably restrict the absolute nature of sovereign rule.