It is no longer the rule among American intellectuals that to describe oneself as a conservative is to confess to intellectual bankruptcy. The new conservatives, on the contrary, make much of their sophistication in matters of philosophy and history, compared with the naiveté of the liberals. That such a reversal of roles has been possible says much about what has passed for liberalism in modern America, for if the liberals had been historically realistic, profoundly humanistic, and uncompromisingly individualistic, the present case for conservatism would lose much of its force. One is tempted to say, if only there had been more liberalism among the liberals, there would be less need for conservatism. To understand this curious situation it is essential to realize that it has been not the liberal but the progressive mentality that has held sway.

In discussions of the United States Constitution, the phrase “the intention of the framers” is often used, but it is hardly ever adequately analyzed. The search for the intentions of the framers is made obviously in the hope of finding out what they meant by the words they put into the written Constitution. This leads to the examination of various evidences outside the Constitution, and implies a feeling that there is a lack of clarity in the words of that document.

The discussion that follows was written in order, first, to raise some of the questions that I think have to be answered before the phrase about intentions can have fullness of meaning as a tool of constitutional analysis; second, to express certain warnings against a too-confident assumption that “the intention of the framers” can actually be known; and, third, to consider briefly the possible significance today of the intention of the framers in case it could be discovered.

When speaking of freedom, La Bruyère's word comes to mind—that everything has been said and that we come too late to add anything. Yet an analysis of the concept of freedom may be warranted for the very reason that it is being used by everyone to refer to whatever he considers valuable, from obedience to law (positive or natural) to autonomy and economic abundance. I believe that it is possible to assign to “freedom” in its different aspects meanings which are emotively neutral and operationally testable, and thereby to rescue for the social sciences generally and for political science in particular an important set of concepts, closely related as they are to those of power and control.

One would have to start with disentangling the widely different senses in which “freedom” is being used indiscriminately. I shall deal with freedom in only two of its many meanings, interpersonal freedom and freedom of action. One of the difficulties will be to steer a middle course between the vagueness of conversational language and the awkwardness of a precise terminology; but I hope to demonstrate that such an endeavor is no idle exercise in semantics but a necessary prerequisite for the fruitful investigation of social and political phenomena.

Political differences among people are not a matter of chance; they are significantly related to such interdependent variables as party identification, issue orientation, and candidate preference. The national sample survey of 1,614 respondents conducted by the Survey Research Center during the 1952 presidential election gives us a sound basis for investigating this phenomenon: 1,200 of the respondents were classified as “middle class” or “working class.” Of the 389 middle class people, 69 per cent said they preferred the Republican candidate, but only 43 per cent of the 811 working class people expressed this preference (Table I).

It has been generally agreed since the publication of Professor Holcombe's The New Party Politics that the urbanization of American society has tended to produce class differences in our politics. The sectional alignments of the 19th century gave way to class and urban-rural politics in considerable measure as Americans continued to move to the cities. By the 1932 and 1936 elections there was a marked tendency for wealth and high prestige to be associated with Republican choice.

Paradoxically, the most urban of all our citizens, American Jews, have not divided their presidential vote along class lines. As a group they rapidly improved their jobs, extended their incomes, and became highly educated during the 1930's and 1940's. At the same time, they drastically switched their predominant major party choice from the Republican party to the Democrats. And within the group itself differences in income or occupational prestige appear to have been of practically no significance in the formulation of presidential vote preference since 1936.

The purpose of this article is threefold: first, to trace briefly the shifts in Jewish vote preference in recent decades through the use of aggregate election statistics; second, to probe the significant motivations of Jewish voters in 1952, primarily by analyzing the results of a sample survey conducted after the 1952 election in the city of Boston; and third, to suggest some of the basic reasons for Jewish resistance to class influences at the polls.

Of all the countries that have so far fallen under the rule of communism, Czechoslovakia is undoubtedly the one whose prewar system of government and ways of life and traditions approximated most nearly those of a typical Western European nation. This is particularly true of the administration of justice. Thus Czechoslovakia furnishes an ideal setting for a case study of the impact of the Marxist-Leninist conception of the administration of justice on a previously Western-oriented community.

Yugoslav federalism does not begin with the federal constitution adopted eight years ago. Federal ideas among the South Slavs followed the stirrings of nationalism and the struggle for independence at the end of the eighteenth and early in the nineteenth century as the logical solution for a situation in which the various tribes wished to be united but not unitary.

With the exception of the Serbian Highlanders in Montenegro, who had been enjoying a precarious independence since 1697, the South Slav tribes were divided between the multi-national Ottoman and Hapsburg Empires. They generally showed little political consciousness either as separate tribes or as members of the Slav family. The first integrating movement among them began in the last three decades of the eighteenth century in the shape of vague Pan-Slav ideas stimulated by the Russian advance towards the Balkans. Pan-Slavism appealed both to many South Slav intellectuals and to the illiterate masses, but was too vague and too weak to counteract the various religious, linguistic, political, and historical differences among the tribes. Moreover, the relations between the three major tribes were disturbed by violent territorial disputes: Macedonia was the bone of contention between the Serbs and the Bulgarians, while Bosnia and Herzegovina were disputed by the Serbs and the Croats.

The science of politics is a science of human behavior. It concerns itself with a specific segment of the activities of humans—those which either take place in, or have a clearly discernible effect upon, the formal governmental machinery of the community. The characteristic feature of a political scientist, therefore, is not his unique theoretical framework but his special empirical interest. Two main consequences follow. First, it is trivially true, and widely recognized, that the major concepts of other behavior sciences are necessarily an integral part of the study of political behavior. Second, it is equally true that, within the social sciences, it is the responsibility of political science to develop those elements of behavior theory that are particularly relevant for the analysis of action in the sphere of politics.

Much of current empirical and theoretical work in political analysis is organized around the observation that many political data can be conceived to represent results of mechanisms for decision-making used (consciously or unconsciously) by individuals or collectivities. In a similar fashion, students of a significant number of other types of behavior have tended to formulate their problems within a decision-making framework. When one examines these apparently disparate branches of behavior theory, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there exist potentially fruitful parallelisms among such theories as those of consumer behavior, administrative behavior, price setting, legislative enactments, propaganda, learning, foreign affairs, and social control.

At Philadelphia in 1787 the authors of the Constitution invented a new kind of federalism. In previous federal governments, the participating states were no more intimate than permanent allies, and citizens retained a primary loyalty to local governments. The federalism of 1787 achieved a converse effect, however, for it subordinated the member governments and created a nation. Likewise, while the earlier federalisms were notoriously prone to muddles in policy and stalemates in action, the American form turned out to give reasonably effective government, even in the short run. For both its nationalism and its effectiveness, therefore, it found favor with constitution makers elsewhere: in the larger Latin American states, in most of the new nations of the British Commonwealth, in the Germany of Weimar and Bonn, even, on paper at least, in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Probably the clearest demonstration of the prestige and utility of the American invention was the revision (in 1848) of the Swiss Confederation into a federalism patterned after the United States. The cantons thereby abandoned the one remaining survivor of the alliance type of federalism, represented in the middle ages by the Swabian, Rhenish, and Lombard leagues, as well as by the Swiss. And so it happens that about half the earth is presently ruled by federal governments—all of them reminiscent in one way or another of the Philadelphia invention.

The presidential election of 1952 offered a unique opportunity for the study of the effect of television upon voting behavior. By happy accident—the FCC freeze on the construction of new television stations—it was possible to find areas of the United States where there were counties within television reception range and also counties otherwise similar to these with respect to their past voting behavior, but outside the reception area. In these areas the presence or absence of television can be regarded, with reasonable safety, as a genuine independent variable; and if television influenced voting behavior, there is some hope of detecting its effects.

The uniqueness of the situation and its utility for testing hypotheses about the effects of television deserve some comment. Ordinarily, one is confronted in ecological studies with an insurmountable confusion of cause and effect. For example, had there not been an “artificial” restriction on the extension of the television network in 1952, we would not be safe in regarding a county without television as comparable with a county having television. For in that case, absence of television would imply remoteness from centers of population of any size, and we could not assume that influences upon voting behavior in such remote counties would be the same as in counties closer to population centers.

Communist international organizations and Communist parties the world over tend to follow a single strategy, which is always determined primarily by the needs of Soviet foreign policy paramount at the time. Corresponding to the requirements of the Soviet Union's “cold war” against the United States, a new strategy has gradually been adopted by international communism since 1947. Often non-Communist observers and sometimes even the Communists themselves seem unaware of the novelty of this strategy and they frequently obscure it by the use of terms more descriptive of older strategies, such as “united front” and “popular front.” It is the purpose of this essay to distinguish sharply between the various Communist strategies with a view to clarifying the characteristic features of the new strategy. It would, of course, be both easy and tempting to document and enliven such an attempt with innumerable examples from history and quotations from Communist literature. However, it would go beyond the intended scope of this brief analysis to do more than draw the broadest generalizations from the record of thirty-five years of international communism.

There is widespread discontent today with the state of English political theory. This does not seem to have been so a generation ago. In 1915, Ernest Barker certainly revealed uneasiness about some intellectual tendencies of the time, but his overriding belief was that the new psychology and the new awareness of the personality of groups within society would enrich thinking in the long run. Ten years later, Lewis Rockow was distinctly optimistic at the end of his Contemporary English Political Thought. Having surveyed the first quarter of this century, he was impressed by “the richness of the contemporary mind” and the boldness of its political speculation. How different is the self-judgment of our own day. “In the present generation,” declared Professor Catlin in 1952, “England is in a poorer way as a fount of political ideas than she has been for centuries.” There were only a few men—Laski, Barker, Oakeshott, E. H. Carr—whom he would put in a high category, while apart from them he went on to say, “a drear darkness has fallen on British political theory which was so bright.” A little later, and speaking of the world in general rather than of England alone, Professor Cobban lamented “a general tendency to cease thinking about society in terms of political theory.” He could find no original thought since the eighteenth century and concluded that the idea of democracy had become a mere shibboleth—and not even a serviceable one, since all camps used it. He felt that the study of politics had taken a wrong turn, being corrupted by a neglect of the moral element, by an indifference to the practical problems besetting men, and by a deep pessimism about the possibility of resolving the dilemma between “moral man and immoral society.” Eric Voegelin seems at first to strike a more cheerful note when he speaks of “the revival, not to say the outburst, of political philosophy at Oxford in recent years,” but his article is critical of some of its tendencies and even goes so far at one point as to refer to its “distressing state.”

The conduct of a polemic focusses attention on the differences between two points of view to the neglect of their continuity and convergences. No modern polemic better exemplifies this than the controversy between the proponents of capitalism and of socialism. Each tends to define itself as the antithesis of the other; even the uncommitted bystander, rare though he be, is likely to think of the two as if they were utterly alien systems.

There have always been some, however, who have taken exception to this sharp contrast between socialism and capitalism and who have insisted that there are significant similarities between the two. One of these, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, maintained that socialism like capitalism involved an overbearing preoccupation with economic interests. In both socialist and capitalist societies, Durkheim argued, economic concerns were at the center of attention. In Durkheim's view, neither capitalism nor socialism deemed it necessary to bridle materialistic ends; neither society subordinated pecuniary interests to some higher, governing, moral norms. Therefore, “from Durkheim's point of view,” writes Talcott Parsons, “socialism and laissez-faire individualism are of the same piece.”