Max Weber has often been criticized for advocating a wertfrei, ethically neutral approach in the social sciences and for thereby denying to man, in the words of Leo Strauss, “any science, empirical or rational, any knowledge, scientific or philosophic, of the true value system.” On the other hand, Carl Friedrich points out that Weber's “ideal-type analysis led him to introduce value judgments into his discussion of such issues as bureaucracy.” There is some justification for both these criticisms. Indeed, a characteristic of Weber's work is that it can be and has been subjected to opposite criticisms, not only in this respect but also in others. Historians object to his disregard for the specific historical conditions under which the social phenomena he analyzes have taken place, which sometimes leads him to combine historical events that occurred centuries apart into a conception of a social system. Sociologists, in contrast, accuse him of being preoccupied with interpreting unique historical constellations, such as Western capitalism, instead of studying recurrent social phenomena which make it possible to develop testable generalizations about social structures. His methodology is attacked as being neo-Kantian, but his concept of Verstehen is decried as implying an intuitionist method. While his theories are most frequently cited in contradistinction to those of Marx, they have also been described as basically similar to Marx's.

For many reasons Rousseau's writings on international relations should interest students both of Rousseau and of world politics. The former have been celebrating the 200th anniversary of Emile and of The Social Contract. Those works, and the Discourse on Inequality have been analyzed incessantly and well. But Rousseau's ideas on war and peace, dispersed in various books and fragments, some of which are lost, have had only occasional attention, and some of that is of the hit-and-miss variety. Incomplete as his own treatment of the relations between states remains, the frequency and intensity of his references indicate the depth of his concern.

Since 1959 one of the most noted ideological issues in the Sino-Soviet conflict has been the question of the “inevitability of war.” Krushchev had brought up this subject at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in February 1956, where he proclaimed as no longer applicable “a Marxist-Leninist precept that wars are inevitable as long as imperialism exists.” His objective in this exercise in revisionism was to rid the foreign policy and the international image of the Soviet Union of a doctrinal liability. Coming to terms with the realities of the thermo-nuclear stalemate, the Soviet leaders had decided to emphasize “peaceful coexistence” (interpreted by them as political, ideological and economic struggle) as the “highest form of class struggle” and the road to victory over Western capitalism. On the ideological plane, this optimistic vision clearly called for the scrapping of a tenet-inevitability of war- according to which, given present-day military technology, the triumph of socialism would have been precluded by the disappearance of the human species. This, and no more, lay behind Khrushchev's pronouncement of 1956, since raised to an article of Soviet dogma, that war can be avoided. “Avoidability of war” became the doctrinal complement to the global strategy and propaganda line of “peaceful coexistence.”

A recent Herblock cartoon in the Washington Post depicts three bare-footed backwoodsmen. The oldest and most tattered of them (labeled “poll tax”) lies wounded, his head propped against a boulder, his rifle abandoned near his side. As the other rifle-bearing rustics-identified as “literacy tests” and “scare tactics”- bend sorrowfully over him the older man says, “I think them Feds got me, boys, but I know you'll carry on.” Perhaps it is premature to anticipate the ratification of the anti-poll tax amendment proposed by the 87th Congress as the newest addition to the federal constitution. No doubt the cartoonist is correct, however, in picturing both “literacy tests” and “scare tactics” as less vulnerable to federal government attack. These presumed barriers to equal participation by Negroes in the politics of the South may “carry on” for some time to come.

The use of spatial ideas to interpret party competition is a universal phenomenon of modern politics. Such ideas are the common coin of political journalists and have extraordinary influence in the thought of political activists. Especially widespread is the conception of a liberal-conservative dimension on which parties maneuver for the support of a public that is itself distributed from left to right. This conception goes back at least to French revolutionary times and has recently gained new interest for an academic audience through its ingenious formalization by Downs and others. However, most spatial interpretations of party competition have a very poor fit with the evidence about how large-scale electorates and political leaders actually respond to politics. Indeed, the findings on this point are clear enough so that spatial ideas about party competition ought to be modified by empirical observation. I will review here evidence that the “space” in which American parties contend for electoral support is very unlike a single ideological dimension, and I will offer some suggestions toward revision of the prevailing spatial model.

“… [M]ost Canadians who are aware of the subject,” says the author of a recent essay, “feel that the [Canadian] Senate has outlived its usefulness and has become a superfluous appendix to the political system. Indeed, the prestige and authority of the Senate has probably fallen to its lowest level in Canadian history.” Considering the disparagements which have been tossed at the Senate, the allusions to “… genial old gentlemen who … live on, undisturbed, meeting a few weeks in the year, bumbling and grumbling at the government, making a few good speeches, and drawing an annual indemnity [now $10,000] for less work than any other citizens of Canada,” this was a restrained indictment. Nevertheless, in 1961 and early 1962, the Senate was also being extolled in some quarters as the keeper of Canada's conscience. Yet others saw it as a crafty player of rank politics and as an infringer on constitutional propriety. The Prime Minister threatened Senate reform and the injection of Senate misbehavior as an election issue. The Senate had seemingly come to life, and in so doing thrust itself into the center of Canadian political controversy. The purpose of this article is to examine the problems surrounding the position of the Senate in the Canadian political system, through an analysis of the agitated discussions of 1961-62.

A survey of the literature of the last decade in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field which has come to be known—rather imprecisely—as civil-military relations, reveals a large number of descriptive and prescriptive, operational and theoretical studies, but little unity of focus or method. The interested shopper finds himself in a veritable department store filled with a wide assortment—including those in the bargain basement. Spurred on by wartime experiences and Cold War exigencies, historians and social scientists, physical scientists and journalists—above all in the United States—have covered reams of paper with discussions of the relationship between arms and men, war and peace, strategy and policy, defense and diplomacy. Displaying a great variety of analytical depth, breadth and sophistication, some of these studies have advanced our knowledge of civil-military relations—particularly in contemporary America—while others have failed to survive changes in international politics and weapons technology. Some writers, both of conservative and liberal orientation, have focused on the “appropriate” role for the military in state and society; others have sought to remain detached from such normative questions in order to concentrate on micro-descriptive phenomenal studies or more or less abstract macro-analytical theoretical models. Between the earth-bound descriptive and prescriptive studies on the one hand, and the soaring theoretical efforts on the other has loomed a wide gap, all too familiar to students of international relations, comparative politics, and public administration, waiting to be bridged—if bridged it can be—by empirical theories of civil-military relationships.

The study of international relations has been considerably advanced in recent years by the application of findings from other areas of the social sciences. These have included decision-making, game theory, conflict, bargaining, communication, negotiation, systems, geography, attitudes, and simulation. International relations scholars such as Morton Kaplan, Charles McClelland, Richard C. Snyder, and Harold Sprout have built important bridges between international relations and other disciplines. It has been fortunate that such innovators have often found men from other disciplines, such as Kenneth Boulding, Harold Guetzkow, Charles Osgood, and Anatol Rapoport, in the middle of the bridge. The volumes of the Journal of Conflict Resolution offer one example of how far this remarkable effort at cross-fertilization has gone.

Students of international politics often state that power is to us what money is to the economist: the medium via which transactions are observed and measured. Further, there seems to be a solid consensus that power is a useful concept only in its relative sense; such objective measures as military manpower, technological level, and gross national product are viewed as helpful, but incomplete, indices. The concept does not come to life except as it is observed in action, and that action can be found only when national power is brought into play by nations engaged in the process of influencing one another. Until that occurs, we have no operational indices of power, defined here as the capacity to influence. In this paper, then, my purpose is to seek a clarification of the concept of power by the presentation of a formal, analytic model of bilateral inter-nation influence.

During the past half dozen years or so, beginning in the mid-1950's, a somewhat revolutionary change has been taking place in the research orientation of the political science profession toward what traditionally has been called the study of public law. Typical of the metamorphosis now in process are the recent publication of a volume of research studies in judicial behavior in a yearbook series dedicated to the analysis of political behavior from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural point of view, and the contributions of several political scientists to a law journal which recently devoted an entire issue to a symposium on the prediction and measurement of judicial behavior. Although it would hardly be accurate to say that the new approach is characteristic of anything approaching a majority of the political scientists who are teachers of constitutional law, the judicial process, and allied subjects, it is certainly no exaggeration to state that the bulk of the research on these same subjects, published in political science journals during this period, has been produced by the behavioralists, as they tend to be called. The purpose of this paper is to summarize this recent research in judicial behavior.