It is a paradox of British politics that, while party discipline is such that no government has to depend on Opposition support in order to pursue the foreign policy of its choice, this very fact has been one reason for the normal consensus on questions of foreign policy between the two front benches. The greater the prospects of Opposition leaders forming the next government the greater the discipline they tend to exert over their ranks, and the more international realities are imposed upon the kind of fantasy-thinking to which a party denied power for many years is especially prone. These tendencies have been notable in British politics since the war; they are likely to continue, given that the Labour Party can control the forces of disruption unleashed by its recent defeat. In the five general elections since the wartime Coalition Government foreign policy issues have not merely occupied a minor role; they have been regarded by party leaders, though not always by the rank and file, as though they were primarily questions of personal qualifications for conducting policies the main outlines of which were not in dispute. At the general election in the autumn of 1959, although disagreements between Government and Opposition had undoubtedly grown since the quiet accords of 1955, the campaign turned, if on international issues at all, on the eligibility of Right or Left to represent the country in negotiations in which the likely British position was largely agreed on both sides. The Leader of the Opposition recognised that this was so, although his explanation for it was that Ministers had been forced to accept Labour's policy recommendations.

World War II and Cold War I have influenced the moral appraisal of diplomacy much as they have influenced all systematic analysis of international relations. Commentators are now more aware that the wide gap between what is and what ought to be cannot be nullified by exhortation or legal formula or inexorable institutional evolution. They appreciate more profoundly the structure and function of power. They have learned from Mukden, Wal-Wal and Munich that accommodation can be more costly than resoluteness, and that an ethic dissociated from the world in which men live cannot give adequate moral guidance for men's living. Nevertheless the commentators remain reluctant, on both political and moral grounds, to accept Realpolitik's ethical outlook on the use of force. The shortcomings of yesterday's total victory have been too sobering; and Hiroshima's destruction has left a scar upon the conscience. Moral judgments on diplomacy are accordingly less simplist, less absolute, more troubled and uneasy than in the pre-war decades.

The moral theories that have attracted most attention among students of international politics are either Protestant Christian or secular humanist in their basic orientations. This is not to say that these orientations are clearly distinguishable in any particular statement; more or less of them can be found in Niebuhr, Wolfers, Butterfield, Lefever, and Osgood among others. Less well known is a view that can be classified as Catholic or Scholastic. In the hope that this could illuminate, if it does not modify, the problems and the answers as conceived by the better known theories, the present study will put forth such a view. The position will be stated first, with such explanation as might be needed for understanding it, and some indication of differences from the Protestant and humanist conceptions. The theory can then be applied to varying hypothetical projections of the contemporary international scene.

This paper results from a larger study of capital budgeting and programming in Philadelphia. Our intention here is to present some findings bearing upon the role of long-range planning primarily, though not exclusively, in metropolitan governments.

Much, though surely not all, of city planning today is directly related to capital programming. This is especially so in large cities for at least three major reasons: basic physical plant and utilities are often run down or obsolescent for a complex of historical reasons; many routine programs are “capital-intensive” and are becoming more so under the impact of new technology and professional standards; and urban renewal has entailed an increasingly entrepreneurial approach to land-use planning. Capital programming itself is a process of separate budgetary decision on capital items, however defined. The rationale for the separate decision process values “planning” highly and emphasizes fiscal planning of outlay that is loan-financed and physical planning of projects distinguished by “lumpiness” and/or longevity. It follows from these considerations that the planning and programming of physical improvements cannot be sharply separated from the remainder of municipal policy. City planning as applied to capital programming has to do not only with land use but with most functional programs and with fiscal policy.

While some long-range municipal planning will probably take place in the line departments, the focal point of planning is likely to be the review and assembly of the overall capital program, at which point fiscal, programmatic and land-use planning all come into play even if the principal competence and concern of the planning agency is in land-use planning. The planning agency can be conceived as performing any or all of the four roles of research, integration, allocation, and provision of the long view. While conceptually distinguishable, these roles tend to merge in the practice of capital program review.

In the past seventy years, lasting reorientations of the national electorate have taken place in two periods, centering about the presidential elections of 1896 and 1918. Most other presidential elections have involved relatively uniform swings of states or counties toward one party or the other; Louis Bean summarized this phenomenon in his chapter title, “As Your State Goes, So Goes the Nation.” But the occasions when this uniform swing does not occur are of special interest, because if the reorientations persist they can mark the injection of new issues into national and state politics for a generation. Lubell noted the importance of the “Al Smith revolution” which preceded the “Roosevelt revolution”; and Key, naming these phenomena “critical elections,” went on to show that Bryan's candidacy in 1896 marked an earlier major reorientation of the electorate. He defined a critical election as one in which “the depth and intensity of electoral involvement are high, in which more or less profound readjustments occur in the relations of power within the community, and in which new and durable electoral groupings are formed.”

Attacks upon administrative secrecy are a commonplace of congressional politics. By resolution, investigation, and the threat of even more punitive sanctions, Congress has repeatedly asserted its belief that executive officials should not be allowed to withhold documents and testimony at their own discretion. The most graphic recent evidence of this legislative concern has been provided by a House Special Subcommittee on Government Information. Over the past three years, this group, headed by Representative Moss of California, has made far-ranging efforts to expose and dramatize the evils of executive secrecy.

The long-standing congressional resentment against administrative efforts to conceal information has very visible roots in considerations of institutional self-interest, since the performance of legislative functions in central areas of policy-making and administrative oversight demands frequent access to facts that only executive officials can supply. In the field of defense policy, especially, congressional dependence upon executive information is acute, and bitter controversy has been sparked by executive refusals to release data bearing on such matters as the missile program, foreign-aid expenditures, and differences within the high command over the best way to spend the defense dollar.

Few forms of explanation of political phenomena are more common than the assertion that the success of some group was facilitated by the “apathy” of other groups with opposing interests. If apathy is not an observable phenomenon in a political context because it connotes an individual's mental state, quiescence is observable. It is the purpose of this paper to specify some conditions associated with political quiescence in the formation of business regulation policies. Although the same general conditions are apparently applicable to the formation of public policies in any area, the argument and the examples used here focus upon the field of government regulation of business in order to make the paper manageable and to permit more intensive treatment.

Political quiescence toward a policy area can be assumed to be a function either of lack of interest—whether it is simple indifference or stems rather from a sense of futility about the practical prospects of securing obviously desirable changes—or of the satisfaction of whatever interest the quiescent group may have in the policy in question. Our concern here is with the forms of satisfaction. In analyzing the various means by which it can come to pass, the following discussion distinguishes between interests in resources (whether goods or freedoms to act) and interests in symbols connoting the suppression of threats to the group in question. Few political scientists would doubt, on the basis of common sense evidence, that public policies have value to interested groups both as symbols and as instruments for the allocation of more tangible values. The political process has been much less thoroughly studied as a purveyor of symbols, however; and there is a good deal of evidence, to be presented below, that symbols are a more central component of the process than is commonly recognized in political scientists' explicit or implicit models.

However careful one ought to be not to indulge in exaggerated conceptualism—an approach which easily degenerates into mere terminological exercise—a number of political terms in constant use have meanings which call for clarification. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to two such terms: election and appointment. We use them regularly in teaching, observation and summing-up of institutions as if they were antonyms, without really bothering to determine wherein the supposed antithesis lies. Of course, neither term denotes an a priori category; both are names for historically evolved procedures, with many variations resulting from attempts to adjust them to preconceived ideas or to environmental factors. But even with full allowance for these variations, and with due regard for every-day common usage, certain discrepancies remain in our use of them which make for unclear thinking.

To give a few instances: a chairman of a company (in the United States, the chairman of the board) is “elected” by the board's members. The same group of persons, sitting in the same capacity, may go through exactly the same motions when selecting a branch manager, and yet we think of him as “appointed.” And is the company's managing director (in American parlance, the corporation president) “appointed” or “elected”? Or to turn to the field which is nearer to reader and writer alike, the field of assigning people to functions of a public, more particularly of a political, nature: is a cabinet in France under the fourth Republic or in Israel “elected” because it does not assume its functions unless and until the legislature has confirmed it by vote? Is a non-political public office to be considered “elective,” if the assignment of the office-holder is made in the final count by a group of persons deciding by unanimous concurrence or by vote? No one will question this statement in the case of judges elected by popular vote; but what about certain judges as well as the General commanding-in-chief in Switzerland, who are “elected” by the Swiss Federal Assembly? And what about civil servants or holders of other public offices whose selection was decided upon, in whole or in part, by a selection board or by some similar collective group? Somehow we think of such office-holders as appointive, despite the procedure of election which took place in their cases.