Sweeping reapportionment of state legislatures according to the principle of “one man, one vote” now seems assured. Some very clear judicial notes have been coming out of the political thicket. At least six of the justices have found that long-forbidden territory wholly congenial. To the political animals — the lions, unicorns, bears, foxes, elephants, and donkeys — we must now add Br'er Rabbit “born and bred in a briar patch.” And yet, despite the volumes of discussion, some issues in reapportionment have been inadequately discussed and invite an attempt to clear the air.

COMMENTATORS puzzling over the question of whether the Brazilian insurrection of March-April, 1964, was a revolution or simply a coup d'état have speculated on the role of a faintly mysterious civilian organization called IPES (Instituto de Pesquisas Estudos Sociais) in the rebellion. IPES is one of a large number of organized civilian groups now covering all of Latin America except for Haiti and Cuba, groups which can be generically termed Neoliberal. The Brazilian rebellion is undoubtedly the greatest success the Neoliberals have had so far in their four or five years of existence (only three of the more than forty Neoliberal organizations were founded before 1959), and the only occasion on which they have been directly (though not uniquely) responsible for the overthrow of an incumbent regime. What the future role of IPES and similar groups will be in Brazil, and whether the transformation of the country will be a truly revolutionary one, remains to be seen, but the power mustered by the Neoliberals in half a decade is remarkable, and a factor which will have to be dealt with in the future.

This Article will explore four major questions. Is there a grand democratic design to be detected in John F. Kennedy's political philosophy? Was the design coherent? May it still profitably guide us today? And does it have enduring significance?

Perhaps these questions ask too much of a President whose primary task is statesmanship and not philosophy or science. Yet if political theory is a “critical study concerned with harmoniously relating the normative, empirical, and prudential components of politics,” then even a focus on Kennedy's public policy inevitably throws light on his goals and his grasp of political reality. And as the statesman seeks (in the light of political possibility) to advance his policies in order to fulfill his purposes, he must in some fashion grapple with the fundamental problems of politics. Consequently, recognizing that Kennedy's approach to the key problems of political philosophy will not be critical, comprehensive, or complete, we may still want to explore his approach in the context of his own grand democratic design.

IN POLITICS the church is only a theoretician. The religious communities as such should be concerned with political doctrine, and with clarifying and keeping wide open the legitimate options for choice. Their task is not the determination of policy. Their special orientation upon politics is, in a sense, an exceedingly limited one. They need to stand in awe before people nowadays called political “decision-makers,” or rather before the majesty of topmost political agency. Political decision and action is an image of the majesty of God, who also rules by particular decrees. God says, “Let there be … ”; and His word becomes deed and actuality. So also earthly magistrates have the high and lonely responsibility of declaring what shall actually be done. Allowing for the limitations that surround even the highest magistrate of a great nation, it is still the case that he creatively shapes events by decisions that must be particular decisions going beyond doctrine. He must actualize what is to be from among a number of legitimate choices. The majesty of political rulership is that it is always a triumph over doctrine through right doctrine, a victory over generalities through the proper generalities. It injects life-giving, or at least actuality-giving, deeds into words over words and beyond words.

THE common note of most writing about strategic policy is that it accepts the governmental framework within which strategic policy-making proceeds in the United States as given, largely beyond analysis or substantial change. This tendency is quite natural and justifiable. Military force is presumably in the service of the nation's fundamental values. A nation's form of government is obviously basic to its ideals and purposes. It is important, however, for the defense analyst as well as the interested citizen to approach the relation of military policy and governmental institutions from a reversed perspective, one that seeks to identify the constraints that the American governmental system and the consent requirements that it establishes impose on effective strategic policy development and operations.

Social or political proposals of the “ideal polity,” some of which amounted to outright Utopias, came to be fairly common during the fourth and third centuries B.C. In addition to Plato's famed Republic (which is said to have been influenced in part by Hippodamus as well as by certain Pythagorean ideas) and Antisthenes' somewhat “unorthodox” social views, Diogenes of Sinope, Iambulus and Zeno the Stoic, for instance, wrote on the “ideal city.” Also, a great many treatises On Kingship, which frequently were nothing more than part of that “mirror of princes literature” which can be traced back at least to Antisthenes, were authored during the same period. But it will be noticed that these relatively early Polities, including that of Zeno, uniformly advocated a small and highly articulated city-state with extremely narrow limits and relatively limited objectives rather than a pan-humanitarian or cosmopolitan ideal. The well-known Stoic cosmopolitanism, which some scholars have called the philosophic corollary of Alexander's conquest, is definitely of later date, later even than Zeno's widely known Republic, which still adheres to the confining notions of the traditional (and fateful) Greek particularism. This, in turn, compels us to distinguish between the early Zeno who in his original dependence on early Cynic teachings apparently shared in this limited outlook, and the late Zeno, who was able to conceive the whole universe as one single great city of gods and men without distinction of race or nationality. It is safe to assume, therefore, that Zeno's Republic is one of his earliest works and perhaps his earliest.

By The Time of the federal election in April, 1963, most thinking Canadians were probably aware that the unity of their nation was in peril. The main issues before the electorate were the instability of the Progressive Conservative government, Canada's persistent economic problems, and her role in the defense of North America. But many commentators thought that the major question which the new government would face was the failure of Canada's two race to reach a satisfactory modus vivendi.

THE outlook implicit in eschatology — that worldly events are moving toward a climax in which history will be terminated, and its trends overruled or fulfilled, according to a divine determination — is dim and implausible in the modern mind. The Biblical and Augustinian pictures of the end of history, the resurrection of the dead, and the Last Judgment, are likely to seem the most outworn vestments of religious faith; and even without these particular vestments, many find it difficult to conceive soberly of an ordained end of the world and history. This is especially clear in the case of the nonreligious. Their main ideologies during the past century or more, such as liberal progressivism, socialism, and communism, have all, in their typical forms, presupposed the finality of earthly developments. But even among religious people, the weakness of eschatology is manifest. It is true that there are some theologians, such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Rudolf Bultmann, who have been concerned with eschatological ideas. But outside of small, intellectual circles eschatology has been largely monopolized by popular sects tending to specialize in lurid visions of “hellfire and brimstone.” The enfeeblement of eschatology even among the religious is apparent in the political outlook which is perhaps more intimately connected than any other in recent times with religious faith — conservatism. Burke and his followers have had remarkably little concern with the question of history's being ended and overruled. One can feel that in his attack on the French Revolution Burke was thinking less of God's judgment on all of history than he was of what he believed to be His manifest presence in history's residue of traditions and institutions. Thus, neither on the “left” nor on the “right,” and neither among the irreligious nor among the religious, are men today very much inclined to envision their history as subject to any sort of climactic interruption and judgment.

SINCE World War II and particularly in the last decade game theory has acquired broad interest, attention, and application by behavioral scientists. Basically, game theory is an attempt to simulate mathematically a situation of decision-making so as to discover the most rational decision. Situations involving two or more “persons” (that is, sets of individuals, groups or environments with isomorphic interests and/or capabilities) can be simulated. Currently game theory is employed in both university and corporate research for studying problems in the areas of economics, sociology, political science, international relations, and militarydefense strategy.

The Jordan River has recently become one of the most politically important and controversial rivers of the present day. Ever since the late 1950's, when the Arabs became fully aware of Israel's determination to implement her long-range plans to divert Jordan River water to irrigate the Negev, UN and Western officials concerned with Middle Eastern affairs have looked forward with great foreboding to the time when the first major stage of Israel's project would near its completion, for they expected this to produce another Middle Eastern crisis. Arab-Israeli tension over the water question has grown steadily and began to reach alarming proportions by late 1963 and early 1964. Fortunately the decision of the Arab leaders, in an unprecedented summit meeting held in January, 1964, to use means other than military force to frustrate Israel's water diversion plans precluded any immediate threat of an armed conflict between the contending parties. Nevertheless, because the fundamental disagreements remain unresolved, there is great likelihood that, for a long time to come, the world will find the Middle Eastern water dispute a potentially explosive situation. But few Westerners are adequately aware of the many complex and serious ramifications that are actually involved. In the past, even UN and Western officials tended oversimplify and overlook many aspects of this controversy and naively sought to deal with it on a technical and economic level despite the fact that the primary obstacles were emotional and political in nature.

ONE of the major issues over which the Russians and the Chinese have disagreed is the emphasis to be placed on violent or nonviolent tactics in the “national liberation movement” in underdeveloped countries. Recent developments in Viet Nam have focused new attention on this dimension of the Sino-Soviet conflict. American bombings of North Viet Nam have elicited widespread protests in the West based on the fear that this militant response to the South Viet Nam “Liberation Front” portended the involvement of the United States in a major war on the Asian continent that might escalate into a nuclear holocaust. Some commentators have also expressed the fear that the American military reaction might close the split in the Sino-Soviet alliance and drive the two Communist giants together. It is perhaps timely then that we turn our attention to the study of the major features of Soviet strategy regarding Asia and reexamine the earlier phases of Moscow's involvement in underdeveloped countries as they emerged after the Second World War. This reexamination might provide insight into the conditions prompting the Soviet militant strategy between 1948 and 1951 and the subsequent tempered withdrawal and retreat from the risk of a direct confrontation with the West; it might also shed light on Moscow's formula for calculating costs and consequences and illuminate the roots of present conflicting Russian and Chinese approaches to the national liberation movement in underdeveloped countries.

Burke is recognized as master of a language highly figurative, full of grace and telling images. But the imagery of nonfiction prose is not so much studied as the imagery of poetry, drama, and fiction. It should be. It reveals a great deal about a thinker. I have not studied Burke's imagery to spy on his personal life, conscious or subconscious, as some students of other writers do, nor have I tried to evaluate his style. I have used it as an oblique way of getting at the meaning of some of his concepts and I think it reveals something about his place in the history of ideas, making him a stalwart of eighteenth-century ways of thinking, instead of a harbinger of the nineteenth century.

ALTHOUGH the dynamics of American politics demand perpetual and creative alterations in the constitutional system, the building of the original complex of arrangements on the foundation provided by the framers was probably the most precarious undertaking in America's history. It was the task of Congress to turn the blueprint for a government into an operating reality, and all at one time. Any structural weakness might have brought down the entire edifice or, at least, would have forced some rebuilding at a later time under new stresses and strains. The establishment of the Supreme Court was peculiarly significant since, paradoxically, the Constitution deemed it as coordinate and co-equal with the Presidency and the Congress, and yet the Court was a creature of Congress in the sense that its detailed form and substance depended upon a statutory enactment. Had the framers spelled out in Article III the precise structure of a federal judicial system, prescribed the detailed nature of the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction, and explicitly authorized judicial review, much of the conflict which continues to this day might have been avoided. Instead, the Constitution left these important questions open to legislative discretion and the stage was set for frequent legislative-judicial altercations which at times have almost reached an irreparable constitutional crisis.

THE tendency among interpreters of Rousseau's political ideas has been to give, at most, cursory attention to the role played by religion in his thought. Although it is impossible to overlook the long penultimate chapter on civil religion in the Social Contract, analysts have generally viewed it as, at best, a Machiavelli-like attempt to provide emotional “cement” for the state or, at worst, as a lamentable and eccentric departure from Rousseau's main emphasis on the realization of freedom through democracy.

Presidential responsibility for foreign policy is something of a commonplace today. Indeed, most analysts see Presidential dominance in foreign affairs as a more or less necessary result of the conditions of the times, which often demand the kind of unified and prompt action which only the Presidency is capable of in the American system. Yet it can be argued that the very factors which have brought Presidential conduct of foreign relations into the national spotlight have simultaneously worked to limit the decisiveness of his control over foreign policy. The period since World War I, and particularly since World War II, has seen the United States becoming more deeply involved in what can be called “positive” policy, policy that requires financial support, or new administrative authorizations, or the assignment of new personnel. And the natural corollary of such policies is the growth in significance of that element of government, which must give legislative authorization for any such undertakings. There has been, in a sense, a reassertion of traditional separation of powers in the area of foreign policy.

Current American problems with respect to the treatment of minority groups have led to the return to popularity of the terminology of a philosophy of inherent rights. Although in popular debates the concepts of “civil rights” and “basic rights” are used loosely, without much regard for a comprehensive jurisprudence, they recall a philosophy of law at odds with pragmatism, a philosophy whose roots go back to ancient Stoicism, and a philosophy consistently maintained and applied by a Justice of the Supreme Court, Stephen Johnson Field, during his thirty-four years on the highest court. In the currents of popular legal opinion a few decades ago, all notions of “rights” tended to be scorned by publicists in legal and political thought, in favor of the more factual studies of power and interest groups. This was done in the name of pragmatism and realism. Although such pragmatic thought continues to hold sway in the economic areas of law and politics, in the area of the law of persons there is a tension between recognition of group demands and formal, moral appeals to law and equality. And where the pragmatists and activists of a generation ago placed their hopes for progress on the flexibility of arbitration boards and administrative tribunals, the locus of hopes, power, and controversy has now shifted to the system of formal law and, in particular, to the Supreme Court. In this shift, the position of Justice Field has likewise shifted: anathema to the proponents of basing all law on considerations of economic interests, because of his “sterile formalism,” he has recently been quoted extensively by Chief Justice Warren in a crucial opinion, and if on the Court today, would be considered an “activist.”

Several aspects of Woodrow Wilson's political thought recurred time and again in his academic writings, privately expressed opinions, official statements, and even in his actions. They formed the framework for much of his political life. One of these was his belief that, of all kinds of government, the best was that kind that was representative of and responsible to the people. Another was a concomitant of the first: a faith in the inherent ability of the people to know what was both right and good for them. Wilson also believed in the sanctity of contracts, in the duty of an honorable gentleman or an honorable government to keep pledges once made. There were, of course, many other facets of his political thought, but these three principles run like red threads through all of it. Like the tributaries of a mighty river, they converged early in 1920 to form the nucleus of one of Wilson's most daring — and tragic — plans of political action. They inspired his appeal for “a great and solemn referendum” on the League of Nations issue in the United States.

THE Goldwater phenomenon is the great mystery of American politics. His nomination as presidential candidate by the Republican Party and his campaign for election have profoundly challenged accepted theories of American politics. Merely to enumerate some of the puzzling questions suggests how badly we need explanations.

“MANY of the troubles of today reflect the distraction of minds to which a sane and balanced view of society has never been adequately presented. … No other writer … has the classical strength and sanity of Professor Green, who was never more thorough and at home than when dealing with those questions affecting citizenship in and for which, it may be said, he lived” (Bosanquet).

To Most of the world, Don Luigi Sturzo is known, if at all, as an astute political thinker and as founder of the Popolare Party in Italy following the First World War. Sturzo's own political career began in 1905, when he was elected mayor of the Sicilian town of Caltagirone, in spite of the fact that he himself was a priest. As he attests, he was brought to engage actively in politics, then as well as in 1918, when founding the Popolare, because he saw that social action, which his own town in Sicily needed badly, was impotent without the necessary political action to aid in carrying out reform.