When President Roosevelt proclaimed the “Four Freedoms” in 1941, he accepted a new conception of human rights far removed from the natural rights of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The conception of rights which inspired the British Bill of Rights (1689), the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) is grounded in simple natural law notions. Man was believed to have a fixed and unalterable nature, to be endowed with reason, which gave him certain rights without which he ceased to be a human being. These natural rights, summed up in the Lockean formula of “life, liberty and property” (later broadened to include the pursuit of happiness), were largely concerned with protecting the individual person against governmental power. Each man was seen as entitled to a personal sphere of autonomy, more especially of religious conviction and property; the inner and the outer man in his basic self-realization and self-fulfillment. These rights depended in turn upon the still more crucial right to life-that is to say, to the self itself in terms of physical survival and protection against bodily harm. This right to life was recognized even by absolutists, like Thomas Hobbes. It was believed immutable, inalienable, inviolable. Locke exclaimed at one point that these rights no one had the power to part with, and hence no government could ever acquire the right to violate them.

Much of this essay falls within the realm of speculative thought. Since it is in the nature of speculation that one's words may appear immodest and his conclusions often eccentric, I shall state my arguments at the outset without pausing to elaborate them. The arguments themselves are quite simple. Each of them will reappear later on clothed, I hope, in more attractive dress.

Two varieties of political thought contended for the allegiance of the American people at the founding of the new nation. The two seem irreconcilable in certain crucial respects.

One was notable for its expression of friendship and brotherhood, for its insistence upon individual spontaneity and uniqueness, and for its disdain for material concerns; it was intuitive and unsystematic in temper. The other displayed a preoccupation with social order, procedural rationality, and the material bases of political association and division; it was abstract and systematic in temper.

The exponents of the latter point of view, having put their opponents to rout, assumed the responsibility for organizing the government and politics of the country. They enacted their psychological, social, economic, and political theories into fundamental law, then erected insititutions designed to train generations of citizens to prefer certain goods and conduct over all others.

We present in this paper an economic analysis of American federalism as a system of shared functions. Recent political studies have suggested that the federal, state and local governments may be viewed as closely meshed parts of a single system. Functions are not neatly parceled out among the many units, or along the three planes, of the federal system. Rather, it is difficult to find any governmental activity performed by a given plane of government which does not involve the other planes in important and continuing responsibilities. Decision-making power, as well as administration, is shared. Formally, as in grant-in-aid programs, and informally, as in the cooperation of federal, state, and local law enforcement officers, the three planes of government work substantially as one in the fulfillment of common purposes.

It is possible to formulate an economic counterpart to the hypothesis of political sharing, as follows: Despite apparent diversities in the fiscal activities of the federal government, on the one hand, and state-local governments, on the other, an essential consistency marks the economic impacts of these two planes of government. In political analysis the sharing hypothesis relies for demonstration on descriptive studies of the common involvement of the federal, state, and local governments in the entire range of their activities. More quantitative criteria can be applied in testing economic impacts.

Three types of economic impacts of government can be distinguished: on the allocation of resources between public and private use; on the level of aggregate demand (income and employment); and on the distribution of income among households. These are the major categories of economic impact with which the economist deals. They are distinct areas: the resource-shifting effect of government, for example, is analytically separate from the equalization-of-income effect.

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.

It has been a quarter century since the President's Committee on Administration Management, chaired by Louis Brownlow, blessed by Franklin Roosevelt, heralded a major innovation in our constitutional arrangements: substantial staffing for the Presidency distinct from other parts of the executive establishment —in Edward Corwin's phrase an “Institutionalized Presidency.” The Executive Office, which throughout our prior history had been essentially a “private office” in the English sense, was to become a “President's Department.” So it did. Presidential agencies have filled the building which in 1937 housed the State Department (and in 1913 had housed War and Navy, too). Presidential aides outrank in all but protocol the heads of most executive departments.

We date this development from Brownlow's Report. In the sphere of presidential staffing, its proposals for the most part were put into practice with promptness and fidelity. And practice, for the most part, has been kind to the proposals, has sustained—indeed has vindicated—key ideas behind them. What a rare experience for an advisory report! It gives the work of the Committee special standing which we properly acknowledge as we meet professionally in 1963, the Silver Anniversary of their devoted service to the country and to our profession.

In the life of all organizations there seems to be a general tendency toward a state of affairs called “equilibrium” by the favorably disposed and “rigidity” by the disaffected. Once the internal processes of an organization have become routine and its relations to the outside world have become stabilized, a kind of inertia seems to set in. The prevailing patterns are seen as good by the members. Identification involves a good deal of resistance to change. But if this is true of organizations, certain conditions also provide incentives for innovation.

All stable organizations are in a continual process of adaptation. Innovation is that part of the process which is deliberate, self-conscious adaptation. Activities are innovative if they are attempts to change the organization and its environment in keeping with policies thought out in advance of the attempt. Innovation is not to be confused with liberalism or reform. The antonym for innovation is “consolidation,” not conservatism. Liberalism and conservatism are postures toward the kinds of changes required. To have no policy at all for changing things or to have a policy against changing things is to be neither liberal nor conservative; it is to be non-innovative or consolidative.

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.

The vote is widely considered the southern Negro's most important weapon in his struggle for full citizenship and social and economic equality. It is argued that “political rights pave the way to all others.” Once Negroes in the South vote in substantial numbers, white politicians will prove responsive to the desires of the Negro community. Also, federal action on voting will be met with less resistance from the white South—and southerners in Congress—than action involving schools, jobs, or housing.

Such, at least, seems to have been the reasoning behind the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, both of which deal primarily with the right to vote. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and his predecessor, Herbert Brownell, are both reported to believe that the vote provides the southern Negro with his most effective means of advancing toward equality, and recent actions of the Justice Department seem to reflect this view. Many Negro leaders share this belief in the over-riding importance of the vote. Hundreds of Negro registration drives have been held in southern cities and counties since 1957. Martin Luther King, usually considered an advocate of non-violent direct action, recently remarked that the most significant step Negroes can take is in the “direction of the voting booths.” The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, historically identified with courtroom attacks on segregation, is now enthusiastically committed to a “battle of the ballots.” In March, 1962, the Southern Regional Council announced receipt of foundation grants of $325,000 to initiate a major program to increase Negro voter registration in the South. The Congress of Racial Equality, the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee are among the organizations now participating in the actual registration drives.

This clause of the First Amendment, recently applied by the Supreme Court to invalidate certain religious practices in the public schools, has called down a new storm over the Supreme Court. The storm has not consisted merely of the political bombast of predictable critics. Rather, it has included Dean Griswold of the Harvard Law School who perceived in the first school prayer case an unyielding and unwarranted absolutism in the position of the Court. It includes also highly regarded church figures, such as Episcopal Bishop Pike, who has called for a constitutional amendment to alter the Court's mandates. It has percolated within the law schools, and within the Court itself where lengthy separate opinions were composed to clarify what has and what has not been done. Yet, even within the Court, as within the larger academic and public forums, wide disagreement remains as to the applied meaning of the opaque language of the religion clause.

This article cannot quiet the storm over the Supreme Court, but it can make clear which parts of the storm are entitled to be taken seriously and which are merely bluster. Beyond this, there are more significant purposes to be served. The first of these is to make sense of existing cases in terms of some coherent doctrine, responsive to the First Amendment and possessing substantial predictive value: to describe the standard of church-state separation which the Supreme Court applies in fact. The second is to demonstrate that a number of open questions remain to be answered before a more precise boundary of church-state separation can be known.

In a recent monograph, Professor Heinz Eulau begins his analysis by quoting two “evidently antagonistic formulations” of the theoretical underpinnings of voting behavior in the United States:

1. “A person thinks, politically, as he is socially.”

2. Crucial among the elements in the electoral decision are “traditional or habitual partisan attachments.”

These rival conceptions of primacy among politically relevant variables are often summarized by the terms “class” and “party.” As Eulau points out, “from Aristotle to Harold J. Laski, the relationship between class and party has been one of the ‘grand problems,’ so-called, of speculation about political systems. It has also remained one of the most neglected areas of systematic theory and of empirical analysis.” Data drawn from Survey Research Center surveys have recently been used to explore the relative importance and specify the interdependence of class and party in American voting. Generally, they show party to be more immediately relevant to the voting decision than class, though class position clearly shapes and sets limits to possible party identification and party-related perspectives.

Difficult problems are involved in attempting to sort out and define the two postulated independent variables. The extent to which, in some sense, class determines party orientation is perhaps the most difficult. For example, even when it is found that a certain portion of the working class prefers the Republican party, it may still be that a generation or two earlier the families of this group were Republican on class grounds, and have perpetuated the identification through the socialization process. Campbell et al., conclude that party identification has a “conserving influence,” inhibiting or, at least, slowing down the political manifestation of changes in class position. Their dat a strongly suggest that in any immediate situation class will be much less highly correlated with the vote than party preference. Campbell et al., do not attempt to control for class in relating party identification to the vote, although they do explore the separate effect of class. Eulau deals with this problem at length, but his focus is rather different. He does not attempt to specify the relative weight of each independent variable in predicting the vote, but concentrates on exploring the interrelationships of the two variables.

Substantial constituency influence over the lower house of Congress is commonly thought to be both a normative principle and a factual truth of American government. From their draft constitution we may assume the Founding Fathers expected it, and many political scientists feel, regretfully, that the Framers' wish has come all too true. Nevertheless, much of the evidence of constituency control rests on inference. The fact that our House of Representatives, especially by comparison with the House of Commons, has irregular party voting does not of itself indicate that Congressmen deviate from party in response to local pressure. And even more, the fact that many Congressmen feel pressure from home does not of itself establish that the local constituency is performing any of the acts that a reasonable definition of control would imply.

Control by the local constituency is at one pole of both the great normative controversies about representation that have arisen in modern times. It is generally recognized that constituency control is opposite to the conception of representation associated with Edmund Burke. Burke wanted the representative to serve the constituency's interest but not its will, and the extent to which the representative should be compelled by electoral sanctions to follow the “mandate” of his constituents has been at the heart of the ensuing controversy as it has continued for a century and a half.

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.”

Academic studies of roll-call voting in Congress have tended to stress two factors: (1) the substantial degree of party cohesion in Congress on most issues, and (2) the importance of constituency factors in explaining deviations from party votes within parties. These studies indicate that party is the single most important predictor of roll-call behavior, and that constituency factors explain most of the deviation from party votes. No such study, however, describes constituency differences between Democrats and Republicans on the national level—that is, inter-party differences on constituency variables as opposed to intra-party differences. We will attempt, in this study, to demonstrate that differences between Democrats and Republicans are not merely a matter of party label or ideology (few really contend otherwise), but that they are rooted in basic differences in the kinds of constituencies from which Democrats and Republicans come. We will then go on to show that these constituency factors are also important in explaining intra-party differences in voting in Congress, but only by way of supporting the hypothesis that party voting patterns reflect constituency differences.

The general theory underlying this analysis posits gross relationships between sociological variables and political behavior, especially in democratic systems which permit relatively wide latitude in political activity. Since shared attitudes about various problems confronting people are often the result of sharing similar environments, and since economic and social environments vary widely in the United States, it is not surprising to find people located in similar environments choosing up sides in similar ways on matters of public policy, and differing with those who do not share the same environment. These effects should be most noticeable in relatively small areas, such as congressional districts.

When during the debate on a motion of censure in October 1962 Paul Reynaud challenged the government from the rostrum of the National Assembly with a scornful: “Here and nowhere else is France!”, the issue was well joined. To Reynaud, perennial deputy during three republican regimes, General de Gaulle's projected referendum appeared as a two-fold attack upon French republican traditions. If adopted, the proposal to elect the President of the Republic by popular suffrage would divest the Assembly of its role as the sole bearer of national sovereignty. Moreover, to seek approval for such a change of the constitution of 1958 without a prior vote of parliament deprived both houses of any participation in the amending process.

In 1958, as President of the Consultative Constitutional Committee, Reynaud had insisted that the possibilities of any direct appeal to the electorate be carefully circumscribed and hedged by parliamentary controls. He had obtained official assurances that the referendum would never be used by the executive as a means of arousing popular opinion against the elected assemblies. The final text of the constitution had incorporated proposals by the Consultative Committee which strengthened the position of parliament whenever either a referendum or presidential emergency powers might create a plebiscitarian situation.

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.

A generation ago “legal realists” led by Jerome Frank and Karl Llewellyn dismissed law as a myth—a function of what judges had for breakfast. The important thing, they insisted, was what a court did, not what it said. No doubt this was good medicine for the times. Yet, however broad Frank's 1930 language, later on the bench he loyally acknowledged the compulsive force of legal rules. As a lower court judge, he decided cases in accordance with what he found the law to be—and on occasion he made clear in addenda what he thought it ought to be.

Llewellyn, too, changed his mind. In 1934 he had said, “The theory that rules decide cases seems for a century to have fooled, not only library-ridden recluses, but judges.” Seventeen years later he confessed that his earlier behavioral descriptions of law contained “unhappy words when not more fully developed, and they are plainly at best a very partial statement of the whole truth.”

In short, after their initial enthusiasm, these and other legal realists recognized that there is and must be law in the judicial process, as well as discretion. This was inevitable, for society can no more dispense with order and coherence than it can deny the demands of changing circumstance. We must have stability, yet we cannot stand still; and so the legal system inevitably has both static and dynamic qualities. Holmes put it in a thimble: “The … law is always approaching, and never reaching, consistency. It is forever adopting new principles from life at one end, and it always retains old ones from history at the other, which have not been absorbed or sloughed off. It will become entirely consistent only when it ceases to grow.”

The main point of this article is to identify some traditions of American thought that figure in analysis of the distinctively democratic aspects of government. The discussion is centered on doctrines of “representation.” While that term has a generally understood meaning, its application in specific contexts depends upon values and expectations closely related to other largely procedural aspects of politics; and together these perspectives figure in appraisals and decisions of policy.

The “distinctively democratic aspects of government” have broadly to do, I think, with relations between public officials and the population. These can be conceptualized and described in terms of institutions, influence, identification, or exchange, and are so treated in various positive or empirical approaches. At the points where normative critique and empirical description join, the literature of American political science seems to have converged on several broad concerns that tend to organize and orient discussion—e.g., representation, responsibility, rationality, and lately, the “public interest,” of which “representation” surely has the clearest empirical reference. These are overlapping or intersecting concerns. They emphasize different aspects of government and different blends of calculation and control (or intellectual versus institutional elements); but they do not refer to distinct phenomena, and they relate to common normative traditions. Such terms are often, I think, of dubious utility because they tend to obscure the more detailed values at stake in action or discussion and perhaps thereby to discourage more pointed empirical inquiry relevant to those values. However that may be, the interrelatedness of these concerns and the broad relevance of “representation” can be briefly indicated.

The existence of blocs in the General Assembly of the United Nations and the importance of their activities have been widely recognized ever since its establishment. Special attention to the phenomenon of bloc politics dates roughly from the ascendancy of the General Assembly over the Security Council after 1950, and the consequent importance of votes in the General Assembly. Because the various blocs and groups of states play a conspicuous role in the decisions of the Assembly, the operation of these blocs is well worth study.

Among the many aspects of bloc politics in the General Assembly needing careful analysis, two of the most basic questions are the identification of blocs and the measurement of their cohesiveness or bloc-like behavior. The purpose of this essay is to review and evaluate the manner in which students of the United Nations have treated these two fundamental questions, and to suggest an alternative method not handicapped by the weaknesses of the techniques so far employed. The advantages of the proposed alternative method will also be demonstrated by applying it to a specific instance of bloc voting: the alignments on the colonial issues which arose in the 1956, 1957, and 1958 sessions of the General Assembly.

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.

Small in size but great in influence on Latin American intellectuals, Uruguay has been regarded as the most progressive of the twenty countries of its heterogeneous area. The “western” nature of its political system invites the application of recently devised analytical concepts, and preliminary analysis suggests that many of these concepts can be exemplified in its highly developed political institutions.

The titles of books devoted to Uruguay seem to suggest an approach to the millenium there: Uruguay, South America's first Welfare State; Uruguay, Portrait of a Democracy; and Utopia in Uruguay, among others. They imply that despite the feudal obscurantism of the colonial era, and the incapacity and abuses of the nineteenth century, that country has achieved redemption of a sort. Yet the idealist who seeks his goal there may be disappointed. Despite all the hopeful arguments that a stable middle sector based on professionalism and technical proficiency may prove the strongest ally for democratic practice and progress (and hence for the Alliance for Progress), an examination of this particular specimen may suggest the opposite. Or worse, Uruguay may actually offer an example which is simply irrelevant.

Current conditions in Uruguay suggest many problematical questions. All must be considered within the context of a democratic, social welfare-oriented system which has produced the highest average level of living in Latin America commensurate with national resources. Has emphasis on political and personal freedom created conditions in which political institutions perform functions quite different from those normally allotted them in traditional institutional analyses? If this is so, are these institutions actually dysfunctional, even within the unique Uruguayan context? To what extent have the demands of interest groups created this dysfunction, and to what extent have they defeated efforts to undertake institutional improvement or correction? Does Uruguayan political experience demonstrate any special and transferable genius which can be employed by the sister republics to their own advantage?