For all the talk and all the public curiosity about the relations between business and politics, there is a remarkable dearth of studies on the subject. What is written is more likely to come from the pen of a sociologist, an historian, a lawyer, or an economist than from a political scientist. One would suppose that the role of business, particularly big business, in the political system would be a matter of central concern to political scientists. And so it may be. But those who write about it are men like Adolph Berle, a lawyer, C. Wright Mills, a sociologist, and Robert Brady, an economist; nor can political scientists legitimately lay claim to Peter Drucker, whose professional training and interests in business antedated his academic position as a teacher of political science.

We move in equalitarian directions; the distribution of income flattens out; the floor beneath the poorest paid and least secure is raised and made more substantial. Since the demise of Newport and Tuxedo Park, the very rich have shunned ostentatious display. The equality of opportunity, the chance to rise in the world is at least as great today as it was thirty years ago. The likelihood of declining status is less. Where does the energy for this movement come from? Who is behind it?

Since 1848, it has been assumed that the drive for a more equalitarian society, its effective social force, would come from the stratum of society with the most to gain, the working classes. This was thought to be the revolutionary force in the world—the demand of workers for a classless society sparked by their hostility to the owning classes. It was to be the elite among the workers, not the lumpenproletariat, not the “scum,” who were to advance this movement. Just as “liberty” was the central slogan of the bourgeois revolution, so “equality” was the central concept in the working class movement. Hence it was natural to assume that whatever gains have been made in equalizing the income and status of men in our society came about largely from working class pressure.

It has been a common teaching among modern historians of the guiding ideas in the foundation of our government that the Constitution of the United States embodied a reaction against the democratic principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence. This view has largely been accepted by political scientists and has therefore had important consequences for the way American political development has been studied. I shall present here a contrary view of the political theory of the Framers and examine some of its consequences.

What is the relevance of the political thought of the Founding Fathers to an understanding of contemporary problems of liberty and justice? Four possible ways of looking at the Founding Fathers immediately suggest themselves. First, it may be that they possessed wisdom, a set of political principles still inherently adequate, and needing only to be supplemented by skill in their proper contemporary application. Second, it may be that, while the Founding Fathers' principles are still sound, they are applicable only to a part of our problems, but not to that part which is peculiarly modern; and thus new principles are needed to be joined together with the old ones. Third, it may be that the Founding Fathers have simply become; they dealt with bygone problems and their principles were relevant only to those old problems. Fourth, they may have been wrong or radically inadequate even for their own time.

The conditions associated with the existence and stability of democratic society have been a leading concern of political philosophy. In this paper the problem is attacked from a sociological and behavioral standpoint, by presenting a number of hypotheses concerning some social requisites for democracy, and by discussing some of the data available to test these hypotheses. In its concern with conditions—values, social institutions, historical events—external to the political system itself which sustain different general types of political systems, the paper moves outside the generally recognized province of political sociology. This growing field has dealt largely with the internal analysis of organizations with political goals, or with the determinants of action within various political institutions, such as parties, government agencies, or the electoral process. It has in the main left to the political philosopher the larger concern with the relations of the total political system to society as a whole.

I feel it necessary to begin with an attempt to define the term “political group” as used in this paper: it is a system of patterned or regular interaction among a number of individuals. The interaction is sufficiently patterned to permit the system to be viewed as a unit, and the action of the unit is directed toward some phase of the operation of government. Every political group has an interest. This is simply the central and continuing type of activity that gives the group its property as a system or a unit. Interest, then, is consistent with the observed pattern of interaction, and not contrary to it. “The interest and the group are the same phenomenon observed from slightly different positions, and an ‘interest group’ is a tautological expression. The interest is not a thing that exists apart from the activity or that controls activity.”

On one thing the Soviet and Yugoslav Communists agree: “national communism” is a contradiction in terms. “The very expression ‘national communism’,” say the Soviet theoreticians, “is a logical absurdity. By itself communism is really international and it cannot be conceived otherwise.” Tito was just as emphatic when he told New York Times commentator, C. L. Sulzberger, that “national communism doesn't exist. Yugoslav Communists too are internationalists.”

That the Soviet and Yugoslav positions appear to agree on this point is no accident. Marxist theory has never acknowledged a genuine alternative to socialism or capitalism, and socialism was a profoundly international idea. But in its effort to abolish national strife, create a world-wide economic and social order, and establish political and social internationalism, the socialist movement had to start within the framework of the nation-state. In practice, therefore, socialism was mainly a national affair. The gulf between the necessary national starting point of the socialist movement and its international ideal was, to put it mildly, considerable. Though the international working class solidarity of the Communist Manifesto has been emptied of plausibility by the events of the last hundred years—not least of all by the abandonment in practice of internationalism in 1914 by the socialist movement—internationalism is a fetish to which even the right-wing socialist makes his obeisance.

There was no change in the personnel of the Supreme Court during the 1957 Term. Nor was there any let-up in attacks upon the Court arising from its recent decisions regarding such touchy subjects as racial segregation in public schools, loyalty programs, the powers of legislative investigating committees, and subversive persons and activities. A great deal of this criticism travelled a pretty low road, but some came from high and responsible sources, such as Learned Hand. Of great weight was a resolution adopted by the annual Conference of (State) Chief Justices on August 24, 1958, by a vote of 36 to 8, which affirmed its faith in traditional federalism and urged the Supreme Court to “exercise one of the greatest of all judicial powers—the power of judicial selfrestraint—by recognizing and giving effect to the difference between that which on the one hand, the Constitution may prescribe or permit, and that which, on the other, a majority of the Supreme Court, as from time to time constituted, may deem desirable or undesirable ….”