Despite the postwar rise of behavioralism in political science, the Review gave surprising prominence to traditional political theory during Harvey C. Mansfield's ten-year term as editor (1956–1965), all the more striking for the prominence of Leo Strauss and his students during the first half of this period. This article considers several factors that help explain the surprising recognition given this subfield and its unexpected bargaining power.

Academics who make scholarly book on trends in the literature must heed “the group theory of politics.” For there is much evidence that the approach is being de-emphasized for a third time. Arthur Bentley's The Process of Government is, of course, the most prominent of the contributions apparently headed for disciplinary oblivion.

This paper attempts to blunt the recent criticism by directing students to the unfinished (and largely untouched) business of exploiting “the group approach.” The prime vehicle for this effort will be Bentley's The Process of Government rather than the corpus of his work or that of his interpreters.

A three-fold rationale supports this analytical visit to the tap-root of “the group approach.” Primarily, critics have avoided the issues posed by Bentley. Moreover, pleas for abandonment of his approach often reflect an important misconception. Consider Rothman's conclusion that “there is certainly room for studies of the kind which rely upon the mature judgment of their authors, rather than being bound by conceptual schemes which appear to be simple keys to reality, but which only serve to blind students to the obvious facts of politics.”

One wonders what the ghosts of Talleyrand and Franklin would say were they to visit the diplomatic conferences of today. Where is the suave approach, the graceful phrase concealing bloody warnings dropped by a king to the music of a minuet or passed by an ambassador to a minister of state over the after-dinner port? How surprised they would be at the blunt Bevin with his frequently unconcealed ill humor, at Molotov, rude and blustering, at Byrnes publicly changing his course in midstream, at Marshall announcing state policy in speeches rather than to plenipotentiaries or through official documents.

How surprised Talleyrand and Franklin would be to think of international relations carried on pursuant to slogans such as “open covenants openly arrived at.” How their shrewd eyes would have twinkled at the credulity of people who believed that they had democratized foreign affairs through such a slogan. The old school diplomats would scarely have confused headlines which report in large black type the speeches of the diplomats, or the political gossip columns which purport to repeat the whispered asides of statesmen, with covenants democratically negotiated.

The fact is that although we have gained publicity for foreign affairs, and that in itself is important, we have not democratized foreign affairs. They are still the business of technicians. They remain the preserve of foreign offices.

Although J. Judd Owen's account of my work is on target in many ways, on some points he mischaracterizes my argument by making it claim or do too much. His misunderstandings flow in part from a conflating of two assertions: (1) that our convictions cannot be grounded in any independent source of authority and (2) that our convictions are ungrounded. I certainly assert the first but never the second. Rather, it is my contention that while we have no independent grounds—grounds implicated in no particular vision of life or comprehensive doctrine—we have, because we live within them, the grounds that are constitutive of our everyday lives, their practices and routines. What are the consequences of this argument? My answer is none whatsoever. If you are persuaded that no independent grounds are available, but that the grounds of your everyday practice are sufficient, you will feel neither disabled by what you do not need nor enabled by recognizing the nonindependent foundations you have always rested on and will continue to rest on. In the end, the most salient characteristic of my argument, a characteristic Owen resists, is its minimalism.

The French Communist Party emerged from the national elections of 1951 with a greater number of popular votes than any of its competitors. Since the preceding elections of November, 1946, it is true, the party has lost close to 500,000 voters, and its proportion of the total number of registered voters has declined from 21.6 to 20.1 per cent. Yet the Communist Party (CP) remains not only numerically, but also by virtue of its geographical distribution, the most important of the French parties. In none of the election districts did less than 5 per cent of the voters cast their ballot for the communist lists, while all other parties parade a considerable number of blank spots on the electoral map of France. In twenty-seven districts the CP can boast of a support larger than one-fourth of the total electorate, while the next strongest party, de Gaulle's RPF, is similarly represented in only eleven districts.

A comparison of the present communist vote with that of 1946 shows that five years which affected deeply the political constellation of Europe and the world have not changed significantly the distribution of communist sympathies among the French electorate. The greatest concentration of votes for the CP is still to be found in the region situated between Paris and the Belgian border, reaching in the East to the départements of Ardennes, Marne, and Aube, in the West to those of Somme and Seine-Inférieure.

C. P. Snow, in his Rede Lecture on the scientific and literary worlds as separate cultures, lists four groups needed by a country if it is to “come out top” in the scientific revolution. First, as many top scientists as it can produce; second, a larger group trained for supporting research and high class design; third, educated supporting technicians; and “fourthly and last, politicians, administrators, an entire community, who know enough science to have a sense of what the scientists are talking about.”

It seems increasingly clear that the growing army of “political” scientists—meaning natural scientists in politics—is more likely to be aided by students of politics prepared to understand the effects of science in political terms than by most of the recent efforts to understand politics in scientific terms. When one looks over the journals in political science, and in related areas of public opinion and social psychology, searching for significant conclusions in articles where much time has been spent on the elaboration of method, it is difficult to avoid V. O. Key's conclusion “that a considerable proportion of the literature commonly classified under the heading of ‘political behavior’ has no real bearing on politics, or at least that its relevance has not been made clear.”

Cumulative voting is a rough method of proportional representation perhaps more familiar to more Americans as a device for choosing corporate boards of directors, such as Montgomery Ward's, than as a means of choosing legislative representatives. Among American state electoral systems it is unique to Illinois, where it has been in operation since 1870. Like the one-house legislature in Nebraska, it has been admired there but not copied elsewhere. As used in Illinois it retains the district system of representation, but each district is the unit for choosing three representatives, and each voter is allowed three votes. Thus, in contrast with a single-member district system, it aims to secure representation for a substantial minority without jeopardizing the principle of majority rule; and it has done so. If this were all, the Illinois example might remain as a museum piece to be observed by students of comparative electoral methods, or by constitution drafters considering a change in systems.

As it happens, however, Illinois superimposed on this cumulative voting scheme for the lower house a conventional single-member district system for the choice of state senators, and providentially for students of voting behavior, from 1870 through the election of 1954 it used the same district boundaries for both purposes.

The prediction that full employment will have a great political future is based on the fact that economic policies of this kind reach large segments of the public not previously accustomed to political action or only recently made aware of the potentialities of politics. Only the war itself has served to remind these relatively non-political people as urgently of the new importance of the government to every one as they are likely to be reminded by the establishment of the principle that public authority and public resources ought to be used to promote or produce sixty million jobs. What people do about the government depends on what they think the government is able to do. Therefore, the idea that the government is now able to protect people against the most dreaded of the manifestations of economic instability is almost certain to have a great impact on the political behavior of millions of people, many of whom have never before been drawn into the orbit of politics.

Moreover, unless the millenium is here, it seems probable that a prolonged and disturbing controversy over employment policies is in the making. In fact, a major political conflict over these policies can probably be avoided only by the abandonment of the whole project, i.e., by conceding the argument that full employment is none of the business of the government. The friends of the new policies are, therefore, in the position of having to pray for stormy weather.

Cluster-bloc analysis is a useful method of examining the voting records of a legislature, in order to find what subgroups of members regularly vote together. Agreement scores are calculated for every legislator with every other legislator. Then when a group is found to have all its members in high agreement with each other they are referred to as a cluster bloc. These groups, which are discovered empirically, are not necessarily the same as the formal caucus groups. So far each researcher has had to use his own judgment as to what constitutes “high agreement,” but it can be shown that the cutoff points can be established statistically, against the null hypothesis of random voting. Since each score can be tested for significance, it is possible to use statistically based indices of cohesion for the legislature or any specified subgroup and indices of adhesion between the various subgroups. Examples are given for the African group in the UN General Assembly.

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.

This, the fiftieth annual meeting of our Association, has more than ordinary significance. Certainly it can be said that the Association has attained middle-age and the intellectual as well as the physical maturity to do proper credit to our years. We may, on this special occasion at least, regard with pardonable pride our record of growth, the recognition and development of our discipline in both teaching and research, the public service it has rendered, and its contribution to the forward progress of American political democracy. American political scientists, practitioners of what Aristotle rightly or wrongly described as the “master science,” have recognized, as did Plato and Aristotle, the surpassing importance of political problems in society and have experienced the difficulties which they foresaw in the effort to employ scientific methods and procedures in the solution of such problems. Beyond doubt, however, we move steadily forward. Our scientific and professional standards show constant improvement. Our store of knowledge is immense. Our almost feverish search for new data is incessant. We know almost all there is to know about the political infirmities of our patients except how to cure them. The state of domestic and world affairs keeps us humble.

The problem of guarding the constitution is fundamental in any political system. If the term “constitution” is given a very broad definition, such dictatorial devices as powerful secret police and special tribunals for the safety of the state may be regarded as means for the protection of the “constitution” of a totalitarian regime. However, western democracy does not rely upon repressive means for safeguarding the constitution, except in times of crisis when use is made of martial law, the state of siege, and constitutional dictatorship. For normal times, western democracy has developed constitutional means of protection that essentially resemble ordinary legal and political processes, such as the amending process, special deliberative bodies, and judicial review.

This study is concerned with judicial review as a means of guarding against legislative encroachments on the constitution. The acceptance of judicial review in national constitutional systems will be traced historically, with emphasis upon twentieth-century developments. Some attention will be given to the historical background of judicial review and to its theory and practice under various modern constitutions, but no systematic treatment of these subjects is attempted.

World politics today is admittedly bipolar, and it seems destined to remain so within the foreseeable future. Beset by its sustained tension, Americans have been led to debate, sometimes acrimoniously, the proper foundations, scope, and content of an effective foreign policy. Since presumably the central theme and central purpose of this debate is the definition of what constitutes the American national interest, the first objective is to define the idea of national interest. Thereafter it is necessary to draw proper deductions relevant to the total world situation, and in turn to apply these deductions as policy to the forces there at work. These forces—political, economic, ideological, and military—in their interconnectedness collectively constitute the raw materials for assessment, judgment, planning, and action in our policy-making.

Resultant differences of opinion therefore can take place at different levels. Initially there are vastly divergent concepts of the characteristics of a nation, of the role of nations in the world, and of the nature of interests proper to a nation. The scope of these divergencies is often hidden by our tendency to find in the term “national interest” connotations of particularism, of exclusiveness, of the nation as against, or superior to, the rest of the world.

The rise of the modern state has been accompanied by a decline in the importance of statutory law to the operation of Western democratic governments. Two of the strongest critiques of the modern state and of this decline in statutory law have come from Friedrich Hayek and Theodore Lowi. Each has argued that only the restoration of a rule of law can ensure the continued survival of democratic societies. Their indictments of the modern state suggest a standard by which legislative policy alternatives might be evaluated. This article develops such a standard, adapted specifically for use in American politics, and uses it to analyze legislative behavior in the House of Representatives under four different presidential administrations. The development and application of the rule of law standard provides a critique of American government from the Hayek-Lowi perspective and reveals a basic incompatibility between the imposition of a rule of law and the establishment of a responsible-party government system.

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.”

Britain may fairly be called the classic home of two-party government. This claim is justifiable because of some characteristics for which the system, as employed in Britain, is distinctive. Chief among these is its long duration. Although there is room for disagreement among historians about the time and circumstances of its birth, it would be difficult to deny that two-party government was established earlier, has lasted longer, and at the present time is probably more firmly rooted there than in any contemporary state. Indeed, the practice of simplifying the complexities of politics into a contest for office between a pair of major claimants has endured in Britain through a catalogue of changes which would assuredly have wrecked a less effective system. In that country it has survived the evolution from an oligarchy of aristocrats to a democracy of the whole people; the transfer of power from monarchy to parliament and then from parliament to cabinet; the rise of large-scale industry with its social aftermath; the switch in economic policy from mercantilism to laissez faire and from this to state planning; and withal, the expansion and subsequent shrinkage of Britain's international might.

Among political scientists, even among political theorists, there is a widespread conviction that political theory has entered upon a time of troubles. Few, however, regard it simply as a “dead dog,” and political theorists continue, as they should, to administer critical self-analysis, and to define and defend their methodological and philosophical positions. The basis for a unity of opposites is still a subject for dispute. This paper is offered, not as a solution, but as a statement of one conception of the role of political theory.

A time-honored technique of dialectic is to seek well-reasoned objections to the view one does not hold. A medicine often commended to the political scientists is a body of systematic, scientific theory akin to economic theory in approach and methodological sophistication. Accordingly, this article takes issue with that interpretation which conceives of political theory as, ideally, the master discipline whereby the science of politics is to be unified and systematized, and empirical investigation oriented and guided. A few definite and carefully developed proposals for reconstruction along these lines, familar to political scientists, are G. E. G. Catlin's The Science and Method of Politics, Harold D. Lasswell's and Abraham Kaplan's Power and Society, and David Easton's The Political System. These works can serve as an initial point of purchase for analysis and discussion.