The subject of party responsibility for public policy in Congress has commanded much attention among political scientists. Creation of the Senate party policy committees in 1947 with legal sanction and public appropriations was heralded by some political scientists as a major step in the direction of centralizing and evolving a so-called party program. These committees have now been in operation for nine years, during which the Republican and Democratic bodies have each served about the same amount of time in the majority and minority. The committees may be said to have passed the experimental stage. Notwithstanding this, there is a paucity of material, both descriptive and analytical, concerning their operations.

In 1951 extensive hearings were held to evaluate the operation of the Legislative Reorganization Act. Yet none of the three Democratic Policy Committee chairmen—Senators Barkley, Lucas, and McFarland, nor any member of their staffs appeared to testify. Senator Robert A. Taft, Republican Policy Committee Chairman, made no reference to his committee when discussing the Act.

The purpose of this paper is two-fold: first, to achieve a better understanding of the methods, problems, and results of the collection of statistics of cities by the National Census Bureau; and second, to arouse if possible a keener interest among the members of this Association in the accomplishemnt of the ultimate purpose for which this work is being carried on—an interest which it is hoped may lead to active assistance on the part of individual members along the lines indicated below.

The title of this essay poses not one vexing issue but two, and each of them sharply challenges the student of American political thought. The first might be called the common problem of political theory—the question of its relevance to the institutional facts of life. How, it is asked, can the analysis of political ideas help to illuminate our understanding of political action? Can theory lead us to a surer knowledge of why governments and electorates behave as they do? Can it help us to diagnose and prescribe? Or is the study of theory, on the contrary, justified simply on the ground that the words of Plato and Hobbes and Locke are part of what Matthew Arnold called culture: “the best that has been thought or known in the world”? This is, I take it, a problem universal among students of political thought, whether they choose America, Europe, or China as their realm; and it lends itself to no easy answers.

According to most scholars, Montesquieu argues that fear threatens a loss of self. Disconnected from the exercise of reason, fear is an emotion that is supposed to prevent the individual from acting with any kind of moral or rational agency. Fear is also premised on the liquidation of civil society; intermediate institutions and plural social structures are destroyed so that despots can act with unmitigated power and violence. I argue that this view does not capture Montesquieu's theory. In my alternative account, fear is intimately connected to our capacity for reason and to our sense of self. It is built on a network of elites, the rule of law, moral education, and the traditional institutions of civil society. I conclude that twentieth-century social science remains too indebted to conventional interpretations of Montesquieu's views, and contemporary theorists would be better served by the alternative analysis proposed here.

Because Mexican politics since the Revolution of 1910–17 have operated mainly within the framework of a one-party system and because in the past strong men have sometimes occupied the presidency, writers in the United States have tended to treat the system as authoritarian. Emphasis upon presidential rule and the corollary explanation of the role of the Revolutionary Party as nothing more nor less than an instrument of presidential domination have served to create an oversimplified picture of presidential power. It is the purpose of this paper to outline at least four checkpoints on which the authoritarian interpretation seems to have involved miscalculation of the realities of the Mexican political system. The nature of membership in the “official” party, the degree of centralization within and without the party structure, the threefold role of the party within the political system, and the ideological bias of the political elite all seem to indicate the necessity of a re-evaluation of the politics of the republic on our southern border.

The Need for Factually Defined Concepts. Most political utterance is necessarily normative in import since it occurs in the process of motivating human behavior. Popularly employed political concepts, appropriately, are frequently of the ideal type in that they tend to denote an hypothetical situation toward conformance with which actual human institutions are being impelled. Ask any student to define a state or a government and he is almost certain to bring in some such notion as “operation in the public interest,” which might or might not be judged applicable to an actual situation. It is safe to say that ninety per cent of the time such concepts as state, government, court, law, administration, political party, and many others are used in this normative sense, not only popularly but in learned circles.

Without desiring the exclusion of the normative from the social sciences, the writer believes that rigid conceptual clarity in distinguishing norm and fact is necessary for the progress of these disciplines. To attain this goal, the technical requisite is a system of concepts having an understood reference of a purely factual character. The absence of such factually defined concepts is noteworthy in political science, and largely unrecognized. Although most of our studies are factual in nature and the intended reference of concepts is usually factual, definition is largely subconscious and when brought to the surface is likely to have normative form, particularly a form borrowed from legal norms.

True definition is appropriate in such disciplines as logic and mathematics and in physics, which has attained since the seventeenth century to the explanation of phenomena by hypothetical systems employing purely postulated entities like electrons and atoms. A set of pure definitions gives postulates from which theorems are derived by rigid deduction. What is put into the definitions comes out in the theorems.

Modern science and modern scientific methods, with all their splendor of achievement, have led to an ethical vacuum, a religious vacuum, and a philosophical vacuum—so it has been said. For they have offered little or nothing to distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice. All social sciences are involved in this calamity, but none has been so deeply affected as political science, which had to face the new creeds of Communism, Fascism, and Nazism as political phenomena of tremendous power. They settled down in the area abandoned by science, taking full advantage of the fact that, scientifically speaking, there was a vacuum.

No political theorist can honestly avoid the issue, and certainly every scholar worthy of the name gives it serious thought. While each may publish his own ideas freely, there is one thing which we cannot do individually, but which we may do collectively—take stock of the various opinions that prevail among us, and clarify their meaning by question and answer. This the members of a round-table tried to do at the last meeting of the American Political Science Association, in two sessions held jointly with the Research Panel on Political Theory, represented by its chairman, Francis G. Wilson of the University of Illinois.

Human culture develops as a means for man to control his environment. Primitive cultures rely to a large extent on magical means. The whimiscal and incalculable forces which govern nature are personified, and rituals are developed which are intended to control the actions of the gods. Such cultures tend to be fatalistic. The magical controls are limited and uncertain. One must endure and accept what comes.

As culture develops, men turn increasingly to rational control of the environment. Technology arises, and, what is more fundamental, attitudes arise which enable the progressive development and utilization of technological resources. In our culture, full rational control over the environment appears not far from accomplishment.

As the forces of nature give way to the development of culture, however, it becomes evident that the culture itself exhibits “forces” or “laws of development” which seem themselves to be beyond control. It has become a commonplace to say that while man has established rational control over nature, he has not done so over his culture, and that this is the next and imperative task. What is too commonly overlooked is the radically different nature of the second problem.

It is through culture that rational control of nature is possible. By analogy, it would seem that culture itself must supply the resources to control itself: that is, that rational control over culture must in some sense be reflexive. This raises a set of problems that, even after two thousand years, have not as yet been thought through. The methods and techniques used to control nature may have to be profoundly transformed before they can be used to subject culture to rational control—indeed, the very meaning of the term “rational control” is called into question.

The impossibility theorem developed by Kenneth Arrow has implications for both rationality and morality in political thought. Transitivity in a collective ordering can be assured only with a decisive set, but this outcome is acknowledged as morally undesirable. The alternatives exhibited by the theorem thus seem to require a choice between rationality and morality. But exit routes can be cut out of this dilemma with the idea of a conditional ordering, one where warranting factors attach to a ranking of alternatives. Conditional orderings form two senses of collective rationality. One is represented by compound directives, which avoid the rational problems of the theorem by warranting local orderings. The second is moral fusion, which requires a reasoned dominance in collective outcomes. These two forms of conditional rationality put into relief the restricted scope of the composition rules and individualism of Arrow's theorem, and suggest alternative relationships of individual and social whole.

From the Countryside to the Cities. Among the many practical problems with which the Chinese Communists have been recently confronted is that of governing large cities and administering policy in urban and metropolitan areas. Only two years ago the major preoccupation of the Chinese Communist Party was with agrarian policy, with emphases on land redistribution, Party reorganization to strengthen the revolution in rural areas, and the construction and maintenance of “rear bases” to support the fighting front. But in the epochal year beginning with the fall of Mukden on November 2, 1948, the directions and emphases of Chinese Communist policy were substantially modified by the new situation created by the rapid capture of all of the seaports, the most important industrial and commercial centers, and nearly all of the provincial capitals of China. To permit the most effective exploitation of this newly-gained strategic momentum, the Party leadership was obliged, on relatively short notice, to find immediate solutions for problems of urban policy that had previously been anticipated as likely to arise in the future.

Urban policy, accordingly, became the urgent question on the agenda of the Second Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, meeting in Shihchiachuang on March 15–23, 1949.

An outstanding advance in one field of human endeavor will often inspire workers in others to try to transfer its conceptions or techniques into their own less successful fields, for obvious reasons. And so political theorists who have long been discontented with the state of politics when compared with that of certain other sciences have, in consequence, sought to advance their field by adopting the ideas or techniques of their scientific contemporaries. The impressive application of physics will probably increase both political tension and the political scientists' interest in methodology.

The last hundred years of political science have seen attempts at the introduction of various exotica, Darwinism, Economism, Freudianism, even Statisticism; but what I shall here discuss is the centuries-old attempt to appropriate the success of dynamics or mechanics to politics, an attempt which found its first great exponent in Hobbes but which has been carried on in this century by men like Bentley and Catlin. The success of dynamics, such men seem to have thought, is evidently the result of its method, which they took to be the reduction of phenomena to the primary qualities of matter and motion. We who are interested in politics, accordingly, will do well to copy the method of the successful scientists and reduce all political phenomena to similar primary entities. Just as Newtonian physicists speak of material bodies or particles, and the forces they exert upon each other, so we must confine ourselves to the description of the motions of atomic political bodies and the forces they exert upon each other. Thus we need only speak with Hobbes of men and their desires, or with Catlin of political men and their wills, or with Bentley of groups and their pressures, in order to succeed. We know that, in the early chapters of Leviathan, Hobbes announced this as his programme; but it is doubtful whether, as he moved from methodology to political theory, he did as he said he would do and whether he had not worked out his political theory before he “deduced” it from his primary entities of matter and motion. In what follows I shall try to show a similar history in the work of A. F. Bentley and D. B. Truman. I shall try to show that Bentley announced a methodological programme and that Truman's “development” of it has been quite external and could, in fact, have been undertaken without any reference to Bentley at all. I shall try to show, that is, that Bentley's contribution to political science has been of a psychological rather than a logical kind, and that the references made to him by contemporary pressure group theorists are similar to those which a Russian physicist might make to dialectical materialism.

A complex liberal version of utilitarianism is introduced which bears similarities to John Stuart Mill's moral and political philosophy and offers a promising approach to liberal democratic theory. Formally, liberal utilitarianism is represented as a type of generalized social welfare functional which maps any given set of individual vector-valued utility functions into a social ordering. The generalized social welfare functional in question relies on the experienced members of society to classify ond compare the different kinds of utilities found in individual vectors; to grant and protect libertarian rights with respect to a well-defined private kind of individual utilities; and to make the interpersonal comparisons required to aggregate over each of the public kinds of individual utilities. At the same time, it is dynamic in that it implicitly comprehends many different levels of a society's moral development from a liberal perspective.

An axiomatization of the ideal liberal utilitarian social welfare functional is provided such that, on the one hand, each person has an absolute right to individual liberty over the issues within his private sphere, and, on the other hand, has an equal voice in a liberty-respecting, strongly monotonk, anonymous and neutral public choice rule operating in a distinct public sphere. The harmony of these private and public components implies the possibility of an ideal liberal democracy.

We develop and validate a novel experimental design that builds a bridge between experimental research on the theory of spatial voting and the literature on measuring policy positions from text. Our design utilizes established text-scaling techniques and their corresponding coding schemes to communicate candidates’ numerical policy positions via verbal policy statements. This design allows researchers to investigate the relationship between candidates’ policy stances and voter choice in a purely text-based context. We validate our approach with an online survey experiment. Our results generalize previous findings in the literature and show that proximity considerations are empirically prevalent in purely text-based issue framing scenarios. The design we develop is broad and portable, and we discuss how it adds to current experimental designs, as well as suggest several implications and possible routes for future research.

This study illuminates Xenophon's teaching about the underlying psychological motives of the most fully developed political ambition. An analysis of what the Cyropaedia portrays as the interplay among Cyrus's spiritedness, justice, benevolence, piety, and cultivation of an aura of divinity leads to an unveiling of supreme ambition's deepest root: not the desire for power as such, nor the love of justice, but the desire to be a quasi-divine benefactor. The article traces the development of this ambition from its earliest manifestations in the young Cyrus's puppylike spiritedness, through his hope-filled rise to power, to his grim mature rein and his death, showing how a shadowy concern for immortality drives him in ways he is reluctant to see or acknowledge.