One of the most noticeable phenomena in the world history of the last two or three hundred years is the subjugation of Asia by Europe. Asiatic civilization and institutions have in the shock of conflict with European civilization and European institutions either succumbed or have been made to suffer great modifications. In some instances political control has passed from Asiatic to European hands. In others, while Asiatic rulers have been able to maintain themselves in at least nominal control, their freedom of action has been curtailed by treaties forced from them by the fear of the loss of political independence.

Furthermore, in those few cases of contact between the European and the Asiatic in which the latter has not suffered a serious loss of independence, European commercial and industrial organization has exercised a remarkable influence over Asiatic life. The steamship and the railway, both European inventions, have bound together the East and West in bonds so strong that it is futile to think that they will ever be broken, and have at the same time given to most Eastern countries means of transportation which are surely and with continuingly increasingly rapidity transforming the conditions of Eastern life.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the decade following the Washington Conference constituted a distinct epoch in the Far East. The revolutionary surge of Nationalist China with its warcry, “abolish the unequal treaties,” threw the foreign Powers on the defensive for the first time in a century. Skillful Chinese diplomacy supported by physical, moral, and economic force swept away foreign rights and privileges of long standing. Expansive world prosperity bolstered up a sagging Japanese financial structure and encouraged all the Powers to respect the self-denying pledges of the Washington treaties and the demands of Chinese nationalism. This period terminated with the Japanese attack on Mukden in September, 1931. As hard times put increasing strain upon the economy of the Island Empire, the Japanese army, with continental ambitions rekindled, launched a bold campaign for hegemony north of the Great Wall—and possibly south.

During the nineteen-twenties, the center of gravity in China shifted to the Yangtse Valley. Shanghai, the foreign-controlled metropolis which stands at the cross-roads of Far Eastern commerce and dominates an immense hinterland, assumed a position of increasing importance in the domestic economy and international politics of China.

I have been asked to present for your discussion the pragmatic approach to political science, the reason being, as I suppose, that my business is the study of philosophy and pragmatism is a kind of philosophy. Now philosophy has special interests of its own and hardly ever offers anything that can be taken over ready-made into scientific work with any useful results; moreover, the discussion of methods at large hardly ever leads to much. A method is good for just what it does, and its uses must be apparent just in the science where it is used. I greatly doubt, therefore, whether any good would come of my talking to you about philosophic pragmatism, which is a name of rather indefinite meaning, signifying a group of scientific and philosophic tendencies rather than a systematic doctrine. It does stand roughly for a point of view, which has perhaps been stated most clearly by Professor John Dewey, and it is a fact that this point of view has acted as a sort of ferment outside philosophy, especially in economics and law, and seems likely to have a significant influence on these subjects, at least in America and during the next few years. What I mean to do, therefore, is to try to picture pragmatism in action, compressing into a single paragraph the description of pragmatism as a point of view. To illustrate pragmatism in action, I have chosen some attempts to adopt this point of view in economics, particularly the work of Thorstein Veblen and Professor Wesley C. Mitchell, and also in the study of law, particularly the program put forward by Professors Walter Wheeler Cook and Herman Oliphant.

A study of the beginnings of national representation inevitably brings to the surface details which in their time were part or parcel of mediæval practices. One cannot expect that these usages, even as connected with representative institutions, can be of concern in our more complex modern circumstances, since the Middle Ages had comparatively few and simple problems for legislative solution. In those days the questions of relationship between the administrative and the legislative, and between the local and the central or national, had not emerged clearly. Nevertheless, such details and questions are interesting as examples of mediæval theory and efficiency, and, moreover, some of them are not entirely devoid of connection with present-day difficulties.

The custom of making in advance a decision which was imposed by the electors upon their chosen representative, a custom known as the imperative mandate, was an important factor in early representative government. It was sound in legal theory, and some of its practice will be seen in the pages which follow. Also, its connection is with that early stage in popular government in which the development of representative institutions corresponded somewhat to one phase of the present. I refer to what is apparently a need to ask from the electors themselves their opinion on large, general questions of principle—for example, in our time, the referendum in Germany on the adoption of the Young Plan.

During the Civil War, which was a war for freedom in a truer sense than most of the wars which have been so called, Abraham Lincoln laid bare the essentials of the dilemma which has baffled the philosophic understanding of freedom and which has made it appear that there was always something left to be desired in its political realization. On April 18, 1864, Lincoln gave a brief and unpretentious address to the crowd assembled at the Sanitary Fair in Baltimore.

“The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty,” he said,

and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatable things, called by the same name—liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatable names—liberty and tyranny.

Let me begin with a quotation:

Radical criticisms of liberalism's method of legal adjudication focus on its excessive formalism, its tendency to foster indeterminacy, and its naive maintenance of the separation of political from legal concerns. I examine these arguments as they appear in the work of Carl Schmitt, on the Right, and the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) movement, on the Left. Jürgen Habermas has recently attempted to refute the positions of these most scalding twentieth-century critics of liberal adjudication. I argue that by so extensively engaging these theorists, and in fact liberalism itself, on their own grounds, Habermas has abandoned some of the distinctive strengths of what he previously practiced as a critical social theory in his new reflexive or discourse theory of law.

In a previous paper the attempt was made to state Vattel's system of municipal and international jurisprudence, and to show in a general way the authority attributed to his treatise on international law. It remains for us to consider the technical rules of international law proposed by Vattel and thus to lay the basis for a critical estimate of the position to which his treatise is entitled among the classics of international law.

The rules of conduct which nations have voluntarily adopted for themselves, and which therefore constitute the law between them, may be divided, with regard to their intrinsic character, into two general classes: first, rules which define certain principles of moral conduct or which embody the recognition of certain fundamental rights of states, and secondly, rules which define the concrete application of principles to the practical relations of states. Chief of the rules defining principles of moral conduct is the rule of good faith between nations, which in its many applications pervades the whole field of international law. This rule of good faith is not merely an a priori conception deduced from the analogy between sovereign states as members of an international community and private persons as members of society; it is a rule of positive international law, accepted by nations as properly controlling their conduct, and appealed to by them in their diplomatic relations.

In the winter and spring of 1923–24 a blizzard of congressional investigations swept the national capital. Party lines were tied up, statesmen were snowed under, and Washington officialdom was chilled by a storm of inquiries into the conduct of government departments. Scarcely a corner of the administration escaped inquisition. The subjects of inquiry ranged from the naval oil reserve leases at Teapot Dome and Elk Hill to the administration of the Veterans' Bureau under Director Forbes of dubious fame. Upwards of two-score inquests were instituted by Congress, through its committees, into the official behavior of the executive branch of the national government. In the end, and as a direct result, two cabinet members lost their portfolios.

Such wide and effective use by Congress of its committees for the purpose of inquiry and examination of administrative conduct raised certain questions in the minds of students of government. What were the constitutional limits of the investigative function of Congress? What was the relation of this function to the law-making function and to impeachment? Was punishment by impeachment a satisfactory remedy for official misconduct, or had it become obsolete as too cumbersome? Did the vote of the Senate calling for Secretary Denby's resignation usher in a new process in this country? Should cabinet officials be required to appear on the floor of Congress and answer questions? Would this be preferable to investigating their actions long after they have been performed? Does the steady increase of federal powers necessitate greater supervision by Congress over the President and administrative officers? Have students of politics overlooked a function of Congress frequently and forcibly exercised for the control of administration?

The purpose of this essay is to draw attention to two aspects of the political ideas of the sixteenth century Reformation which were important to the development of the Western tradition of political theory. First, like all great transformations, the Reformation stimulated the rethinking of much that had been taken for granted. In terms of political ideas, this centered around a developing crisis in the concept of order and in the Western traditions of civility. The criticism of the papacy by the early reformers had really amounted to a demand for the liberation of the individual believer from a mass of institutional controls and traditional restraints which hitherto had governed his behavior. The medieval church had been many things, and among them, a system of governance. It had sought, not always successfully, to control the conduct of its members through a definite code of discipline, to bind them to unity through emotional as well as material commitments, and to direct the whole religious endeavor through an institutionalized power structure as impressive as any the world had seen. In essence, the Church had provided a rationalized set of restraints designed to mould human behavior to accord with a certain image. To condemn it as the agent of the Antichrist was to work towards the release of human behavior from the order which had formed it. This liberating tendency was encouraged by one of the great ideas of the early reformers, the conception of the church as a fellowship bound together by the ties of faith and united in a common quest for salvation. But the Genossenschaft-idea lacked the complementary notion of the church as a corpus regens, a corporate society welded together by a viable structure of power. The inference remaining was that men could be fashioned to live in an orderly community without the serious and consistent application of force.

Although the major purpose of the Cultural Revolution was to transform Chinese political culture, the way in which this transformation took place has remained unclear. This paper attempts to understand cultural transformation as a process of interaction within a semiological system, consisting of a network of communicators and a lexicon of political symbols. The pragmatic aspect of this process is the outcome of an interplay among the intentions of the elites, the masses, and the target of criticism: political circumstances during the Cultural Revolution were more benign to the cathartic and hortatory intentions of the masses and elites than to the expiatory needs of the target. The syntactic aspect of the system concerns the relationship among symbols: These were found to form a dichotomous structure divided by a taboo barrier, which elicited strong but ambivalent desires to achieve a revolutionary breakthrough. The semantic aspect of the symbolism refers to problematic dimensions of experience in Chinese political culture–the psychological repression imposed by a system of rigid social censorship, the political discrimination practiced against certain social categories, the persistence of differences in income or educational achievement in a socialist system–and suggests that these “contradictions” may be resolved by bold frontal assault.

The symbolism of Cultural Revolution polemics has now become part of Chinese political culture. Its impact seems to have been to inhibit social differentiation (particularly hierarchical), to encourage greater mass participation, and to foster more frequent and irreconcilable conflict among elites.

This paper proposes and tests a modest theory of voting defection, the act of voting contrary to party identification. The relevance of voting defection to popular control of government is clear. Except for the infrequent elections that Key calls “critical,” the identification of people with their parties is very stable over time. The percentage of Democrats and Republicans in the electorate changed only slightly in the four presidential elections from 1952 to 1964. Short term shifts in public attitudes, then, are reflected not in shifts in the distribution of party identification, but in the degree that people vote in accordance with their identification. When they are disenchanted with the President, defection will be high among members of the opposition party and low among members of the party in office. In 1952 people were weary of the Korean War; this weariness was apparent in the massive numbers of Democrats who thought Eisenhower a man capable of ending the conflict and who backed up their convictions with Republican votes. In short, in the rate of defection we have a mirror that reflects popular discontent with the politics of the President. My present concern is to explore some personal attributes of the voters who make up this critical electorate, to augment the propositions surrounding party identification with one explanation of why it is that people vote contrary to their party allegiance.