Plato's Meno deserves careful examination today because it highlights two facets of the concern for virtue neglected or obscured by the current revival of virtue among liberal theorists: the devotion to a good that cannot simply be reduced either to individual flourishing or to communal well-being—what Plato calls “nobility” or “the noble”; and the complex relation of virtue so understood to the concern for religion or piety. If the sought-for incorporation of virtue into liberal thought and practice today fails to grapple with these profound human concerns, in the first place by recognizing their existence, the language of virtue and its attendant moral sentiments will remain a matter more of scholarly debate than of lived practice.

We investigate a sequential voting model in which voters' forecasts of outcomes on future issues are determined endogenously. Voters are assumed to make decisions in an environment in which future outcomes are uncertain. The uncertainty arises from two possible sources. Voters may be uncertain of other voters' preferences. In addition, events that occur before future issues are decided may affect voters' preferences on future votes. Information available to voters at each point in time is characterized. An equilibrium to the voting problem, if one exists, is one for which the outcome on the issue currently being decided and voters' forecasts of outcomes on future issues are determined simultaneously. We show that an equilibrium exists under a particular voting institution and characterize voters' forecasts for this equilibrium.

In these days of war, with democracy facing the greatest challenge in its history, it would be a sad mistake for anyone to assume an attitude of smug complacency. Such would be disastrous if not literally treasonable. Educators, therefore, along with labor and industry, business and agriculture, need to re-examine and revaluate their contribution to the common welfare of the community. Engaged in a war that threatens the very existence of freedom of thought, scholarship, and teaching, educational leaders have an obligation to see that the best possible use is made of one of democracy's outstanding institutions—a free educational system. If the democratic nations fail to train men in good moral and intellectual habits, fail to produce men of keen insight and critical judgment, fail to give us free minds that can join in our struggle toward a better life for all the people of the world, they will have failed in one of their most important obligations to the human race, no matter how the struggle upon the field of battle may end.

Among other curious legends about the Balance of Power which were assiduously circulated by German propagandist writers during the war and even before, and have since been repeated in that part of the Socialist press which takes its inspiration from Moscow, I have noticed a tendency which has spread even to reasonable Liberal papers—with a strong pacifist colour—to ascribe the origin and the birth of this doctrine to the machiavellian policy of British statesmen. Many times have I read denunciations of England on the ground that she invented this doctrine, to which are set down the innumerable wars from which Europe has suffered since the sixteenth century.

Now the fact of course is that it is not an English doctrine at all, although it became for quite obvious reasons, which were inevitable, a corner-stone of English policy, unconsciously during the sixteenth, subconsciously during the seventeenth, and consciously during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, because for England it represented the only plan of preserving her own independence, political and economic. It matters little when the doctrine was actually first formulated—I had doubts about that and, therefore, I confess without shame, having no pretensions to learning, I betook myself to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and there found that it was first given definite shape as a doctrine by Grotius and afterwards became a current part of the equipment of every European statesman.

The Executive Office of the President of the United States was established in the summer of 1939 through the associated, if not wholly harmonious, endeavors of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Seventy-sixth Congress. The Reorganization Act of April 3, Reorganization Plans No. 1 of April 25 and No. 2 of May 9, and the Joint Resolution of June 7, were the principal stages in a labyrinthine course of policy-formulation that culminated September 8, 1939, in the issuance of the celebrated Executive Order 8248. Today, ten years later, it is virtually impossible to conceive of the Presidency without the Executive Office, so essential has this nexus of administrative machinery become to its proper functioning. The end of a decade of unparalleled presidential activity would seem a proper season to take stock of the Executive Office of the President: to recall the reasons for its creation, total up the many additions and subtractions that have followed in bewildering and not always purposeful profusion, sketch its present composition, and, most important, call attention to its waxing significance as a key institution in the American system of government.

At the root of the conflict between Berlin and his critics is a fundamental disagreement over the possibility of certainty and over the relation of human ends to politics. Gerald MacCallum's formalist critique obscures the political question of whose values a free person is at liberty to pursue. Macpherson's attempt to defend positive liberty as not rationalistic is shown to fail because he (a) conflates liberty with its conditions and (b) assumes a rational pattern to human moral development. And Crick charges Berlin with ignoring politics, understood as active participation in the polis. Finally, Berlin's conception of politics as a form of human interaction aimed at creating the conditions of human dignity in a situation where we sincerely disagree over the ends of life is shown to be an effort to liberate us to live life for our own purposes. Yet Berlin's defense of liberty is problematic because it is too skeptical; to overcome this difficulty, a non-teleological yet developmentalist account of human nature and a weakly hierarchical account of human values is suggested.

The stability of democracies has been of critical interest to students of comparative politics. One question that has received limited empirical analysis is, How do we integrate class conflict into the broader concept of democratic stability? We extend the work of Przeworski and Wallerstein. Our principal thesis is that as the material bases of class exchange diminish, the state intervenes economically to expand the resources conducive to class consent. A tripartite coalition thus emerges, with the state facilitating class compromise between labor and capital through economic policies. We explore this thesis in a cross-national analysis of data collected from 20 advanced industrial democracies during the time period 1965–83, and explore the essential conclusions and the political-economic implications of our findings.

Developing states lacking a monopoly over the use of force are commonly seen as having failed to live up to the ideal Weberian sovereign type. Yet rather than being a calling card of anarchy, the devolution of important state functions to subnational actors is a rational strategy for developing states to effectively provide important public goods. The case study of the Jewish Community of Palestine demonstrates one instance where subnational communities provided public goods. This study highlights the causal effect of property rights within institutions to drive behavior consistent with the provision of public and private goods. Analyzing temporal and institutional variation across two agricultural communities demonstrates a unique strategy of subnational governance and public goods provision in a developing state. Devolution of public goods provision to subnational actors may be an alternative strategy of governance for developing states that are not yet able to effectively provide important public goods.

Since the 1960s, “the stakeholder,” or affected party, has emerged as a novel democratic subject whose participation in varied institutional sites—from universities to government agencies, corporate boardrooms to international organizations—is seen as necessary for the management of complex problems. However, few specifically attend to the stakeholder as a distinct political subject and consider its implications for democratic practice. This paper presents a genealogy of the stakeholder, documenting its appearance in corporate managerialism and US public administration and showing how racial mobilization, rapid technological progress, and the political rationality of systems thinking provided the conditions of possibility for its emergence. Though orienting democracy around stakeholders permits opportunities for participation in political life, I argue that this subject is predicated on a circumscribed form of participatory politics that erodes habits of discovering a common good, erases distinctions between individuals and corporate bodies, and amplifies the problem of expertise.

Presidential addresses in our Association are frequently discourses on the state of our discipline. In the past twenty years nine presidents have reflected on its status, trends and needs. It would be presumptuous for another president to return to the topic now if the moment did not validate the need. After a period of novel developments, accompanied by uncertainties and tensions, there is need to reemphasize our community of interest and our common obligation.

It is a community extending across diversities and an obligation with many components. The study of the science and art of government has many facets which reflect search in that eternal triangle of science, values, and utility.

In the beginning it is well to remark that we are constantly drawn toward two poles in a dual quest. We would like to find verifiable propositions or working assumptions about political activity which, like the law of gravity or the laws of motion, transcend time, and technology and culture variations. We would like even to extend our vision further: just as the biologist seeks for the origins of life and the astronomer for the initial creative impulse for the universe, we want to know if there is a universal plan in history and a destiny for man.

Such cosmic vision must be based on the assumption of some constants in human behavior, such as self-love; or in human relations, such as power; or in natural morality, such as justice. Yet grasp for certainty fades as we wonder whether all such things are relative to environment, and hence whether ecology and the search for the laws of change must be the centers of inquiry. As we contemplate how such great cultural changes as the secularization of thought in the Enlightenment, or such tremendous physical events as the discovery of America have upset the assumptions of thought, and as we try to think of what nuclear energy, automation and the dominion of scientists may mean, we are humble before the task of building an endurable science of politics.

The westward movement of settlement—into the semi-arid, treeless Great Plains beyond the 100th meridian—carried along with it traditions of local government familiar further east. Settlers organized their newfound lands into the counties, townships, and small school districts to which they were accustomed in the states of their origin. Local-government customs evolved in humid, populous areas were thus transposed to a region destined by weather and other physical conditions to remain a place of sparse population.

Predilections in government organization were fortified by a mistaken supposition that agricultural enterprise could be successfully organized and conducted according to the fashion of the East. The homesteading law generally in effect until 1909 (allowing but 160 acres to a settler) reflected this supposition. Moreover, the rectangular survey, with its gridiron of 36-square-mile sections, constituted a ready-made invitation to organize the congressional township as a governmental unit and to make much the same area the basis for school districts.

Over the years subsequent to the original peopling of this region, circumstance and harsh experience have forced a revision in predominant beliefs concerning its nature and capabilities. Adjustments in agronomic enterprise and population have perforce occurred, often painfully and distressfully. It remains to be seen what adjustments must correspondingly occur in the organization and functioning of local government, for the basic facts of a region must find reflection in the trials, tribulations, and performance of its overlying governmental institutions.

By a turn of legal fate, the first case between two American states to be decided by either the International Court of Justice or its predecessor, the Permanent Court of International Justice, is one which involves the controversial practice of diplomatic asylum. One can choose to regard diplomatic asylum as a principle of American international law or as a “permissive local custom,” though in no sense a principle of international law, or one can agree that “the fact that asylum is not exercised in the territory of the leading states, and is mainly resorted to in the ‘backward’ countries of the Near and Far East and of Latin America, suggests that it is a practice followed only in relation to states who are not fully civilized in the Western sense of the term, and that as such it is a temporary exception to the system of international law which obtains in the community of civilized nations.” Whatever the viewpoint, the fact remains that the practice has been indulged in for a long time, with and without formal legal sanction, and in more places than Latin America. The Colombian-Peruvian Asylum Case brings to attention the issues of the validity in international law of diplomatic asylum and of its desirability in international relations. A short sketch of the origin and development of diplomatic asylum will indicate something of its nature.

The Thirty Years War, though essentially religious in origin, assumed towards its end a distinctly political complexion. It became a trial of strength between the major powers of Europe, resulting in the unquestioned supremacy of France and Austria, the establishment of Switzerland as a fully fledged sovereign state, and the extension of the dominion of Sweden and Denmark. Most, if not all, of these changes occurred at the expense of the territorial unity of the German Empire. At the same time the disruption of German Imperial unity brought in its wake the effective assertion of sovereignty on the part of some 360 German principalities. The political unity of ‘Germany’ became a legal fiction.

Under these changed circumstances the generally prevalent Roman Law, based as it was on the idea of strong central administration, was no longer in accordance with the political realities of Germany.

With a claimed membership of over 12 million members, possession of over 1000 seats in local and national legislative assemblies, a widespread domestic reputation, and a sensationalistic treatment in the foreign press, the Sokagakkai has come in recent years to be a subject of some academic, and much religious and political interest in both Japan and the United States. An organization of lay believers of the Sho sect of Nichiren Buddhism (noted for its intolerance and vigorous propagation methods), the Sokagakkai has gone into Japanese politics with a striking degree of success; the extent to which it has brought its religious characteristics into the political sphere and the question of whether such religious groups should be in that sphere at all are at present the focus of considerable debate in Japan.

Most criticisms of the Sokagakkai have to date concentrated upon its religious activities, its doctrinal truth or falsehood, its alleged militaristic tendencies, and the proper place of religion in the political system of a secular state, I would like to touch on some of the social (or antisocial) functions performed by the Sokagakkai in Japanese society, as proclaimed by the Gakkai itself and as evidenced in the Gakkai's performance, and on the implications of these social functions for the Japanese political process.

As its name, the “Value-Creation Society,” suggests, the Sokagakkai postulates pursuit of absolute happiness by means of the creation of certain values in one's life as the proper direction of human life. So that all men may be able to achieve this happiness, the Gakkai emphasizes equality of all men; so that they may be fully able to enjoy their values, the Gakkai stresses freedom. Absolute freedom, equality, and happiness may be sought by the individual through religious faith; the agency for the realization of these ideals for society and the world is the political system.

For two generations American political and economic life has been moving swiftly toward “bigness,” toward monolithic organization. We live by, in, and among bigger and bigger corporations, bigger and bigger unions, bigger and bigger governments. On all sides individual freedom and responsibility have shrunk. Absorbed into organizations bigger than himself, the American tends to be overpowered by these organizations, whether of industry, labor or agriculture. And whatever his orientation, he must operate in and under an ever-expanding multilateral network of occupational and governmental regulation.

In the shadow of such manifold giantism modern men—practically all of them employees who rate themselves “middle class”—seem but puny figures. Man's own handiwork has become a Frankenstein monster, destroying his initiative and individuality. In the grip of forces he has created, helpless single-handed to control, he suffers from loneliness, from not belonging, from impersonality. Millions who live in great cities, hundreds of thousands employed in assembly-line factories and organized in industrial unions, thousands of stockholders who can only endorse management's policies governing “their” billion dollar corporation —all these experience frustration, helplessness.