Few movements in the history of American politics and political thought have been of equal immediate or enduring importance with that associated with the name of Thomas Jefferson. And yet Jefferson never published anything other than very brief and inadequate discussions of the principles for which he stood. His only systematic exposition of his political ideas is found in his famous Notes on Virginia. This work, however, was written in 1781-82 and deals but remotely with the issues which were to occupy the stage after 1789. Neither in Jefferson's own writings nor in those of Madison and Monroe, his successors as official head of the Republican party and as president of the United States, do we find any adequate exposition of the theories associated with the era of Jeffersonian democracy. It is only in the extensive works of John Taylor of Caroline, a friend and associate of these men in the political battles of that period, that such an exposition is to be found. Jefferson wrote that “Colonel Taylor and myself have rarely, if ever, differed in any political principle of importance.” John Randolph said that Taylor's “disinterested principles” were “the only bond of union among Republicans.” And Timothy Pickering calls him “the Goliath of the party.” As Henry Adams has said, Taylor was regarded as a political thinker of the first rank by the Virginia school and by many other leaders of his time, but it is equally true that his writings have occupied a position of obscurity since his death. This obscurity, however, does not alter the fact that they were influential in their time and are today the best source of information concerning the principles of both the earlier and later phases of the movement initiated by Jefferson during the first years under the Constitution.

Tali Mendelberg's The Race Card offers a methodologically rich and convincing account of the impact of subtle race cues in contemporary American politics. Although her thesis is a controversial one, Mendelberg develops a careful and cogent argument that racial attitudes can have a substantial effect on candidate evaluations—provided that candidates craft a racial appeal that appears to be about something other than race. She argues that the success of implicit antiblack appeals, ones juxtaposing visual references to race with ostensibly nonracial verbal messages on issues such as crime or welfare, are due to four “A” factors: ambivalence about racial stereotypes, accessibility and priming, awareness of one's reliance on racial attitudes, and the ambiguity of the racial cue.

The growth of the democratic element in Japanese government has not been without effect on the Privy Council. In the early years of its history, the Council and the ministry were institutions serving the same classes and seeing eye to eye. This was true not only under the presidency of Ito, Oki, and Yamagata (1889-94), but also even during a considerable part of the period when party government was struggling for supremacy. In those days, political parties in the House of Representatives were balked by the bureaucrats, clansmen, and militarists entrenched in the administrative branch, while the seats in the Council were occupied by the great leaders of these controlling classes. But the doctrine of ministerial responsibility had begun to take root. In 1895, the Ito ministry abandoned the principle of executive independence of political parties and accepted an alliance with the Jiyuto, or Liberal party. In 1898, the Kenseito, or Constitutional party, under the leadership of Okuma and Itagaki, was given the opportunity of forming the first party cabinet in the history of Japan. Upon its fall, caused by internal dissension, the succeeding ministry under Yamagata (1898-1900) contained no party men, although the premier condescended to an alliance with the Kenseito. In 1900, Ito himself formed the Seiyukai, and brought the second party cabinet into office. But it was not until the first Kenseikai ministry, under Okuma and Kato (1914-16), and the fifth Seiyukai ministry under Hara (1918-21), that well-grounded ministerial parties controlled the lower house.

Stephen Salkever in this Review (“Virtue, Obligation and Politics,” APSR 68 [March, 1974]) discusses two paradigms of politics: one based on the concept of virtue (ancient political philosophy), the other resting on obligation (modern political thought). We analyze the meaning and significance of these two paradigms in terms of the cognitive-developmental moral psychology common to Lawrence Kohlberg, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget. We first present the cognitive-developmental theory and its empirical findings. We then demonstrate that the politics of obligation falls within the virtue paradigm as a necessary stage in the development of virtue, which involves placing Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Rawls within our developmental scheme. Finally, we explore the nature of understanding moral principles from within the cognitive-developmental perspective. In all this, we agree with Salkever's basic assumption that any account of political good (public as opposed to private) must be based on moral psychology, i.e., it must deal with the question of “What is good for the most inclusive of all publics, the human species?” We go two steps beyond Salkever, however, by showing the significance of the question, and by providing an answer to it (both of which bear upon the understanding of morality). An underlying purpose of our research is to present and to promote the political relevance and significance of moral psychology in general and cognitive development in particular.

The neutrality legislation enacted at Washington in 1935 was admittedly a compromise, satisfying neither the President, who in his statement upon signing the joint resolution, again criticized its mandatory feature as potentially dangerous, nor many of those in and out of Congress who wanted some definition of our relation to war. As if to point the moral, the Italo-Ethiopian conflict flamed into what the President was pleased to call “a state of war,” and some of the very issues which the legislation was intended to meet became acute. More recently, civil war in Spain has tragically illuminated new issues in our position and policy.

Within recent months, increased attention has been given the possibility of utilizing interstate compacts to cope with problems that transcend the boundary lines of given states. A Council of State Governments has been created to promote such interstate agreements, and several states have established commissions to facilitate coöperation with this council. Compacts have been advocated as solutions not only for the problem of criminal extradition, but also for such problems as the control of the extraction of natural resources (e.g., coal, oil, gas, water supplies, and water power) and the conservation of their supply, and the regulation of milk prices, of the conditions of labor, and of the production and distribution of the services of certain classes of public utilities.

Prior to the National Revolution of 1933, one of the foremost postulates guiding the conduct of German civil servants was that of political neutrality. The permanent public personnel—national, state, and local—was to consider itself, in the apt formulation of the Weimar constitution, “servants of the whole people, not of a party.” Although imprudent legislative and executive measures taken during the republican era weakened rather than strengthened the principle of neutrality, it was effectively upheld by the disciplinary courts. Indirectly, the professional tenet of non-partisanship facilitated German bureaucracy's identification with a broadly conceived constitutionalism. At a time when the National Socialist vote had become the largest in national elections, organizers for the new creed still made least headway among the government personnel. Statistics published in 1936 disclose the fact that less than four per cent of all civil servants joined the national Socialist party before Hitler's rise to the chancellorship. As the incoming Reich cabinet was not slow to recognize the “impossibility” of large-scale displacements, it resorted to transitional regulations in order to weed out overtly heterogeneous elements.