Background of Conference Action. Forty-one countries were represented at the twenty-sixth session of the International Labor Conference, held in Philadelphia April 20–May 12, to consider the future rôle of the International Labor Organization and the economic and social policies to be recommended to the governments of member states. This was the first regular session of the Conference to be held since 1938, the New York-Washington session in 1941 having been a special one. As in 1941, there were no delegations from Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, Rumania, Spain, and the U.S.S.R. Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Haiti, Iraq, Liberia, Switzerland, and Turkey, which were not represented at the 1941 sesseion, were represented by government delegates and advisers, as well as Sweden, which sent a full delegation. The occupied countries of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Yugoslavia were represented by complete delegations; also Luxemburg by two government delegates and an adviser.

As compared with the 1941 sesssion, the twenty-sixth was held at a time more propitious to the cause of the United Nations, was better attended both as to countries represented and the number of delegates and advisers present, and was more deeply occupied with specific proposals concerning the future status of the I.L.O. and post-war economic and social problems. The reasons for this were to be found in the events of the two and a half years separating the two sessions.

In the period following World War II before the declaration of martial law in the Philippines, politics and heavy demands for patronage affected the allocation of resources, the administrative process, and personnel policies in ways inimical to the interests of businessmen and technocrats. When faced with intense competition, politicians pressed to employ growing numbers of clients and protégés in local administration. Strong political machines were better able than weak machines to ignore pressures for social services benefitting largely the lower class. The level of political mobilization and size of the lower class increased expenditures on primary education, and expenditures on intermediate and secondary education grew as the percentage of the electorate that was lower class increased. To the dismay of business interests and technocrats, “wasteful” expenditures on local administration and social services were most institutionalized and difficult to cut, while expenditures on economic improvements proved more elastic.

Three decades have elapsed since the first president of the American Political Science Association at its inaugural meeting described the objects and purposes that it should pursue. Some of his successors have discussed various details of this program and others have reviewed the results achieved. Due recognition has been accorded to the significance of historical backgrounds, legal systems, and political theory. In addition, emphasis has been placed upon the importance of an understanding of the government as it actually functions. Hence, much of the work of this Association and its members has been devoted to the investigation and exposition of those customs, procedures, and institutions which, with or without any recognition by constitution or statute, exercise a profound influence over governmental organization and function.

It is natural that during this period significant changes should have appeared in the scope of Political Science and in the character of the techniques employed, with resulting differences in data and conclusions.

This essay has two complementary purposes. It seeks principally to clarify the basis of the political philosophy of Richard Hooker, the great Elizabethan divine, and, in so doing, to clarify as well certain of the limits of political speculation itself. We hear quite often now that reports of the death of political philosophy have been greatly exaggerated. If this is indeed a time of its resuscitation, it is important that its limits be recognized and that inquiry be liberated from doctrines which cannot be based on unassisted reason alone. The ancillary purpose of this study is a contribution to such a disentanglement.

Hooker's political thought itself also repays the attention of modern political scientists, if only as a remarkably comprehensive model of pre-modern or “traditional” society. Hooker wrestles with one of the difficulties which had much to do with ending “traditional” society in Europe and in those places Europe has influenced: the bitter and conflicting claims of church and state, and especially of various churches. Hooker's is a revealing endeavor to solve the political problems inherent in revealed religion, without abandoning—as his “enlightened” successors did—Christianity as a decisive constituent of politics or Aristotle as the secular guide of politics.