The modern state, by contrast to the Aristotelian regime, is essentially impersonal. For Machiavelli, stato is extremely personal; yet, it is argued, Machiavelli laid the foundation for the modern state in his general and impartial advice to acquire stato. The argument proceeds by an analysis of Machiavelli's use of stato, after a brief consideration of its medieval counterparts.

A common characteristic of dependent industrializing countries is a substantial direct entrepreneurial role for the state. One explanation for this is that in dependent industrializing countries the system of allocation and production has been captured by a key group, the techno-bureaucratic elite. The argument is that this elite lends its political support to the state, in return for the state substituting as entrepreneur in the industrialization process.

In this article we analyze the theoretical implications of this explanation of the entrepreneurial state. A formal model is constructed of the relationship between state entrepreneurship, material consequences for the techno-bureaucratic elite, and important domestic and international constraints. We then use deductive methods to analyze the logic of state entrepreneurship. Among other things, we show how cyclical fluctuations in the global economy are reflected in constantly changing levels of state entrepreneurship, and we investigate the consequences of alternative kinds of dependency syndromes for histories of entrepreneurial substitution and for streams of benefits to the techno-bureaucratic elite. It is demonstrated that there is an inverse relationship between the tendencies to reach stable levels of state entrepreneurship and the long-term potential for economic growth.

From my work on my doctoral dissertation (Lipset 1950, 1968) down to the present, I have been interested in the problem of “American exceptionalism.” That curious phrase emerged from the debate in the international Communist movement in the 1920s concerning the sources of the weakness of left-wing radical movements in the United States (Draper 1960, pp. 268-72; Lipset 1977a, pp. 107-61). The key question repeatedly raised in this context has been, is America qualitatively different from other industrial capitalist countries? Or, to use Sombart's words, “Why is there no Socialism in the United States?” (Sombart 1976).

In a forthcoming book, I evaluate the hypotheses advanced by various writers from Karl Marx onward to explain the absence of an effective socialist party on the American political scene. (For a preliminary formulation, see Lipset 1977b, pp. 31-149, 346-63.) If any of the hypotheses are valid, they should also help to account for the variation among working-class movements in other parts of the world. In this article, therefore, I shall reverse the emphasis from that in my book and look at socialist and working-class movements comparatively, applying elsewhere some of the propositions that have been advanced to explain the American situation.

We examine the political history of twelve twentieth-century efforts at comprehensive administrative reorganization in the United States. These efforts account for only a small fraction of administrative changes and do not seem to have had a major impact on administrative costs, efficiency, or control. They have been a source of frustration for presidents and others and have become regular and unlamented casualties of experience. Nevertheless, the idea of comprehensive administrative reorganization has been persistently resurrected by the political system. The history of comprehensive reorganization suggests that short-run outcomes are heavily influenced by the problematics of attention; that influence over long-run administrative development involves affecting gradually evolving systems of meaning; and that reorganization rhetoric and ritual affirm an interpretation of life at least as much as they are bases for short-run political decisions. We suggest some implications of such conclusions for a more general understanding of the organization of political life.

Hegel's theory of crime and punishment is tested by raising against it three difficult questions: Why must we punish the criminal? Must the punishment fit the crime? Is insanity an acceptable defense? It is argued that a Hegelian approach can generate plausible answers to these questions, answers that help to explain and justify a number of our own morally implicated practices. It is further argued that Hegel's method of arriving at such answers is by no means alien to those employed by contemporary analytic philosophers.

Research on the tendency of governments to trade off welfare spending for defense has generated diverse and often contradictory findings. This study attempts to clarify the issue of trade-offs by examining expenditure patterns since 1948 for the four major NA TO allies: United States, United Kingdom, Federal Republic of Germany, and France. When viewed from the perspective of long-term trends in shares of outlays, trade-offs are evident. When short-term changes in expenditure, which are more germane to the potential for one spending category to benefit at the expense of the other are studied, no pattern of trade-off can be detected. A three-equation model is estimated to control for the variety of possible determining factors of public resource allocation. In none of the four nations does a pattern of trade-off emerge, except in periods of wartime or postwar reconstruction. These findings are consistent with the ability of governments to finance new spending through either increased taxes or larger budget deficits. The growing disinclination to use these methods, however, suggests that the potential for trade-offs has perhaps reappeared in the 1980s.

Some recent theories have blamed the growth of government on budget-maximizing bureaucrats who are assumedly capable of imposing their most preferred budget-output combination on legislatures, subject to cost and demand constraints. However, theoretical examination of the range of bargaining outcomes that might occur between bureau and legislature shows that budget-maximizing behavior does not necessarily lead to super-optimal levels of production, nor do the suggested reforms of competition and privatization necessarily improve the situation. In this bargaining model, the central determinants of governmental growth are not budget-maximizing bureaucrats, but the legislature's decisions regarding mode of oversight and form of internal organization.

Conventional comparisons of national industrialization strategies place a strong emphasis on the cultural development of a modern ethic of work performance as an important component of effectively attaining industrial growth. In the case of Czarist and Soviet Russia, most studies maintain that Russian workers are exceptional inasmuch as they have always lacked a modern work ethic and therefore remain necessarily less productive than the more ethically disciplined work forces of Europe, Japan, and North America. However, such studies fail to deal with the problems of Soviet industrialization and distort the actual historical processes of Western capitalist industrialization. This analysis argues that a modern work ethic has developed within the Soviet workplace since 1917. it maintains that the social origins of this cultural code of disciplined labor are to be found, in large part, in the cultural values and group practices of the radical Russian intelligentsia before 1914, a group that provided the concrete class bases of the Bolshevik reconstitution of Marxism as a culture-transforming ideology for industrializing Russia.

In this article I present a formal model of relative deprivation and demonstrate its implications concerning the relationship between inequality and political instability. The model, which is based on assumptions similar to those of Nagel (1974), implies that the relationship of instability to inequality can be either curvilinear, as Nagel found, or linear, as Russett (1964) found, although under different conditions. In both cases the model implies that reducing inequality reduces the level of relative deprivation, thereby enhancing the prospect for political stability. However, changes in the tendency of individuals to compare their lot with that of others can also substantially affect the level of relative deprivation in a society.

Has the scope of public planning in contemporary capitalist economies promoted or hindered economic growth and income distribution? We explore this question by assessing the impact of various mechanisms for raising government revenues on investment, growth, and income distribution in 22 developed market economy countries. The article considers whether growth and distribution are affected differently by governments' relative reliance on personal and corporate income taxes, social security contributions, property taxes, and sales and value added taxes, or by the relative progressivity of tax mechanisms. Our findings lend support to the assertion that fiscal instruments (especially personal income taxes) can be used successfully to achieve greater income equality. On the other hand, these findings run counter to the conventional notion that an automatic trade-off exists between an active public sector and a dynamic, expanding economy: although there is surely some tension between the economic goals of growth and equality, it is not at all clear that they are necessarily incompatible or that government can contribute only to the latter.

This article presents some “rational-actor” models that depict the negotiation process between terrorists and government policymakers for those incidents where hostages or property are seized and demands are issued. The models account for the objectives and constraints faced by both the terrorists and the policymakers. Uncertainty is introduced through probability constraints (i.e., chance constraints) requiring a specific likelihood of some event occurring. Implications are subsequently extracted from the comparative static analysis as the models' parameters are changed. The last part of the article presents a club theory analysis concerning the sharing of transnational commando forces.

This article analyzes pervasive political corruption in the People's Republic of China today, based on a collection of 275 media reports from 1977 to 1980. First, a description of the types of corruption, the characteristics of corruptors, and the urban-rural concentration of corruption is presented. Then, an analysis of the regional variation in corruption is made, taking into account political, strategic, social, and economic factors. Third, Chinese “theorizing” about the causes of corruption is described, and its correspondence with some outstanding Western theories on corruption is discussed. Finally, Chinese authorities' strategy of weakening the “system of corruption” in China is evaluated, especially the strengthening of social control.

In two recent articles, Inglehart (1981, 1982) arrives at the conclusion that the decline of materialism in postwar Japan is the result of generational change and period effects. Aging effects cannot be demonstrated empirically. This article challenges his views. It will be shown that a life-cycle explanation can claim as much empirical evidence as a generational explanation, as long as the overall goodness of fit and the sign and strength of the age effects and cohort effects are the only criteria the decision is based upon. Particularly, a two-dimensional age-period model fits the data nearly as well as the cohort-period model that Inglehart proposes. Theoretical considerations, however, plead for a three-dimensional solution that includes some cohort effects beside period and aging effects for those generations that grew up in the postwar era. Such a model can also be established empirically.

The Prisoner's Dilemma game, Rousseau's image of the Stag Hunt, and the concept of a security dilemma have all been used to support the argument that much international conflict is the result of anarchy at the global level rather than the aggressive intentions of governments. This article argues that the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Stag Hunt are usually inadequate models of the problem they have been used to illuminate, and that a security dilemma as commonly defined need not have the implications that are ascribed to it. It also argues that developing more adequate models of the general problem of enforcing agreements in a condition of anarchy will help us to understand better why international cooperation is more easily achieved in some areas than in others.

Why do some new representative institutions succeed and others fail? This article tests several hypotheses about the ecology of institutional performance, drawing on a ten-year study of Italian regional governments. Institutional success is greater where socioeconomic development is more advanced, where the political culture is participant and sociable, rather than passive and parochial, and where social stability is greater; these three variables alone account for more than four-fifths of the variance in institutional performance. Of particular importance is the impact of historical patterns of social solidarity and political mobilization on contemporary institutional success.

In this article I argue a thesis about Hegel's views on war different from most previous interpreters, e.g., Popper and Hook on the one side and Avineri and Pelczynski on the other. In particular I argue that his reflections on war are an attempt to answer the problem of political obligation or the question of why should anyone willingly die for the state. Accordingly, I examine briefly Hegel's critique of Kantian morality for its inability to account for political obligation proper and although ultimately I conclude that Hegel never completely extricated himself from Kant's belief in a providentialist historicism leading to a condition of “perpetual peace,” I still want to suggest that war remains for Hegel an essential moment in the “ethical” life of the state and perhaps the chief means whereby the dignity and autonomy of the state can be exerted over the network of private interests that constitutes civil society.

The Social Contract is reinterpreted by emphasizing its relation to Rousseau's other writings and doctrines. In the spirit of Hobbesian realism, Rousseau regards natural law and other forms of “private morality” as ineffectual, invalid, and in practice dangerous tools of oppression and subversion. But, still more realistic than Hobbes, Rousseau thinks it impossible to build a nonoppressive state on men's selfish interests alone and embraces the classical view that morality or virtue is politically necessary (as well as intrinsically good). Rousseau's doctrine of the natural goodness of man, however, which traces all vice to the effects of oppression, leads him to conclude that the non-oppression more or less guaranteed by the absolute rule of general laws is also sufficient to make men virtuous. Thus Rousseau can declare law as such (General Will) infallible and “sovereign”—and he must do so in order to protect rule of law from its greatest danger, the subversive appeal to “natural law.”

We evaluate the six-year presidential term proposal in the context of a model of the U.S. economy characterized by a short-run but not a long-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment. Votes and public welfare are separately conceptualized as functions of inflation and unemployment, which are indirectly controlled by the president through manipulation of government spending.

In a series of simulation experiments, the vote-maximizing choice of policy instruments led to less we(fare loss with six- than with four-year terms under most conditions. Ironically, vote maximizing was shown to lead not only to short- and long-term welfare loss, but also to long-run political disadvantage.

Although France is not among those countries most frequently cited as examples of the trend toward corporatism, some observers have seen evidence of corporatist patterns of interest group-government contacts. Others assert that French groups have a distinctive protest form of action, and still others see France as a preserve of traditional pluralism. Interviews with 99 French interest group leaders in 1979 suggest that the pluralist model most accurately describes the actions reported by these leaders. Although the group leaders described some corporatist activities, such as participation in statutory commissions, and indicated a willingness to engage in protest, the most common actions were those more consistent with pluralism: personal contacts with government officials and lobbying. These activities were also the forms judged to be most effective in influencing policy, although the overall impression was of a political system in which organized interests had relatively limited impact.

A model of war costs is presented that is based on the utility nations expect to derive from the war as well as on the technological gap between adversaries and the short-term tactical tit-for-tat calculations that must occur on the battlefield. This model explains nearly three-quarters of the variance in battle deaths per million population per month of war experienced by war initiators. Approximately one-quarter of the variance in war costs is accounted for by considering the position of the initiator's opponent. A second model, based on marginal changes in expected utility, technological differences, and tit-for-tat, is shown to account for more than one-third the variance, regardless of whether war costs are viewed by the initiator or an opponent in a war. This study, therefore, provides a useful explanation of war intensity and contributes to the cumulative, lawlike implications of the expected-utility approach on which it is based.