Liberal democrats, like all those who elect to paddle in the placid waters of liberalism, show a charming imperviousness to the existence of power. It is the ingenuousness which permitted the ideology of individualism to flourish for well over a century in the Western world. But all chickens—political as well as others—eventually come home to roost; and the failure to imbibe the home truths set down by such ungentlemanly characters as Thrasymachus, Machiavelli, and Pareto now accounts for the dilemmas, reconsiderations, and tortured defenses of liberal democracy which we see abounding on all sides.

Liberal democracy—that uneasy compromise which was never a compromise at all—is, from the moral standpoint, the worthiest of political creeds. It can arouse the enthusiasm of the humane, the heretical, and the responsible: in short, of all men of good will. But the tenets of liberal democracy can only be a guide for governors and governed in a community if there exists a halcyon situation in which the traditional status system is placidly taken for granted by all in the community.

In a recent issue of this Review John P. Roche developed an explanation of the motivation behind the exercise of self-restraint by the United States judiciary. He related the scope available for the exercise of judicial power to the working of the American party system, i.e., to the extent to which the Court found itself faced by “cohesive majorities.” Almost in passing he drew a comparison between the British and the American position. “No cohesive majority, such as normally exists in Britain,” he said, “would permit a politically irresponsible judiciary to usurp decision-making functions, but, for complex social and institutional reasons, there are few issues in the United States on which cohesive majorities exist.” The purpose of this essay is to test that thesis, and the concept of cohesive majorities, in the setting of Australian politics and judicial review.

The 1944 action of the Supreme Court voiding the white primary ended the last effective legal block to Negro voter registration in the South. After that, resort to legal steps to block Negro registration was either outlawed by the courts or else could only be a delaying device. In the state of Louisiana, however, the decision in Smith v. Allwright did not result in Negro registration comparable to white registration. In 1956, twelve years later, 30 percent of the potential Negro voting population was registered, compared to 73 percent of the whites. This study is an investigation of some factors in that discrepancy, and in particular, of the differences in registration between Catholic and Protestant areas.

An important characteristic of Negro registration in Louisiana is the extreme range of variation to be found among the several parishes. Table I shows 17 parishes with fewer than 20 percent of the eligible Negroes registered, and 11 parishes with 70 percent or more of the potential Negro vote registered. Therefore, the statewide “average” percentage of Negro registration has little meaning without more detailed interpretation.

Recent forays into administrative theory have impaired the neat dichotomy between politics and administration that was postulated, either as description or as ideal, by fin dė siècle political scientists and reformers. The intertwining of policy formulation and policy execution is a recognized fact of the administrative process. The questioning of this early dogma of public administration has opened up speculation as to what the proper relationship between the two aspects of the governmental process ought to be. Dilemmas have been identified but no systematic and fully acceptable solution has been propounded. Evidently, an answer cannot be given without delineating and understanding the matrix of politics in which administration inevitably is imbedded.

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.

At its national congress, September 15 to 27, 1956, the Chinese Communist Party, among other items of business, elected a new group of leaders officially known as the Eighth Central Committee. For some time to come this group of men and women will have a highly influential role in the affairs of their party and of the Chinese nation. What they say and do may also affect the course of world events.

What kind of people are they? What are their social and educational backgrounds? How long have they been in the Communist movement? By what roads have they been able to reach the summit of their party hierarchy? What kinds of influence can they exert in the various fields of national affairs? To what extent did their election to the central committee represent a “status mobility” within the party? Answers to these and similar questions should illuminate some broader questions: (1) whether the Chinese Communist Party is really led by the working class as the Communists themselves have claimed; (2) what are the typical features of the Chinese Communist leadership; (3) how the characteristics of that leadership have been conditioned by those of Chinese society; and (4) what are the strengths and weaknesses of the Communist leadership? This paper is addressed to these questions.

The essence of Hacker's construction is the theory of the ruling class. Immediately, one thinks of Marx, Mosca, Michels, Pareto, and several Americans who have espoused, in one form or another, oligarchic doctrines. What most sharply distinguishes Hacker from most theorists of this persuasion is the absence of presuppositions of historical inevitability. Seeking only to describe sequences and relations of the past and present, he makes no claims of omniscience, of knowing what the social process must unfold. Neither is his theory normative.

Yet, apart from details and variations, there is a crucial framework of meaning which discloses Hacker's close affinity with the essence of conventional oligarchic doctrines: the few rule, the many simply obey; the governors, in substance if not in form, are free from compulsion to answer to the governed. Historically, and indeed currently, Hacker asserts, genuine power has been and is the exclusive or, at least, the primary possession of a privileged few. True, the composition and foundation of the governing class have changed, but this change, he continues, did not bring in its wake a widening or deepening of the structure of power in American culture. It merely means the substitution of one set of masters or controllers for another. After all, a monopoly of power is a monopoly, whether its source be deference or manipulation. Both, he avers, “permit a few men to rule many men.” Neither system of power allows the personnel and the general policies of government to be the product of voluntary and active consent. In both contexts, the ruled, not the rulers, are the object of control. “Both deference and manipulation are similar in that they are control.” Such, then, is Hacker's relation to the essence of oligarchic thought. What can be said of the validity of his formulation?

Of all the changes that have occurred in Yugoslavia since 1948, one of the most interesting is the development of a new theory and role for the Communist Party. Now officially called the League of Communists, the Yugoslav Party illustrates both the well-known dominant role of Communist parties in states where they have come to power and at the same time the peculiar nature of Yugoslav Communism that has set it apart from the Soviet variety.

Organized on the Soviet pattern and headed by men steeped in the Soviet tradition, the Yugoslav Communists even in 1945 occupied a position like that of their comrades in the USSR, where, as Stalin said, “not a single important political or organizational question is decided without directions from the Party ….” Even after the Cominform dispute had produced a new ideological pattern, a more liberal approach to Communism, political and economic decentralization and profuse professions of democracy, few could doubt that, as Stalin said about the situation in the Soviet Union, “the Party governs the country.”

Hans J. Morgenthau's “The Dilemmas of Freedom” is an extremely able, concise, and forthright treatment of a problem of grave importance, and a defense of a point of view which I deeply respect, but concerning which I have serious doubts. I suppose that the differences between us could be summarized in this way: Morgenthau suggests that the solutions to the dilemmas of freedom which he finds, are available and explicable largely in a kind of formalism. He follows, in that, the great tradition of the Federalist, which he quotes. I believe it is difficult today to understand these solutions in formal terms, and I believe the difficulty is enhanced by Morgenthau's own conception of what freedom is.

The data for political studies are most commonly drawn from history, either in accounts of lives, events and institutions, or in the writings of earlier systematic students. But to probe the meaning and relationships of ultimate ends like justice and truth, no actual happenings are needed; imaginative fiction and drama can supply the food for thought. Why then should we not as reasonably and profitably look for lessons in political wisdom in the works of our greatest poet? In this essay I have sought to find and expound such a lesson in Shakespeare's tragedy, King Lear.

According to that profound student of Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, the most difficult task of statesmanship is that of providing, not for the foundation, but for the perpetuation, of political institutions. If the political institutions are the best, to perpetuate them is not only the most difficult, but also the greatest of all the tasks of the statesman.

An exhilarating breath of fresh air has blown into the musty halls of political theory with the publication of Robert Dahl's Walgreen lectures, A Preface to Democratic Theory. We now know that discussion of minority rights and majority rule can be carried on with lucidity and serious attention to some of the intriguing intellectual puzzles which arise, as well as with reasonable rigor and a genuinely remarkable economy of expression.

For all his clarity and conciseness, however, Professor Dahl has paid a fourfold philosophical price:

1. His case against “Madisonian” democracy is procedural and perhaps more peripheral than profound.

2. The neo-Spinozistic endeavor to formalize political ideology appears premature.

3. His confessed epistemological perplexity over the ground of “intensity” judgments is peculiar.

4. His refusal to wrestle with ethical issues—a refusal he shares with most “empirically oriented” political scientists—leaves them not only open and unresolved, but even unexplored. Yet, in an important sense, these issues seem to be the central ones.

Following Dahl's example, I shall try to set forth these caveats as concisely as possible, leaving aside qualifications and positive theory construction.

Neal's article constitutes a good survey of what the Yugoslav Communists have said in recent years about the role of the Communist Party in their system. From a critical standpoint, however, it stops short of cutting through the Communist jargon. This has led him into taking contradictory positions. In the comments that follow, I will confine myself to examining his major conclusion that Yugoslav Communism has “pioneered in new forms and theories of Marxism,” and the related inference, implied more than once, that Yugoslavia may be evolving toward democracy.

The title of this essay poses not one vexing issue but two, and each of them sharply challenges the student of American political thought. The first might be called the common problem of political theory—the question of its relevance to the institutional facts of life. How, it is asked, can the analysis of political ideas help to illuminate our understanding of political action? Can theory lead us to a surer knowledge of why governments and electorates behave as they do? Can it help us to diagnose and prescribe? Or is the study of theory, on the contrary, justified simply on the ground that the words of Plato and Hobbes and Locke are part of what Matthew Arnold called culture: “the best that has been thought or known in the world”? This is, I take it, a problem universal among students of political thought, whether they choose America, Europe, or China as their realm; and it lends itself to no easy answers.

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.

To discuss all of the points at which we seem to disagree would be an unwarranted imposition upon readers of this Review, many of whom, I fear, will not have read the book in question. Consequently I propose to stick to the central issues so far as possible, for to a considerable extent these transcend the book itself; and therefore some purpose will be served even for those who have not read the book.

Among political scientists, even among political theorists, there is a widespread conviction that political theory has entered upon a time of troubles. Few, however, regard it simply as a “dead dog,” and political theorists continue, as they should, to administer critical self-analysis, and to define and defend their methodological and philosophical positions. The basis for a unity of opposites is still a subject for dispute. This paper is offered, not as a solution, but as a statement of one conception of the role of political theory.

A time-honored technique of dialectic is to seek well-reasoned objections to the view one does not hold. A medicine often commended to the political scientists is a body of systematic, scientific theory akin to economic theory in approach and methodological sophistication. Accordingly, this article takes issue with that interpretation which conceives of political theory as, ideally, the master discipline whereby the science of politics is to be unified and systematized, and empirical investigation oriented and guided. A few definite and carefully developed proposals for reconstruction along these lines, familar to political scientists, are G. E. G. Catlin's The Science and Method of Politics, Harold D. Lasswell's and Abraham Kaplan's Power and Society, and David Easton's The Political System. These works can serve as an initial point of purchase for analysis and discussion.

In the omnibus philosophy of an earlier day the pursuit of knowledge was the pursuit of science. Political science became a specialized discipline only very recently, and while it gained by its specialization it also suffered because of it. One of the nice tasks of modern political science is how to avoid the effects of descriptive detail as a substitute for theory and once again relate political phenomena to broader patterns of human activity, without losing the advantages, particularly in research, of the specialized knowledge and lore so laboriously acquired.

McCloskey's essay offers a justification for and an approach to the study of American political thought. Justification is needed, as he puts it bluntly and persuasively, because American political thought is second-rate. His proposed approach to its study constitutes a solution to the problem posed by that second-rateness. That is, he offers not just one possible valuable way to consider American political thought but, rather, the way which justifies the study.

The justification for studying second-rate thought, he tells us, cannot be the same as that for first-rate political thought. To use his example, the study of Plato can be defended on the ground that it is somehow “intrinsically self-warranting.” He distinguishes another major justification for the study of first-rate thought, namely, its relevance to the understanding of politics, that is, presumably, to the understanding of politics regardless of time or place. But the study of American political thought, because it is second-rate, cannot be justified on the first ground; the student of American political thought “must stand on the leg of relevance if he is to stand at all.”

Does conservative political thought have a place in America today? The answer to this question depends upon the general nature of conservatism as an ideology: its distinguishing characteristics, its substance, and the conditions under which it arises. By ideology I mean a system of ideas concerned with the distribution of political and social values and acquiesced in by a significant social group. Interpretations of the role and relevance of conservative thought on the contemporary scene vary greatly. Underlying the debate, however, are three broad and conflicting conceptions of the nature of conservatism as an ideology. This essay deals with the relative merits of these concepts.