“… [M]ost Canadians who are aware of the subject,” says the author of a recent essay, “feel that the [Canadian] Senate has outlived its usefulness and has become a superfluous appendix to the political system. Indeed, the prestige and authority of the Senate has probably fallen to its lowest level in Canadian history.” Considering the disparagements which have been tossed at the Senate, the allusions to “… genial old gentlemen who … live on, undisturbed, meeting a few weeks in the year, bumbling and grumbling at the government, making a few good speeches, and drawing an annual indemnity [now $10,000] for less work than any other citizens of Canada,” this was a restrained indictment. Nevertheless, in 1961 and early 1962, the Senate was also being extolled in some quarters as the keeper of Canada's conscience. Yet others saw it as a crafty player of rank politics and as an infringer on constitutional propriety. The Prime Minister threatened Senate reform and the injection of Senate misbehavior as an election issue. The Senate had seemingly come to life, and in so doing thrust itself into the center of Canadian political controversy. The purpose of this article is to examine the problems surrounding the position of the Senate in the Canadian political system, through an analysis of the agitated discussions of 1961-62.

Human culture develops as a means for man to control his environment. Primitive cultures rely to a large extent on magical means. The whimiscal and incalculable forces which govern nature are personified, and rituals are developed which are intended to control the actions of the gods. Such cultures tend to be fatalistic. The magical controls are limited and uncertain. One must endure and accept what comes.

As culture develops, men turn increasingly to rational control of the environment. Technology arises, and, what is more fundamental, attitudes arise which enable the progressive development and utilization of technological resources. In our culture, full rational control over the environment appears not far from accomplishment.

As the forces of nature give way to the development of culture, however, it becomes evident that the culture itself exhibits “forces” or “laws of development” which seem themselves to be beyond control. It has become a commonplace to say that while man has established rational control over nature, he has not done so over his culture, and that this is the next and imperative task. What is too commonly overlooked is the radically different nature of the second problem.

It is through culture that rational control of nature is possible. By analogy, it would seem that culture itself must supply the resources to control itself: that is, that rational control over culture must in some sense be reflexive. This raises a set of problems that, even after two thousand years, have not as yet been thought through. The methods and techniques used to control nature may have to be profoundly transformed before they can be used to subject culture to rational control—indeed, the very meaning of the term “rational control” is called into question.

The long-term Afrikaner drive for power has been strongly influenced by the demographic structure of the South African electorate. Within the framework of the primary political system, secondary structures make deviations from the demographic patterns extremely difficult. The purpose of this paper is to trace the relations between the population cleavage and the composition of basic social institutions, and their bearing on the distribution of political power; and to raise the question of the viability of the resulting system.

Let us start with demography. Power in South Africa resides in the two White linguistic groups—the Afrikaans-speaking descendants of mainly Dutch settlers—and the English-speaking descendants of mainly British settlers—and parliamentary party affiliations have come to be determined almost entirely by linguistic and cultural ties; that is, by the structure of the society. The demographic composition of the electorate (Table I)—three voters speak Afrikaans to every two who speak English—has tended to influence the direction that the political system has taken. Because Afrikaners were always a majority of the electorate there were, amongst their political leaders, some who saw that if those who spoke the Afrikaans language voted, not as workers, or farmers, or protectionists but as Afrikaners, then political power would be theirs. General Louis Botha, inverting von Clausewitz, had declared after the Boer War: “the battle which was won and lost in the fields of war must be fought again upon the political platform.” The history of party politics in South Africa is little more than an account of the various attempts, and the ultimate success, of Afrikaner leaders to attain this objective.

John C. Calhoun's Disquisition on Government is that rarity in American political thought-a work that explicitly declares itself a theoretical study of politics. By purporting to give a comprehensive and systematic account, by claiming to have explored new territory beyond the range of American discoveries, Calhoun in effect put his Disquisition in a class of which it is almost the sole example: an American political theory. But this claim to esteem and originality has been disputed; and in the subsequent debates among his interpreters, we have yet to find a satisfactory solution to the problem that Calhoun represented in such clear shape. Those who have rated him as a statesman and thinker—be that assessment high or low—and those who have accepted or denied his claim to originality have all failed to solve the peculiar problem of how to study and interpret the writing of a man of theory-and-practice. Until that problem is met, our understanding of the Disquisition is not clear and we remain without a way of evaluating Calhoun's merits and originality.

How, then, ought Calhoun's Disquisition, or his high theoretical pretensions in general, best to be understood? Reducing his theory to practice, or saying in effect that the Disquisition was only another string to his pro-slavery bow, forecloses the question of what Calhoun can teach us. Reducing his practice to theory places what is almost a superhuman burden upon a man who was at or near the center of the national political stage for forty tumultuous years. A more moderate procedure would seem to be indicated.

In recent years a rich outpouring of case studies on community decision-making has been combined with a noticeable lack of generalizations based on them. One reason for this is a commonplace: we have no general theory, no broad-gauge model in terms of which widely different case studies can be systematically compared and contrasted.

Among the obstacles to the development of such a theory is a good deal of confusion about the nature of power and of the things that differentiate it from the equally important concepts of force, influence, and authority. These terms have different meanings and are of varying relevance; yet in nearly all studies of community decision-making published to date, power and influence are used almost interchangeably, and force and authority are neglected. The researchers thereby handicap themselves. For they utilize concepts which are at once too broadly and too narrowly drawn: too broadly, because important distinctions between power and influence are brushed over; and too narrowly, because other concepts are disregarded—concepts which, had they been brought to bear, might have altered the findings radically.

Many investigators have also mistakenly assumed that power and its correlatives are activated and can be observed only in decisionmaking situations. They have overlooked the equally, if not more important area of what might be called “nondecision-making”, i.e., the practice of limiting the scope of actual decisionmaking to “safe” issues by manipulating the dominant community values, myths, and political institutions and procedures. To pass over this is to neglect one whole “face” of power.

The following notes deal with three aspects of American political science in which the trends, we believe, will be of particular interest to members of the profession. The findings presented here have been taken from a much broader study of the discipline currently in process. Given the present spatial exigencies, we have made some arbitrary decisions in selecting the topics to be dealt with here. It may be desirable, therefore, to indicate the scope of the larger investigation and the relationship of this paper to the parent study.

We had originally planned to base our analysis of trends in American political science primarily upon the biographical and professional data contained in the 1948, 1953 and 1961 editions of the Directory of the American Political Science Association. While the data in these volumes were both useful and suggestive, we soon realized that this information alone was not sufficient for our purposes. We became increasingly convinced that any meaningful discussion of the state of the discipline required a reliable knowledge of the attitudes and views of the profession on a number of current issues and problems. Lacking this type of information, the authors of recent studies of American political science have been forced to treat their personal beliefs as reasonably representative of the membership at large; to speculate, however shrewdly, as to divisions of opinions in the discipline; or simply to ignore the topic altogether.

Bernard Lewis once grappled with the question “What is a Turk?” and finally put forward, virtually as part of the definition, the “sentiment of Turkish identity”—simply thinking of oneself as a Turk. Now the course of world history is being much affected by people who on occasion speak of themselves collectively as “Africans.” How important to the definition of an African in politics is the quality of thinking of oneself as an African?

In many respects, Melville Herskovits has maintained, Africa is a geographical fiction. “It is thought of as a separate entity and regarded as a unit to the degree that the map is invested with an authority imposed on it by the map makers.” The argument here is presumably that climatically the range in Africa is from arid deserts to tropical forests; ethnically, from the Khoisan to the Semites; linguistically from Amharic to Kidigo. What have all these in common apart from the tyrann y of the map maker?

One possible answer is that they have a negative common element: they are alike one to another to the extent that they are collectively different from anything in the outside world. It is perhaps this question-begging assumption which makes President Nkrumah of Ghana insist that “Africa is not, and can never be an extension of Europe.” That argument was used against the notion that Algeria was part of France, and it continues to be used against Portuguese “integration” of Angola and Mozambique. In a televised New York debate with Jacques Soustelle when the future of “French” Algeria was still in question, Ghana's Ambassador Alex Quaison-Sackey employed the argument not merely as a variant formulation of the thesis that “Algeria had to be independent of France” but as a piece of evidence in support of that thesis.

A survey of the literature of the last decade in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field which has come to be known—rather imprecisely—as civil-military relations, reveals a large number of descriptive and prescriptive, operational and theoretical studies, but little unity of focus or method. The interested shopper finds himself in a veritable department store filled with a wide assortment—including those in the bargain basement. Spurred on by wartime experiences and Cold War exigencies, historians and social scientists, physical scientists and journalists—above all in the United States—have covered reams of paper with discussions of the relationship between arms and men, war and peace, strategy and policy, defense and diplomacy. Displaying a great variety of analytical depth, breadth and sophistication, some of these studies have advanced our knowledge of civil-military relations—particularly in contemporary America—while others have failed to survive changes in international politics and weapons technology. Some writers, both of conservative and liberal orientation, have focused on the “appropriate” role for the military in state and society; others have sought to remain detached from such normative questions in order to concentrate on micro-descriptive phenomenal studies or more or less abstract macro-analytical theoretical models. Between the earth-bound descriptive and prescriptive studies on the one hand, and the soaring theoretical efforts on the other has loomed a wide gap, all too familiar to students of international relations, comparative politics, and public administration, waiting to be bridged—if bridged it can be—by empirical theories of civil-military relationships.

The study of international relations has been considerably advanced in recent years by the application of findings from other areas of the social sciences. These have included decision-making, game theory, conflict, bargaining, communication, negotiation, systems, geography, attitudes, and simulation. International relations scholars such as Morton Kaplan, Charles McClelland, Richard C. Snyder, and Harold Sprout have built important bridges between international relations and other disciplines. It has been fortunate that such innovators have often found men from other disciplines, such as Kenneth Boulding, Harold Guetzkow, Charles Osgood, and Anatol Rapoport, in the middle of the bridge. The volumes of the Journal of Conflict Resolution offer one example of how far this remarkable effort at cross-fertilization has gone.

In the history of political thought, revolution is a relatively new idea. Rebellion, insurrection, tyrannicide, civil war, resistance: all these have been discussed and debated since the very beginnings of speculation about politics. But the idea that a select group of men might wilfully and systematically employ political violence to effect the moral and social transformation of an established order was literally not conceived until early modern times and did not become a matter of self-conscious speculation until quite recently. The purpose of this essay is to analyze and, in part, to explain one of the earliest appearances of revolutionary thought—among a group of exiled English and Scottish writers in the sixteenth century. It is a case study in the origins (rather than a description of the origin) of a new intellectual style and a new mode of perceiving and responding to the political world. But a new style and a new set of perceptions and responses suggests a new man: the religious exile of the sixteenth century was such a man, an intellectual suddenly set loose from conventional and corporate ties and radicalized, so to speak, by his experience. Hence the nature of the exile and the social character of the exiles must be studied before the new ideas can be fully understood.

The writings of the Marian exiles have rarely been accorded such importance as will be attributed to them in this essay. Their work has more often been treated as a minor part of monarchomach literature; more especially, as an anticipation of, or a footnote to, the more important work of the French Huguenots.

But for two decisions, the 1961 term of the Supreme Court could have been characterized as one of the least interesting in recent years. Apart from Baker v. Carr and Engel v. Vitale no decision stands out as a major interpretation either of the Constitution or of national or state legislation. Not that there was any shortage of constitutional cases. In at least thirty such the Court gave decisions and written opinions. In a number of instances, some of which will be examined presently, acts of state legislation were held invalid. Some 63 cases involved the interpretation of acts of Congress; in none was a statute held unconstitutional. There was, in other words, a continuation of the point of view which the Court adopted in the spring of 1937, rather than a hostile disposition toward both state and national legislation dealing positively with the social and economic problems coming in the wake of that new (to the United States) combination of factors, the industrialization of much of the country and the acceptance of most assumptions of nineteenth century humanitarianism.

Last year Professor McCloskey, writing in this Review on the 1960 term, quite properly limited himself to the consideration of cases dealing with civil rights. Yet before Charles Evans Hughes became Chief Justice in 1930, so few such cases arose that no one would have devoted even a major portion of an annual survey to them. Indeed, before the Civil War there was only one obscure case in which an act of a territorial legislature was held void as contrary to the guarantees of civil rights in the Constitution, and none involving either Congressional or state legislation. A few emerged in the decade after that War, but it was only with such cases as Strormberg v. California, Near v. Minnesota, Powell v. Alabama, Grosjean v. American Press Co., and DeJonge v. Oregon that the Supreme Court actively began to be the guardian of civil liberties.

Political science has been greatly stimulated in recent years by the invention of new designs for the comparative analysis of political systems. The diversity of these designs, however, risks creating a situation in which it may be difficult to derive agreed conceptual tools. Any points of convergence which can be found, therefore, and particularly in contrasting comparative designs, need to be emphasized. The purpose of this note is to show that in two recent designs for comparative analysis which are divergent in purpose, method and universe of application, there is a convergence on two fundamental points. The first is that liberty, taken to mean freedom of criticism and of discussion, is a major variable for comparative analysis. The second is that once liberty has been employed as a variable, it is necessary to employ policy as a secondary variable in order to discriminate among those political systems in which freedom of discussion does not exist or is severely limited.

Neither of the systems of comparative analysis which I will discuss, one constructed by Raymond Aron and the other by Gabriel Almond, explicitly employs either liberty or policy as variables. In fact, Aron makes a deliberate effort to avoid using liberty as a variable, and policy is implicitly ruled out of Almond's design by his reliance on functional categories. Yet both authors implicitly take freedom of discussion as a major variable, and when they discuss totalitarian regimes they both employ additional variables which can be subsumed under the heading of policy.

Students of international politics often state that power is to us what money is to the economist: the medium via which transactions are observed and measured. Further, there seems to be a solid consensus that power is a useful concept only in its relative sense; such objective measures as military manpower, technological level, and gross national product are viewed as helpful, but incomplete, indices. The concept does not come to life except as it is observed in action, and that action can be found only when national power is brought into play by nations engaged in the process of influencing one another. Until that occurs, we have no operational indices of power, defined here as the capacity to influence. In this paper, then, my purpose is to seek a clarification of the concept of power by the presentation of a formal, analytic model of bilateral inter-nation influence.

Some four years before the appearance of Mill's On Liberty, Macaulay sang the praises of the freedom of the press in his History of England. One hundred and sixty years earlier, in 1695, the censorship of the press had been withdrawn in England. Prior to this event, according to Macaulay, the prohibition of political criticism had elicited a flourishing trade in contraband criticism to which moderation was unknown. Its creators and distributors were not law-abiding citizens, and their character was not high. In fact, what they produced was unprincipled, fanatical, wild and dissolute in the extreme.

For the aftermath, we must quote at length:

… The emancipation of the press produced a great and salutary change. The best and wisest men in the ranks of the opposition now assumed an office which had hitherto been abandoned to the unprincipled or the hotheaded. Tracts against the government were written in a style not misbecoming statesmen and gentlemen; and even the compositions of the lower and fiercer class of malcontents became somewhat less brutal and less ribald than in the days of the licensers.