When the turn of fate brings to a man the honor of speaking on this occasion, he is likely to review the remarks of his predecessors. Their practice, I find, has been, in the main, to address themselves to one or the other of two kinds of themes. They discourse either upon a substantive problem within their own specialty or upon a matter of common concern to us as members of the same profession. As our interests have become more diverse, the second alternative seems to have been followed with greater frequency. My decision to consider in my remarks the state of our discipline has, therefore, the support of precedent if not the merit of prudence.

The burden of my argument may be stated briefly and bluntly. It is that the demands upon our profession have grown more rapidly than has the content of our discipline. We are, in a sense, the victims of our own success. The achievements of our profession arouse expectations that our discipline enables us to meet only imperfectly.

It is gratifying to be able to present to students of political behavior the approach that my colleagues, Jerome Bruner and Robert White, and I worked out for the study of “Opinions and Personality,” since throughout our explorations political scientists had been what the current jargon would call a “salient reference group” for us. As a psychologist and “outsider,” however, I offer these remarks with some trepidation, since the framework that we arrived at in the detailed study of ten men's outlook on Russia was, after all, distinctly psychological; therefore a limited view that embraces but one segment of the processes with which political scientists are properly concerned. Our investigations were long on the description and analysis of opinions, but short on the observation of consequential behavior, political or otherwise. And our study did not even focus on public opinion, in any sense that attemps a close conceptual distinction between the public and the private.

In the last decade, more and more political scientists have speculated on the possible applications of mathematical analysis to political phenomena. It is the position of this paper that such discussion, when in the abstract, serves little purpose, for the question of whether or not quantitative techniques can fruitfully be so applied is essentially an empirical one and can only be resolved by experiment. Yet even a specifically experimental approach becomes challengeable if it can be shown to misunderstand and hence misemploy otherwise sound techniques. The claim to have solved problems whose mathematical features have not, in fact, been comprehended seems especially harmful in a field where the application of mathematics is as yet in its infancy, and this not only because minor impurities at the base of a growing framework may assume major proportions at its apex, but because exposure of error may breed unjustified disenchantment or give solace to those who prefer a casual, imprecise impressionism in the social sciences.

Lochner v. New York still stands as the symbol of the Supreme Court's orientation during the half century from the late 1880s to the middle 1930s, an orientation characterized by many commentators on the work of the Court as individualistic, anti-communitarian and laissez-faire. It has been attacked by the enemies of its assumptions not only as bad law but as dead law as well. Almost forty years ago Thomas Reed Powell was writing that Lochner had died without even being mentioned in its own obsequies. Those whose conservative natures might have prompted the suspicion that Justice Peckham's argument for the Court must have had some merit have shied from defending it, dazed perhaps by Holmes' brusque comment that the argument had substituted Herbert Spencer for the Founding Fathers.

In the fashion of fellow Young Burkes who are challenging liberal folkways in areas from civil-military relations to free speech, Albert Mavrinac offers here a prescription for Supreme Court supervision of group conflict in America. At the outset, it is fitting to pay tribute to his intellectual fortitude. To embrace Lucifer, Lochner v. New York, and, in the same article, to condemn St. Joan, Brown v. Board of Education (in the latter case virtually in the midst of the beatification ceremonies), and to strike this stance in the presence of a constitutional law fraternity strong in its liberal piety—this is indeed a profile in academic courage. I take it that my assignment as commentator in this Review is to discuss what there is besides courage to support his revisionist credo.

My initial reaction was that Mavrinac had written an interesting essay about wisdom for legislators: it hardly seemed possible that an analysis of judicial standards should lack discussion of the integrity of the judicial process itself and focus so sharply on extra-court considerations. Having persuaded myself that a consistent theory of judicial review must lie in the interstices of the argument, I re-read it.

The type of comprehensive conceptual scheme presented by Professor Smith in the foregoing paper is, in the writer's opinion, the most useful framework currently available for studying the relationship between opinions and personality. The paper draws upon a major work by Smith and his colleagues, Opinions and Personality, which has not only been greeted as a “pattern-setter for a new phase of attitude research” but is already having an important impact on political behavior studies.

That political scientists should find the pluralistic theory proposed by Smith congenial, cannot be explained merely by the fact that it is accompanied by an emphatic rejection of the type of simplistic theorizing about personality and opinion already in disfavor with most of them. Rather, its appeal is solidly intellectual, deriving from the fact that it stems from a general (and long awaited!) movement of convergence within the field of psychology.

So many discussions go astray because the same words are used in different senses by adherents of different points of view that it seems imperative to start practically every discussion by clarifying the meanings of terms. Yet this problem is easier posed than solved. We in academic life owe understandable allegiance to erudition and to elegance of expression, and all too often we take a definition to be adequate (in the sense of clarifying meaning) if it sounds well. More is required, of course. Clarification of meaning (whether couched in formal definitions or in illustrative examples) takes place only if the terms defined are actually geared to the experience of the people concerned. This is a serious problem, because the experiences of people, although they overlap, can be widely disparate. Particularly among us in academic life the disparity may be quite wide. For our experience is very largely the experience of thinking, and thinking is tempered by language in the broadest sense, that is, by the way ideas are organized. And various ways of organizing ideas are imposed on us by our disciplines. Discipline means constraint. Discipline is essential for any organized activity. And so in academic disciplines, “discipline” means constraint on the mode of thought. It prescribes the repertoire of concepts, the patterns of classification, the rules of evidence, and the etiquette of discourse.

We have had many reminders of the limits and risks of statistical predictions about human behavior. When I ventured last year to offer a formula describing Supreme Court action in the state “right to counsel” cases over a period of years, I was mainly concerned to show that, contrary to accepted judicial doctrine about decisions in unique cases, consistencies in the Court's collective judgments could be demonstrated in this area, and stated in quantitative terms. I did not suppose that the formula was more than a method of approximation. I did not offer it as the perfect formula, or the only one; and in particular I did not claim that it was capable of indefinite extension to other areas of constitutional law. An exploratory effort begins with what is available. But I did take into account, so far as the available data permitted, not only the Court's decisions, but also the votes of individual justices on each of the pivotal factors on which their positions could be identified or imputed. I did not claim more for the product than that, so far, it works. With this general statement, let me turn to Fisher's article.

The dangers that arise when norms and personal values intrude upon scientific work are familiar to every political scientist—so familiar, that nowadays the dangers are likely to be shrugged off with undeserved contempt. “The ‘cult of objectivity’ has passed in social science,” one writer has recently proclaimed; and David Easton declares, less dramatically, that even though he assumes that “factual and moral propositions are logically heterogeneous, this does not mean that in practice it is possible to discover a proposition which expresses only a sentiment or states only a factual relationship.” In context, such remarks may be perfectly innocent. They stir up embarrassing associations, however, and merge with certain streams of thought that would wash away the distinction between facts and values, in the belief that this is the way to make values respectable again, or as a consequence, perhaps, of a failure of nerve—which may be only fatigue—in the defense of “objectivity.”

If justification were needed for taking notice once again of the liberal-conservative distinction, it would be sufficient, I suppose, merely to observe that this division has been injected into the politics of Western nations for at least two centuries and, depending on the nature of one's criteria, perhaps longer.

The distinction between the two camps has not always been sharply drawn, of course, for both have been compelled, as a condition for survival, to hold important beliefs in common. Moreover, each has reversed itself on certain issues, such as government regulation of the economy, casting off old views in favor of beliefs previously cherished by the other. Competing for popular support in elections, and succeeding one another in office, the two camps have, of necessity, taken on many values in common, tempering their programs and adjusting their courses to the practical requirements of political contest. In a system like ours, where the parties have functioned less as ideological movements than as brokerage organizations hoping to attract majority support from almost every segment of the electorate, the distinction has tended to be dulled even further, until, at the actual scenes of daily political struggle, it has often faded entirely.

This effort is impelled by a growing conviction that most of our people and much of our responsible political and intellectual leadership are so hopelessly confused in matters of foreign affairs, as actually to be becoming dangerously irresponsible. The paper is not meant to appear spectacular, nor is it aimed at being pleasing. It will attempt a bit of plain speaking to a very important segment of our intellectual leadership, with whatever persuasiveness it may attain. Most of it will consist of simple statements of readily verifiable fact. In the very nature of my space and personality limitations, my statements will have to be somewhat dogmatic, and readers are invited each to pursue his own confirmations of them.

Implicit in the title are two propositions: (1) that our recent and current foreign policies and strategies have been basically so poorly conceived and so increasingly dangerous that they have been largely unworthy of the apparently dominant intellectual support they have received, and (2) that too much of what has been passing for political science scholarship has been little more than footnoted rationalization and huckstering of those policies.

Writers on parliamentary law frequently begin their essays by citing with approval Hatsell's famous observation that “… it is more material that there should be a rule to go by than what that rule is ….” So generally is this notion accepted that it probably ought to be regarded as a fundamental premise of parliamentary law. Indeed the whole structure of this branch of law rests on the assumption that form is more important than content. Its literature consists almost entirely of the compilation of precedents, and, furthermore, parliamentarians have seldom been concerned to justify the decisions they compile. This indifference to rationalization clearly follows from Hatsell's premise: if one believes that form alone is important, one appropriately concentrates on the form of rules, largely ignoring questions of whether or not their substance is efficient, or fair, or reasonable.

On March 6, 1957, the Gold Coast, now called “Ghana,” attained fully responsible status within the British Commonwealth. African nationalists, Pan-Africanists and their supporters in other parts of the world hailed the event as a milestone on the road to complete emancipation of the Africans, as proof that the “dark continent” had come of age and that all of its people were now fully capable of governing themselves.

This study of several key factors in the development of political thought and practice in the former colony was undertaken with a view toward an assessment of the stability and soundness of the country's new political institutions and practices. In a more general sense, it may be regarded as a commentary on the process of institutional transfer from colonial (European) to African political control. Since the formal structure within which the transfer took place is classifiable, nominally at least, as parliamentary-democratic, the evaluation may also serve as a commentary on contemporary performance of what, to reflect its second-hand nature, may be termed “colonial-parliamentary democracy.”

What combination of forces elects a President? Each electoral decision releases a flood of interpretive comment about the conditions, circumstances, and causes which have influenced the result. A very great assortment of factors is examined and varying estimates are made of the responsibility of each for the outcome. Certainly, interpretations of the most recent presidential contest have shown the variety of ideas Americans bring to the analysis of their national elections. Mr. Eisenhower's victory has been attributed to the satisfactions engendered by national prosperity; to the anxieties raised by the threat of war; to the moods of racial, ethnic, or other groupings in the population; to the personal attractiveness of the winning candidate; to the conservative temper of the electorate; to the impact of various issues; to changing party loyalties; to the growth of suburbia; to the progress of an electoral cycle; to events and strategems of the nominating conventions and the campaign; to the influence of the press and of the other mass media. The list could be revised or lengthened in many ways.

For students of government the annually recurring debates over foreign aid are a stethoscope held to the heart of the United States foreign policy process. They reveal in classic form the political strains and stresses that have come to afflict this country's postwar external relations. Foreign aid has required new concepts, skills, personnel, institutions, legislation, and funds. This modern brand of “dollar diplomacy” has not only jostled traditional structures and processes within the executive branch but has called upon the legislator and the man in the street to adjust to a new vision of the American mission and to what it involves in material terms as well. Herewith is a case study of that reappraisal.

The foreign aid debate of 1957, centering around the preparation and approval of the authorization and appropriation acts for fiscal 1958, was especially instructive because it was the occasion for a resounding collision between a greatly intensified crusade to redirect and reinvigorate the program, particularly in support of long-range economic development, and an equally determined campaign to bear down on the brakes. The present commentary focuses primarily on the roles of the official executive and legislative participants, as well as of influential non-governmental interests, during the course of this debate. The story sheds some light on both the foreign policy process in general and on some of the major substantive and administrative issues at stake in this particular case.

In a recent essay, Richard Snyder has stated that: “[A] paradox in political science is the lack … of any systematic attention to the analysis of the decision-making behavior of judges.” It is not my purpose to argue either for or against the particular frame of reference for decision-making analysis advocated by Snyder. I do believe, however, that he has correctly identified the approach—the analysis of judicial decision-making as an aspect of political behavior—which is most likely to command the focus of interest and activity of the coming generation of political scientists whose substantive concern is with the study of political problems in the area of our discipline traditionally known as public law.

The concept “political behavior” remains sufficiently novel within the public law fraternity to impose something of an obligation to make clear what I have in mind in using the term. I shall borrow from David B. Truman who, in a Brookings Lecture not long ago, defined the “behavioral sciences” as “those bodies of knowledge, in whatever academic department they may be found, that provide or aspire to provide ‘verified principles’ of human behavior through the use of methods of inquiry similar to those of the natural sciences.”

Soviet foreign policy has been a subject of extensive and intensive study ever since the painful birth of the Soviet state. All the writings and investigations, except for the purely descriptive, are based in some degree on one or several key premises and assumptions of authors who used them to explain and interpret Soviet foreign policy. This is understandable and probably inevitable in view of the enormous significance of the subject matter, the vastness of observed behavior in time and in space, and the lack of available information on policy making. Consequently, scientific, intuitive, and even merely hopeful thinking has been applied to the evidences of Soviet foreign policy in an effort to find a method of analysis, a frame of reference, a tool of orientation which might permit some systematization of the whole subject.

Clearly, a single seemingly well-constructed theory of Soviet foreign policy which purports to offer a key to broad analysis is too attractive for an analyst to ignore. But however plausible it may seem, it cannot possibly offer the whole answer. Some elements of Soviet foreign policy may be isolated, focalized, dissected, and examined, but others cannot be subject to even speculative, crude estimates.

When Woodrow Wilson, still in the early years of his academic career, studied the relations between Congress and the Executive, he focussed on organization and channels of leadership and responsibility. He was distressed at the disorderliness of affairs in which Congress had a part, and he was convinced that its noisy and often undignified procedures were an impassable obstacle to good government. He pined for the logic and clearly fixed responsibilities of parliamentary government on the British model of that time, for its party discipline and for the clear-cut choices between alternative policies that it offered to the electorate.

For contemporary observers, Congressional-Executive relations still attract attention, particularly in the field of foreign affairs. But the factors which Wilson examined with the greatest care of all seem now to be less central than they were to him. Partly this is because the federal government itself has changed: it now has a vastly wider range of both responsibilities and control than it once had, and there have been shifts in the relative power of the different branches within the government, to which Wilson himself as President contributed much. But there are also other reasons. In an age of ideological extremes, a wider consent than a simple majority seems more desirable than it might have been in Wilson's day, and no one is certain that the parliamentary form is superior in providing for this wider consent.

A common generalization about the distribution of power in the American political system states that it is fragmented and decentralized. In accordance with this view, the making of public policy decisions can be explained largely in terms of the continuous interaction, competitive or cooperative, among many diverse semi-autonomous centers of power, some governmental, others non-governmental. Each power-holding unit—individual or group, private or public—is a discrete, describable entity existing within a plural political universe. It must be perceived and understood not in isolation but as one unit in a larger system of interrelated parts. Within such a network, multiple role-playing, group cross-pressures, and institutional rivalry must be considered normal. This paper is an attempt to apply the generally pluralistic viewpoint so expressed to a much neglected political institution, the President's Cabinet, and to the power relationships involving an individual Cabinet member.

I want to dissent initially from the rather constricting frame of reference that Schubert has established in his paper. He has every right in the world to set rhetorical snares, but I have no intention of walking into them. If I may summarize, Schubert asserts that he is a spokesman for a radical new direction in the study of public law, claiming that the old ways are moribund. He further urges that we should look with envy at the creative function of the social psychologists who supplied the Supreme Court with the banners it carried in Brown v. Board of Education while we were bumbling around with historical and philosophical trivia. He concludes that instead of wasting our time with talmudic disputations on whether the Supreme Court reached the “right” or the “wrong” decisions in specific cases, we should settle down to build a firm “scientific” foundation for our discipline.

Not the least amusing aspect of this indictment is that I find myself billed as the defender of the ancien régime, as the de Maistre of public law. Therefore, for the benetfit of the young and impressionistic, let me break loose from Schubert's rhetorical trap: I too think that much of the research done in public law—and, for that matter, in political science generally—has been trivial.