This article examines the concept of interests in politics which has been the subject of major debate in recent years. It makes two proposals: one concerns the elucidation of the concept of interests; the other concerns the relative status of an agent's perception of his or her own interests and an observer's specification of them. For brevity, statements of the form ‘x is in A's interest’ are referred to as interest-statements.

Two major traditions of belief, democracy and capitalism, have dominated American public life from its inception. Although they have not always coexisted in perfect harmony – indeed their union has often been torn by conflict – they have managed to accommodate to each other with sufficient flexibility to have forged a viable political culture.

The energy crisis has, at least for the time being, been replaced in newspaper headlines and public attention by other, more fashionable, and seemingly more pressing preoccupations. In the United States, for example, the dilemmas posed by the shortages and spiralling price increases of the 1970s gave way to different policy problems and the Reagan Administration has all but ceased to consider the energy question important.

In the general election of October 1974 the Scottish National Party gained 30·4 per cent of the vote in Scotland. This result and the build-up to it in the previous two elections, seemed to indicate a new pattern for Scottish voting. British and American writers had drawn attention to the decline of partisanship as a basis for voting. In Britain, the class basis of this partisanship had been dominant but now appeared to recede. Growing support for the SNP might have been an extension of this. Some went further and argued that a new issue – self-government for Scotland – had displaced class loyalties.

The empirical–normative distinction is taken by many political scientists to be exclusive and fundamental. Yet if the distinction is deep and exclusive then any theory, or any of its components, must be either empirical or normative but not simultaneously both. If this is the case then each theoretical statement will have as its central verb either an ‘is’ or an ‘ought’ (or some equivalent) and no statement taking an ‘ought’ as its central verb will be derivable from any statement taking an ‘is’ as its central verb. Correlatively no purely descriptive statement or conjunction of such statements will warrant any normative or evaluative conclusion.