Apparent revival of Communist power in the recent French elections raises once again the thorny problem of appraising the strength of this huge and partially submerged political force. Some Western observers, forgetting that the drop in popular support for the party in 1951 was largely a consequence of the bizarre workings of the election law, were distressed by the gains scored in January of this year. In fact, the Communists were competing on an equal footing with the other parties (in contrast with 1951) and could rely on supporters who, in that year, had deserted on election day. Divisions among French center parties in 1956 meant that a vote for the PCF was no longer regarded as just a “throw-away protest.” From the standpoint of political statistics, it is important to recognize that under optimum conditions the party was able to do no more than make up for the setback suffered in 1951. Indeed the Communist vote declined slightly as a percentage of total popular vote, stabilizing at about 4,500,000 in a year when some 2,250,000 more voters went to the polls. The true picture, then, is one of impressive, but not steadily advancing, strength.

The subject of party responsibility for public policy in Congress has commanded much attention among political scientists. Creation of the Senate party policy committees in 1947 with legal sanction and public appropriations was heralded by some political scientists as a major step in the direction of centralizing and evolving a so-called party program. These committees have now been in operation for nine years, during which the Republican and Democratic bodies have each served about the same amount of time in the majority and minority. The committees may be said to have passed the experimental stage. Notwithstanding this, there is a paucity of material, both descriptive and analytical, concerning their operations.

In 1951 extensive hearings were held to evaluate the operation of the Legislative Reorganization Act. Yet none of the three Democratic Policy Committee chairmen—Senators Barkley, Lucas, and McFarland, nor any member of their staffs appeared to testify. Senator Robert A. Taft, Republican Policy Committee Chairman, made no reference to his committee when discussing the Act.

In the perspective of those political scientists who would reform American parties so as to make them more “responsible,” British parties are familiar prototypes. Prominent among the admired qualities is the cohesion displayed in parliamentary voting by the members of each major British party. That this cohesion is greater than that of American legislative parties has been generally observed at least since the work of A. Lawrence Lowell. And it is common enough, though not universal, to regard British parliamentary solidarity as a virtue particularly because it permits a victorious party, after an election, to enact the program behind which a majority of voters have presumably been rallied. Correspondingly, the relatively low cohesion among Republican and among Democratic congressmen is taken as a defect of American politics.

The purpose of this article, however, is not primarily to discuss value judgments concerning parliamentary cohesion. Rather it is to examine the nature of that cohesion and the ways in which it is maintained. But regardless of the disputed merits of British practice, it is still reasonable to ask after such an examination whether the cohesion of party members in the House of Commons is the product of devices which the United States could adopt, or whether it is the result of underlying factors alien to the American environment.

The primary raw material of Communist power in economically less developed regions of the world is neither the landless peasant with outstretched rice bowl nor the intellectual in search of a cause. Even more basic than these frequently summoned symbols, the realpolitik of social tensions determines political events where economic scarcity aggravates the particularisms dividing man from man.

This contention gains strength from a study of Communist fortunes in a representative Asian setting. With little or no industrial economy to ease population density and underemployment, Andhra State on the southeast coast of India bears the familiar marks of Asian poverty. Here has emerged the most successful regional Communist movement in India. Yet the explanation for Andhra Communist strength does not lie in economic factors. The postwar decade in Andhra demonstrates that social factors can relegate even unusually powerful economic factors to a position of secondary importance.

Were evidence to be drawn only from very recent American experience, a strong case could be made for the notion that the status of business enterprise owned and operated by the government tends to be rather anomalous in a “free enterprise” country. Whatever may be said about the existence of a “mixed economy” in the United States, the philosophy of the Eisenhower Administration is plainly one which casts doubt on the legitimacy of public enterprise.

With American experience in mind, this article attempts to characterize the status of public enterprise in Canada, a country whose economic system is also based on private enterprise. In the Canadian “free enterprise” garden, how should the public enterprise plant be described—as a creeper vine, a hothouse flower, or a hardy but unspectacular perennial? To what extent has it affected its surroundings and in turn been affected by them? The study proceeds on the assumption that specific examples of public enterprise furnish the best basis for generalization about its character. The examples are confined to the national government in order to keep the study within manageable limits and to facilitate reference to American experience (although no extensive comparison is intended).

Throughout most of its national history, Venezuela has been the victim of long and tyrannical dictatorships, broken only by brief spells of semi-democratic government. Constitution after constitution has fallen before the whims of self made generals. Numerous major revolts and countless minor civil uprisings have scarred the country, all having the twofold objective of acquiring for their leaders national power for power's sake and the privilege of organizing Venezuela as a private economic and political domain.

In almost all instances the politicians have travelled a bloody road to national power. Having once established themselves in the presidency, they demonstrated considerable reluctance to observe the functional separation of powers decreed by the constitution. As a result of this attitude the legislature and judiciary were weakened to the point of impotency. The raison d'être of these branches thus came to be the legalization of the programs and activities of the executive, even if this meant, as it often did, violating the constitution. The purpose of this article is to examine the evolution and application of executive power.

The rapid succession in which independence or a large measure of self-government has been achieved by dependent territories in Africa has been one of the more striking political phenomena of the postwar period. It would be rash indeed to prophesy the total eclipse of colonialism in the modern world, for the situations obtaining in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, as well as the fears expressed by the Ashanti in the Gold Coast and the southern tribesmen in the Sudan regarding the shape of the independent state, can be indications that political dependency can be reasserted in new forms. Nevertheless, the brand of Western colonialism which reached its zenith prior to World War I appears to be drawing to a close, and in a number of instances the metropolitan power concerned is actually planning the liquidation of its empire.

The causes of this vaporization of colonialism in Africa are complex. In some cases the significant factor is rooted in international politics, as in the military defeat of Italy or the encouragement given by Arab and Asian states to rising nationalist groups. In other instances the financial position of the metropolitan country or the anti-colonial policy of a major political party has been the crucial factor.

That there was a continuity between medieval political thought and the body of systematic theory that surrounded the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is by now a commonplace. But when we speak of the medieval contribution to the American political tradition, it is important to avoid the implication that what medieval thought contributed was identical with what American thought received. Between the close of the fifteenth century and the latter part of the eighteenth lie some two and a half centuries of crowded thought and experience, which more or less profoundly changed the meaning of concepts continuously in use. The more we learn of medieval theory, the clearer it becomes that it must be interpreted in its own terms rather than in terms of its derivatives. And the American political tradition, of course, cannot be fully understood in terms of its historic roots. Perhaps the chief service which the history of ideas can offer to political theory lies in providing material for the sharpening of concepts through a comparative analysis. For the full understanding of the meaning of an idea, one needs to know not only what it is, but also, I suggest, what it is not. Thus there may be value in an attempt to define the medieval meaning of some concepts that were a significant part of the medieval contribution: in particular, sovereignty, natural law and natural rights, and consent.

The issues which arose during the discussions of the conference fall fairly conveniently into three compartments.

First, we obviously had to settle, with reasonable clarity, what we were talking about: what “political philosophy” is, what “political science” is, and whether they are really distinguishable. The basic issue of the conference was to determine the relevance of the one to the study of the other, and if we had decided that they were really the same thing, there would simply have been no problems for us to discuss. On the whole, we felt that a valid, if not necessarily sharp, distinction was to be made between the “philosophical” and the “scientific” approaches to the study of politics and that we were not discussing absurd or tautological issues. We agreed, however, that all types of political inquiry involve the construction of theory, implicit or explicit, and that the title “political theory” has been unjustifiably appropriated by the historians of political thought.

At the Council meeting in Boulder in September, 1955, Professor Norman J. Padelford, Chairman of the Nominating Committee in 1954–55, presented a proposal for revising the provisions of the Constitution governing the election of officers of the Association. The Nominating Committee was itself divided on the question of the recommendations and the Council, after voting down the proposals, referred them to the Executive Committee for further study.

The Executive Committee decided to ask Professor Padelford to write a brief statement setting forth the proposals and the arguments for them to be published in the Review. At the same time it decided to ask one member of the 1954–55 Committee, who had been opposed to the proposals, to set forth the arguments against them; Mr. Howard R. Penniman was asked to do this. The Executive Committee decided to send these statements to several people from different sections of the country for comment and to print the Padelford and Penniman statements along with the comments in the Review. Not all those asked to comment did so; five replies, however, were received and are printed here along with the two main papers.