This annual ceremony of our non-partisan Association is being held at a time when most political scientists are preoccupied with the events of a fateful national election. To avoid any implications of partisanship, it seems best on this occasion to eschew politics in the conventional sense and to concentrate on institutional analysis not applicable to the current conflict. This discussion will therefore deal with the Supreme Court and with the Court primarily as an institution, rather than with problems of changing personnel or the political implications of particular decisions. It will assume that institutions are important in terms of their intrinsic nature and that the kind of institution to be used for a particular governmental task depends largely on the kind of task to be performed, with room for exceptions in exceptional circumstances. So it is that the Court will be presented not in isolation but as a part of the judicial system at whose apex it stands, and will be discussed in terms of the assumptions which lie back of and dictate its rituals, routines and procedures, and which have a great deal to do with determining its efficacy for the tasks allocated to it.

Because analysis of hallowed institutions and ritualized performance is often incorrectly identified with the expression of hostility or disrespect, with only deference permitted on the part of him who would leave the ritual or the institution with the stature it had when he approached it, let me emphasize that the purpose here is not to attack or to disparage but to analyze and to encourage further analysis, with creative ends in view.

This study deals with one reputed value of federalism, its service in the cause of freedom or liberty (both terms are used interchangeably here to mean an immunity from arbitrary governmental action). In particular, I shall examine one aspect of that sort of freedom in our federal system, namely, the right against self-incrimination. The general case for the peculiar virtue of our constitutional system as a means of assuring such a right was summarized by Madison:

In the compound republic of America the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.

Passing over argument about the contribution of the separation of powers and judicial review, our attention will center on the complexities introduced by the federal division of powers. William Anderson posed the broad question some years ago: “Does federalism imply not only a division of powers between national and state government, but also a subtraction of powers from both in favor of the individual? Will there be less government in a federal than in a unitary state, or possibly even more?” And we might add—what his formulation leaves partly open—if more government, then necessarily less freedom? More explicitly, Franz Neumann has suggested recently that “whether the federal state does increase freedom cannot be abstractly determined. We have some evidence that the federal state as such (that is regardless of the form of government) has not fulfilled this role.”

The National Security Council constitutes the most ambitious effort yet made to coordinate policy on the cabinet level in the American federal government. An examination of the experience of the NSC, together with the assumptions and expectations that went into proposing, establishing, and developing it, should help to clarify the problem of policy coordination under the President.

Various proposals for a special war cabinet in the United States, usually called a Council of National Defense, date back as far as 1911. The National Defense Act of 1916 established a body by such a name, headed by the Secretary of War. The statute was so watered down from the original proposals, however, that its uses were negligible, except later as a convenient peg for the National Defense Advisory Council (NDAC) and its subsidiaries that Roosevelt called into being in 1940. After World War I, both armed services revived the idea of a more powerful Council in an effort to find some base of support for their military policies, and as a counter to proposals for unification, proposals which they both opposed because these were founded on unrealistic expectations about the sums of money that could be saved through reorganization of the service departments.

This paper is concerned with the behavior of members of a Congressional committee in their role as overseers of an independent regulatory commission. Congressional committees seem periodically to become aware of the presence of the regulatory agencies and after a more or less spectacular examination of one or another of them, allow them to slip back to an undisturbed and unnoticed routine. Their status as “independent” agencies leaves to Congress the formal responsibility both for checking on the fulfillment of their legislative mandates and for preserving them from domination by their clientele and the President. Too little notice has been taken, however, of the nature of the control of these regulatory agencies emanating from Congress.

This study results from an examination of the House Education and Labor Committee as it reviewed the performance of the National Labor Relations Board in 1953. My sources are the public hearings of the Committee in the 83d Congress and interviews with Committee members over a two-year period thereafter.

Attempts to establish a “morphology of civilizations” seem to continue in spite of dire warnings from scholars. Indeed, while rejecting Toynbee and Sorokin with one hand, many a scholar has beckoned with the other to adventurous young men to leave the barren tracts of specialization and re-enter the broad panoramic fields of Weltgeschichte. Current interest in “comparative feudal institutions” illustrates the case in point.

The notion that “feudalism” is a “form of society,” especially a “stage in development,” can be traced back to Marxist historiography, and from there back to eighteenth century French thinkers. But instead of becoming thoroughly discredited, the notion has recently led to new thinking on the subject which may turn out to be fruitful. In Feudalism in History for example, Rushton Coulborn, has combined eight separate papers on feudalism in various parts of the world by different historians, with his own critical and synthetic studies. Though he fails to find even one “fully developed” feudal society according to his own definition—a not unexpected result—his study contains an amazing amount of suggestive analysis.

His suggestions are particularly valuable in the construction of “working models” or “ideal types” as research tools. Even when we remain safely within our own “fields,” if we are to go beyond highly specialized fact-gathering and at the same time avoid “presentisi subjectivism,” we will need such tools.

Society's training of the young, including formal and informal citizenship instruction, character training, and the processes which lead to the development of different personality types, has been seen as an important determinant of adult political behavior by theorists since Plato. In addition, much of our traditional folklore, not to mention much twentieth century literature on personality development, national character, authoritarianism, and electoral preference, points to the utility of examining the individual's early years as one means of illuminating his mature actions.

The present paper considers one aspect of the child's political development—the genesis of his attitudes toward political leaders and the possible ways that this developmental process may affect his adult responses to the formal wielders of power. Citizens' orientations to political authority have a complex and imperfectly understood, but obviously important, bearing on the equilibrium of a body politic.

Two classes of data will be considered: survey literature giving some indication of how adults respond to political leaders, and results of a study of 659 New Haven public and private school children of widely varying socio-economic status, ranging from fourth- through eighth-graders (about nine to thirteen years of age). Paper-and-pencil questionnaires were administered to this sample between January and March of 1958. Findings from these sources are supplemented by a smaller collection of prolonged interviews with individual children and many informal encounters with groups of school children and teachers over a period of about two years.

An outstanding advance in one field of human endeavor will often inspire workers in others to try to transfer its conceptions or techniques into their own less successful fields, for obvious reasons. And so political theorists who have long been discontented with the state of politics when compared with that of certain other sciences have, in consequence, sought to advance their field by adopting the ideas or techniques of their scientific contemporaries. The impressive application of physics will probably increase both political tension and the political scientists' interest in methodology.

The last hundred years of political science have seen attempts at the introduction of various exotica, Darwinism, Economism, Freudianism, even Statisticism; but what I shall here discuss is the centuries-old attempt to appropriate the success of dynamics or mechanics to politics, an attempt which found its first great exponent in Hobbes but which has been carried on in this century by men like Bentley and Catlin. The success of dynamics, such men seem to have thought, is evidently the result of its method, which they took to be the reduction of phenomena to the primary qualities of matter and motion. We who are interested in politics, accordingly, will do well to copy the method of the successful scientists and reduce all political phenomena to similar primary entities. Just as Newtonian physicists speak of material bodies or particles, and the forces they exert upon each other, so we must confine ourselves to the description of the motions of atomic political bodies and the forces they exert upon each other. Thus we need only speak with Hobbes of men and their desires, or with Catlin of political men and their wills, or with Bentley of groups and their pressures, in order to succeed. We know that, in the early chapters of Leviathan, Hobbes announced this as his programme; but it is doubtful whether, as he moved from methodology to political theory, he did as he said he would do and whether he had not worked out his political theory before he “deduced” it from his primary entities of matter and motion. In what follows I shall try to show a similar history in the work of A. F. Bentley and D. B. Truman. I shall try to show that Bentley announced a methodological programme and that Truman's “development” of it has been quite external and could, in fact, have been undertaken without any reference to Bentley at all. I shall try to show, that is, that Bentley's contribution to political science has been of a psychological rather than a logical kind, and that the references made to him by contemporary pressure group theorists are similar to those which a Russian physicist might make to dialectical materialism.

“Realism” in systematic political science in this country began to emerge, in a reaction against the inadequacies of legal and institutional description, early in this century. David Easton, remarking the change, cites in evidence Arthur F. Bentley's attempt “to fashion a tool.” By midcentury, it may be said, Bentleyism is tooling the fashion. A recent commentator, deploring the current emphasis on methods and measurements, declares the new orthodoxy has left its mark on the profession no less than on the world and is partially responsible for our failure to identify and solve social problems. Yet, for all the talk about Bentley's influence, and despite the social significance of his ideas, there has been too little study of his theory of politics. I propose to examine his writings as those of a “realist” and to show how his search for both “realism” and a “science of politics” may lead to a surreptitious sanctification of the actual. In short, in this paper I shall argue that the implications of Bentley's cosmology are conservative.

Bentley's political work had an ulterior end; it was not pure curiosity. “My interest in politics,” he said, “is not primary, but derived from my interest in the economic life, and … I hope from this point of approach ultimately to gain a better understanding of the economic life than I have succeeded in gaining hitherto.” The terms of his solution, expressed first in The Process of Government, reflected his understanding of the early twentieth-century midwestern social and economic structure. Influenced by social Darwinism and sociological realism, and rejecting legal and judicial formalism, Bentley advanced what could be called a “functional” theory, based upon what he later called the “transactional approach.”

Academics who make scholarly book on trends in the literature must heed “the group theory of politics.” For there is much evidence that the approach is being de-emphasized for a third time. Arthur Bentley's The Process of Government is, of course, the most prominent of the contributions apparently headed for disciplinary oblivion.

This paper attempts to blunt the recent criticism by directing students to the unfinished (and largely untouched) business of exploiting “the group approach.” The prime vehicle for this effort will be Bentley's The Process of Government rather than the corpus of his work or that of his interpreters.

A three-fold rationale supports this analytical visit to the tap-root of “the group approach.” Primarily, critics have avoided the issues posed by Bentley. Moreover, pleas for abandonment of his approach often reflect an important misconception. Consider Rothman's conclusion that “there is certainly room for studies of the kind which rely upon the mature judgment of their authors, rather than being bound by conceptual schemes which appear to be simple keys to reality, but which only serve to blind students to the obvious facts of politics.”

A little over 100 years ago John Stuart Mill wrote in his essay On Liberty that “… there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.” The sentence from which this is taken is not obiter: Chapter Two of his book is devoted to arguments, putatively philosophical in character, which if they were sound would warrant precisely such a conclusion; we have therefore every reason to assume that Mill meant by the sentence just what it says. The topic of Chapter Two is the entire “communications” process in civilized society (“advanced” society, as Mill puts it); and the question he raises is whether there should be limitations on that process. He treats that problem as the central problem of all civilized societies, the one to which all other problems are subordinate, because of the consequences, good or ill, that a society must bring upon itself according as it adopts this or that solution to it. And he has supreme confidence in the Tightness of the solution he offers. Presumably to avoid all possible misunderstanding, he provides several alternative statements of it, each of which makes his intention abundantly clear, namely, that society must be so organized as to make that solution its supreme law. “Fullest,” that is, absolute freedom of thought and speech, he asserts by clear implication in the entire argument of the chapter, is not to be one of several competing goods society is to foster, one that on occasion might reasonably be sacrificed, in part at least, to the preservation of other goods; i.e., he refuses to recognize any competing good in the name of which it can be limited.

In the long development of democracy, legal safeguards for individuals are usually established only in times of crisis or after grave dissatisfaction with the procedure employed in a particular case. Fortunately, in either instance, when the safeguard is given legal sanction, it is likely to continue in effect so that a cumulative body of protections is established. And in some rather unusual cases, civil rights and liberties broadly construed are guaranteed by an act of prescience: our Bill of Rights is an admirable example of the value of forethought.

During the past half century, Princeton University has established a substantial corpus of rules to protect academic freedom, twice because of dissatisfaction with the treatment of individual cases, once in response to crisis, once as an act of conscious foresight. The following brief report is submitted in the hope that some of Princeton's developments may serve as useful suggestions to its sister universities.

Princeton University has been singularly though certainly not entirely free of periods of crisis and of important and distressing academic freedom cases for the last half century. Its tradition of academic freedom goes at least as far back as the latter years of the 19th Century, but its first formal adoption of a rule did not come until 1918.

The year 1918 was a year of crisis. Across the face of the land, our universities and colleges reacted in a variety of ways, most frequently in the form of resolutions or rules that rested on a demand for full support of the prosecution of the war and that frequently led to exclusions and dismissals from faculty and student body. Princeton, too, was moved in this way and on June 5, 1918 the Faculty adopted such a resolution. Fortunately, Princeton also demonstrated another response to the crisis, of a very different character, and with permanent rather than ephemeral effect.