In 1898, Mr. Justice Brewer measurably strengthened his claim to immortality by publicly inviting criticism of the Supreme Court. His words are well-worn now, for generations of professors have gratefully quoted them in journal and classroom; and during the 20th century the challenge he issued has evoked a response that may give his shade occasional second thoughts. The Supreme Court has had many problems in the years since he spoke, but a shortage of critics has not been one of them. Journalists, academicians, and politicians have, in their several ways, poured out a steady stream of reproach which from time to time has swelled into a torrent.

The commission plan and the city manager plan-new forms of city government launched during the early years of this century—were both devised in response to local circumstances, but were soon being heralded as improvements over the then universal mayor-council system. Enthusiasts for both of these new governmental structures claimed many advantages for them. The hopes for the city manager plan seem to have been somewhat better founded, but the passage of time has shown that both plans had limitations which the reformers did not foresee.

Almost all of the early discussion about the relative merits of the three plans neglected the role of political environment. Proponents of the different systems deduced their arguments from “the principles” on which the plans were based. A three-year study of the actual operation of manager government in the late 1930s called attention to the importance of varying local conditions. “The tremendous variety of local political conditions and administrative habits apparent in the fifty cities covered by this survey,” the authors concluded, “makes it impossible to [give general answers to] many questions about the city manager plan.”

Perhaps no single individual has had as much impact on the discipline of political science during the past several years as has Leo Strauss of the University of Chicago. Both he and his disciples (and they are disciples in the “classical” sense) have engaged in a full scale attack upon the premises underlying the contemporary study of politics.

Strauss argues that these premises are illfounded and self-contradictory, and, if taken seriously, lead to moral nihilism. He contends, further, that another set of premises, those of “classical natural right,” which treat man in terms of his natural end and his relation to the “mysterious whole,” are capable of providing a more adequate foundation for the study of politics.

Each German federal election since 1949 has resulted in a reduction in the number of parties securing representation in the Bundestag. While this trend continued in 1961, there is evidence that the party system is becoming stabilized, making it unlikely that any of the present parties will disappear in the near future. This article examines the 1961 election and its significance for the German party system.

The major outlines of the present German party system became apparent as early as 1946, when party activities were resumed on a zonal basis. The principal parties then in the field were the Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party, the Christian Democratic Union, and the Free Democratic Party. The last two of these were known differently in different sections of West Germany, but today, with very few exceptions, the designation for each group is the same throughout the Federal Republic.

Political scientists today are more cautious than they used to be about comparing forms of government and evaluating their virtues. Moreover, in such comparisons as we do make, we rightly lay more stress on party systems and even more informal aspects of government than on constitutional forms. Yet much of what is said by way of comparing and evaluating the disciplined and programmatic type of political party with the American type carries an undertone of the old arguments. Virtues once attributed to the British style of Parliamentary government, honorifically tagged “responsible government,” are now associated with “party government,” while the evils earlier (and still) attributed to the separation of powers are now frequently laid at the door of a weak party system. To be sure, many who criticize the American constitutional and political arrangements for irresponsibility make no claim that the British system is superior.

Much recent research in the decision-making of the United States Supreme Court has been characterized by a pronounced emphasis upon the invocation of socio-psychological theory and statistical methods of data processing in lieu of exclusive reliance upon the legal-historical theory and methods typical of most research in this field of study. Symbolic of this development is the increasing tendency of political scientists to consider constitutional law as an aspect of political behavior as well as a branch of law, and correspondingly, to study the subject matter as judicial behavior. Naturally, this recent work has evinced a preoccupation with unidimensional analysis, since it is less complicated to work with one variable than with many, and the experience so gained no doubt is a prerequisite to multivariate study. Nevertheless, students who remain committed to the more traditional workways in constitutional law are quite right in insisting, as they do, that most Supreme Court cases raise what at least appear prima facie to be many issues for decision, and that their more subjective and impressionistic mode of analysis retains the great virtue of not oversimplifying the rich complexity of many Supreme Court cases to the extent that inescapably seems to be required by the newer theories and methods. Clearly, further advances in the behavioral study of Supreme Court decision-making depend upon the development of multidimensional models of Court action, which will make possible the observation and measurement of interrelationships among the significant major variables that in combination provide the basis for an adequate explanation of the manifest differences in the voting and opinion behavior of the justices.

The Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) is today the largest communist party outside the Sino-Soviet bloc. In a country with a population of some 96 million, it claims today a membership of two million, and the communist mass organizations claim more than 11 million members. At the same time PKI is well represented in parliament and the several high-level councils appointed by Sukarno to render advice to the government. The deputy governors of three of the four provinces in Java are communists, and as of March 9, 1962 the two main Party leaders acquired quasi-cabinet status. Yet the possibility is remote that PKI may achieve power in Indonesia in the foreseeable future. My purpose here is an analysis of the Party's place in Indonesian politics that results in this forecast.

Readers of Stanley Rothman's article “The Revival of Classical Political Philosophy: A Critique” will be aware that the title he has chosen does not indicate the full scope of his endeavor. He has in fact attempted to state and criticize the grounds of classical political and natural philosophy, and to state and in a certain measure defend the grounds of modern social and natural science. Exceptional resources of scholarship and analytic power would be needed to dispose of those tremendous themes, which I believe Rothman has not succeeded in doing. A prominent purpose of Rothman's paper is to criticize the work of Professor Leo Strauss and of some of his students, on the view that he, and after his instruction they, are the animators of the attempted revival of classical doctrines concerning natural right. The attempt to revive natural right is presented as complementary with a belief in the weakness of social science as now understood by the majority of academic and other professionals. The purpose of the present reflections on Rothman's article is to see how far he has made a valid criticism of the classics and of the men he regards as their attempted restorers; and to consider the soundness of his views on the received sciences.

If a democracy is to function successfully, the great mass of the population need instruments for communicating their views to political leaders. The chief channels for communication are parties and pressure groups. English politics provides much scope for study of these conduits, because both parties and pressure groups are highly organized and well articulated. Although the part played by party activists in policy formulation is only one small aspect of this network, the study of that part throws considerable light upon the interplay of parties and pressure groups, and challenges as well some prevailing notions about the policy demands of party activists.

Analysis of the dynamic properties of two or more interrelated systems is a recurrent problem in social science theory. A particular problem frequently arises (although it often goes unrecognized) in assessing the validity of an analysis of a system, some variables of which are causally related to other variables, which latter, in turn, are either not explicitly taken into account or are assumed constant. Examples are easy to find: economists may study the behavior of a single country's economy with only secondary regard for the rest of the world; studies of group behavior may pay only secondary attention to the other roles played by the group members in other contexts; two more examples are worked out below and others may be found in the works about to be cited. Indeed, in a larger sense, the division of social science itself (or of natural science, for that matter) into separate disciplines is an example, for the variables taken as given by one discipline are the very subject matter of another and vice versa. In all these examples, the very real problem is present that if variables taken as given are causally affected by the variables of the system being analyzed, or if variables assumed not to affect that system actually do affect it, the results of the analysis may have little relevance for the study of real problems.

In studies comparing the Bonn Republic with the Weimar Republic, few aspects of the former have received more attention from political scientists than its extraordinary political stability. Contrary to all expectations in the immediate postwar era, and under the same leadership, Germany's second try at parliamentary democracy has already outlasted the Nazi millennium and will soon have exceeded—successfully—the life span of its ill-fated democratic predecessor, the Weimar Republic. Interpretations abound which attribute the political stamina of the Bonn government to the economic prosperity of Western Germany, its Allied tutelage, its firm Western-oriented course, or its disenchantment with political extremism of either variety. Of particular interest to political scientists, however, are the theories which identify the political stability of the Bonn Republic with the “reign” of Konrad Adenauer from the beginning to this day.

The application of several European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries for membership in the Common Market (EEC) is viewed in Washington with great pleasure: the development of a United States of Europe is widely anticipated. Many observers have already calculated the combined manpower, economic resources, military power, etc. of the new union, and have pointed to the decisive advantage the United States, in coalition with this “third power,” will have over the Soviet Union. Even the fact that the EEC and EFTA, if completely merged, would have 13 members is not considered unlucky: after all, the United States itself evolved out of a union of 13. It may however, be premature to prepare a celebration for the birthday of the United States of Europe. The following theoretical excursion suggests that loading the EEC with new members may well reduce it to the level of a glorified customs union rather than forward it to a political federation. Moreover, I shall argue, political communities often unify not by increasing their membership, but in a dialectic fashion: two or more groups form; they appear to be moving in opposite directions until each is well integrated, then they are “synthesized” (not merged) in a superior union. That is, they form one encompassing union without dissolving the bonds that held together the units that composed a group before the larger unification. The earlier autonomous groups become sub-groups in one union, adjusting to the new over-riding bond without being fused into one group that knows no internal divisions.

On May 10, 1959, Austrian voters, in giving overwhelming support to the coalition that has been governing them since 1945, split their ballots about as evenly as possible between the two competing coalition partners. The Socialist Party (SPOe) obtained 50.3 per cent of the vote cast for the coalition parties; but the People's Party (OeVP), despite a rigorous system of proportional representation, moved into the new Parliament with 79 seats, a plurality of one over the SPOe. The election of 1953 had shown strikingly similar results. Then, the Socialists had not been able to translate the electoral tie into a complete governmental equilibrium. This time, stung by losses sustained in the government negotiations after the OeVP's victory in the 1956 parliamentary election, and encouraged by its own victory in the 1957 presidential election, the Socialists demanded the formation of a government based on perfect equality of the two partners. They had waged the campaign with a plea to the voters to place the ship of state in equilibrium, and the voters had responded. For eleven weeks following the balloting, OeVP and SPOe engaged in coalition renegotiations which are recounted and analyzed in this study because of the light they throw on the nature of the rigid coalition that has become postwar Austria's contribution to the taxonomy of political institutions.

Since the theory of games was first made widely available, with application to economic behavior, its use has been suggested in many other areas, from the global to the individual. Several correspondences between game theory and certain aspects of political process have been noted.

The contribution of game theory to substantive knowledge in the empirical sciences, however, has been modest; Luce and Raiffa judge that its impact has been greater in applied mathematics. The area of political behavior—despite the apparent applicability of the notion of conflict of interest—is similarly lacking in studies, although a few notable exceptions exist.

It would not, I think, be entirely misleading to suggest that doctrines of laissez faire and attacks upon reasoned state intervention in political and social life have tended to emanate from two extremes in social philosophy—ultra individualism and an extreme organicism. In the first case, and we may take Locke as an example, society is made up of a heap of individuals who came together to form the state for the limited purpose of the protection of property. Man is not seen as a part of a larger whole, influenced by the structure of that whole, but as an isolated individual; thus any state interference beyond the protection of property is viewed as a restriction of individual liberty. On the other hand are thinkers who regard society as such a complicated and delicate organism that they can only—and governments should only—sit back and gasp at the complexity of it all. Any attempt to improve one aspect will affect the balance of the whole in ways impossible to predict. It is difficult to point to a pure instance of this opinion, but this is the impression left with the reader after perusing such works as Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Bradley's Ethical Studies and the works of some more modern conservatives. All that governments can be expected to do is to prevent the worst collisions and any attempt to pursue a positive policy is doomed to failure.

The Italian Socialist Party (PSI) is one of the three major groupings—the Social Democrats, the Socialists and the Communists—that have cultivated the ground to the left of center (i.e., to the left of the ruling Christian Democrats) in Italian politics since World War II. As recently as 1951, the PSI appeared to be inextricably linked with the Communists; but the Socialists have gradually worked themselves around to the position, early in 1962, of openly supporting a Left-Center coalition government still headed by the Christian Democrats. This drastic alteration in the Italian political spectrum has created new possibilities for Italy's political development. It has already permitted the long-awaited “opening to the Left”—as a basic alternative to governments dependent on the Center-Right—under which Italy will be ruled by a coalition of Christian Democrats, Republicans, and Social Democrats, with the PSI offering its support in Parliament in exchange for a bold program of economic planning and social reform. But some Socialists see a further possibility: the so-called “Socialist alternative.” They hope for the possible development of the PSI into a second major party in a two-party system which would absorb the great bulk of the Italian electorate, with the exception of minor extremist fringes to the right and left. To be sure, the success of the “opening to the Left” and the eventual emergence of a “Socialist alternative” both depend on the continued supremacy of the more progressive factions within the ranks of the Christian Democratic Party.

The concept of power remains elusive despite the recent and prolific outpourings of case studies on community power. Its elusiveness is dramatically demonstrated by the regularity of disagreement as to the locus of community power between the sociologists and the political scientists. Sociologically oriented researchers have consistently found that power is highly centralized, while scholars trained in political science have just as regularly concluded that in “their” communities power is widely diffused. Presumably, this explains why the latter group styles itself “pluralist,” its counterpart “elitist.”

There seems no room for doubt that the sharply divergent findings of the two groups are the product, not of sheer coincidence, but of fundamental differences in both their underlying assumptions and research methodology. The political scientists have contended that these differences in findings can be explained by the faulty approach and presuppositions of the sociologists. We contend in this paper that the pluralists themselves have not grasped the whole truth of the matter; that while their criticisms of the elitists are sound, they, like the elitists, utilize an approach and assumptions which predetermine their conclusions. Our argument is cast within the frame of our central thesis: that there are two faces of power, neither of which the sociologists see and only one of which the political scientists see.

The massive demonstrations of May and June 1960, which forced the resignation of the Kishi Cabinet and the cancellation of President Eisenhower's trip to Japan, alarmed Americans as much as they elated the Chinese Communists. The complacent American view of Japan as a sturdy conservative force loyally allied to the United States through a wise and benevolent Occupation and generous economic aid was rudely shattered. Coming at a time when student unrest precipitated the overthrow of governments in South Korea and Turkey—also allies—it was natural that many Americans saw communist plots and a Japan in the grip of a “revolutionary situation.” But if they were wrong—and it has taken a great deal of soul-searching for informed opinion to understand fully what happened—they were no less wrong than the Chinese Communists, who read the situation in much the same way. After a two-week trip to Japan in August 1960, Liu Ning-i, Chairman of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, reported jubilantly that the revolutionary situation in Japan was well advanced. “The Japanese people's future is full of brightness and hope,” he wrote.

Editorial policy reflects in part an ideal, in part a code of operating practice. It is the editor's business to maintain some gap, but not too large a gap, between the two—to keep the ideal always some distance ahead of the practice, and to keep the practice from lagging too far behind. And it is inherent in the notion of policy that both ideal and practice embody a degree of rational consistency in statement and application that rules out mere personal caprice.

Throughout the history of Indian politics in the 20th Century runs a curious and disturbing thread. Both before and after the achievement of independence in 1947, large segments of the Indian populace felt that the institutional means of redress for grievances, frustrations and wrongs—actual or fancied—were inadequate. Since the British withdrawal a fuller panoply of democratic procedures for influencing government has been introduced, but a basic suspicion persists that government is still alien and elite—although now the separation is based upon indigenous social division rather than upon foreign conquest and race. The fact is that the gaining of independence has marked very little change in the use of the more direct and agitational modes of public suasion. The Congress Government has been treated to an almost constant tattoo of demands supported by the same techniques popularized during the independence struggle, such as hunger-strikes, black-flag demonstrations, the courting of arrest, impeding of public business, and violent riots.