A part-time book review editor is a sort of conscripted volunteer, and his problems resemble those of the amateur in any organized enterprise. He undergoes an educational experience in the course of which everyone hopes his mistakes will do as little harm as possible. He learns the things he can do something about and those he had better let alone, those things that have to be put in writing—when—and those things that shouldn't. Perhaps the best example of the first category is his decision to go to work; he is well advised to pick an editor-in-chief whose judgment and standards he respects implicitly, and whose idea of supervision is to create circumstances under which the book review editor can do his job better. The second category consists largely of resisting the temptation to rewrite reviews. Apart from grammatical corrections, clarifying phraseology, and deletions based upon considerations of space, the book review editor should content himself with firm, polite reminders to reviewers, whose drafts he finds unsatisfactory, of the purpose of the review within the word limitation specified in the original invitation. This brings us to the two strategic principles upon which the B.R.E. in most cases can secure acceptance of his responsible judgment: (1) space allocation, translated into reasonable word limitations, and (2) time pressure, expressed in lead times to meet editorial deadlines. The same principles also operate to guide the B.R.E. in his correspondence; if he cannot speak his mind in one page there is apt to be something wrong with his thinking, and an administrative decision that cannot be satisfactorily stated in a public letter should probably be reconsidered.

Not the least paradoxical aspect of the United Nations mandate in the Congo, as described in the three-power resolution adopted by the Security Council on November 24, 1961, is that it was designed to prevent the exercise of a right which is explicitly recognized by the Charter. In effect, by “completely rejecting the claim of the Katanga as a sovereign independent Nation” and “recognizing the government of the Republic of the Congo as exclusively responsible for the conduct of the external affairs of the Congo,” the authors of the resolution clearly denied the provincial authorities of the Katanga the right to self-determination. Similarly, the support given by the United States government to the resolution, reaffirmed in several official statements, seems hardly compatible with our long-standing moral commitment to the Wilsonian principle that “the small states of the world have a right to enjoy the same respect for their sovereignty and territorial integrity that the great and powerful states expect and insist upon.” Actually, what may at first sight appear to be a sign of inconsistency is rather a reflection of the fundamental ambiguity in the concept of self-determination.

The purpose of this article is to investigate distributions of influence in a legislative body, to spell out the resulting hypotheses, to introduce a method for estimating the degree of interaction between legislators, and to demonstrate the relevance of specific indicators to the study of legislative behavior. The methodological task falls somewhere between the small group laboratory situation and the more complex arena of community decision-making. Intense observation, control, and precision are sacrificed in favor of a real and vital situation. The analysis of a relatively self-sufficient political entity is lost in favor of maintaining some of the advantages of laboratory research. The universe selected for this study consists of fifty people who must directly or indirectly, but not remotely, rely upon each other in order to satisfy their official purposes.

Political science is a basic discipline in the social sciences. Although it must necessarily maintain close scholarly association with the disciplines of history, economics, sociology, anthropology, geography, and social psychology, political science cannot be considered a part of any of these other social sciences. Political science has its own area of human experience to analyze, its own body of descriptive and factual data to gather, its own conceptual schemes to formulate and test for truth.

Nature seldom allows us to get what we wish without paying her price. This truism is commonly illustrated by the delicate balance in animal life which often cannot be disturbed to satisfy man's wants (e.g., for fox hunting) without demanding of man in return (e.g., by increases in the rabbit population and in crop damage).

The several civil service systems in this country also illustrate this bittersweet combination of intended and unintended consequences. The argument here will not go to the extreme of one observer, in whose judgment the United States Civil Service Commission was the single greatest obstacle to the successful waging of World War II. Rather, the focus here will be upon several characteristics of our civil service systems that have as presumably unintended consequences an increase in the burdens of managing work. For the most part, the analysis of management problems will derive from the research literature dealing with behavior in organizations, a field of study presently seething with activity.