As I set out to prepare for this combined inaugural and valedictory, I sought a theme worthy of the occasion and within the span of my own limited vision. Notwithstanding the lush crop of “problems” confronting our world and our profession, no suitable theme came readily to mind. I experimented with many, including “Variations on a Theme by Joe McCarthy,” or “Acheson at Armageddon,” or “General MacArthur Fades Again.” But in all such cases the theme was obscured by the variations. And so I've called these remarks “Variations on a Familiar Theme.”

Since 1903 when Frank Goodnow spoke on “The Work of the American Political Science Association,” no less than forty-five presidents have prepared annual speeches on as many different themes. It is interesting to note that of thirteen such speeches up to 1917, only one gave any major attention to international relations. Then, between 1917 and 1924, four of the seven were devoted to an international theme. But during the twenty-six years from 1924 through 1950, only two dealt primarily with international relations.

Perhaps it is the absence of a substantial communist opposition in Great Britain that has caused Americans to be less concerned about the reactions of our British allies than of the continental nations to the recent foreign policy of the United States. However, if Americans assumed an almost universal British acceptance of the foreign policy adopted by the United States and formally adhered to by the British Government, the Bevanite revolt of early 1951 administered a sharp jolt. First, in April there were the resignations from the Government of Aneurin Bevan, Minister of Labour, former Minister of Health, and one of Labour's strongest and most popular leaders, Harold Wilson, President of the Board of Trade and one of the Government's young intellectuals, and John Freeman, a lesser figure but in the significant position of Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Supply. Their resignation speeches made it clear that, while the immediate cause of their departure was a new budgetary provision requiring a health service charge for dentures and spectacles, the root of their dissatisfaction lay in the burden of rearmament expenditures accepted by the Government in accordance with the main lines of U. S. policy.

There presently exists in Japan an entire level of socio-political organization practically unknown to Westerners and little studied by the Japanese themselves until recent years. It comprises one of the lowest units of group organization in rural Japan and, in a practical everyday sense, plays a more immediate and important role in the daily lives of a larger proportion of the Japanese people than do any of the more formal and better known units of organization, such as the village, town, gun (county) or prefecture. This unit is known as the buraku, perhaps best rendered into English as hamlet.

The “People's Government” at Peking, which has been functioning since October, 1949, under the sponsorship of the Chinese Communist Party, includes a system of disciplinary surveillance over government personnel that in several aspects is reminiscent of one of the world's most remarkable institutions. This is the Chinese Censorate, traditionally a highly systematized organ of administrative and political control that was an integral, and usually a prominent, part of China's governmental structure for more than two thousand years.

The new control system in China bears only a partial resemblance to the old. It is even possible that China's censorial heritage may not have had any part in shaping its development. However, since that heritage may conceivably channel its future development in directions that would be unforeseeable and unexplainable in any other context, it would appear to be desirable to take a fresh look at this long-lived institution. Aside from prospects of future influence, the Censorate, as a unique and, in its setting, a durable solution to the universal and ever-present problem of control in government, has intrinsic significance for students of political science.

The importance to an enemy's intelligence services of information regarding such targets vital to the United States as important installations, plant locations and shipping routes is generally recognized. Although the methods for withholding such information from the enemy are not foolproof, they are at least clear and unclouded by conflicting values. What is not so generally recognized is the importance, in connection with an enemy's plans for the destruction of targets, of detailed economic data. One of the few writers in this field expresses it this way:

The battleground of administrative theory has witnessed the rise of functional-institutionalism, under the banners of Gulick and others, and the yielding, in part, of its “principles” to the hordes of the iconoclastic “pragmatic revolt” (or the cult of “administrationism” as Waldo labeled it). But just as legal realism has been interpreted by some observers as law's acid bath, so, too, this new “administrative realism” is considered by many a catharsis, not a cure.

Some present-day theorists have attempted to throw normative life-lines to the administrator. Appleby has written of the socio-political role of the administrative process. Barnard and Friedrich have called upon the administrator to act under the rubric of his moral responsibility. Others on the organizational level—Stene for example—have attempted to derive a “pure theory of organization,” not based upon all-embracing, clearly predictive rules, but rather in the form of theories of “administrative statics” (another Waldoism) which may be cast over a framework of the concrete purposes of any specific administrative situation. The underlying continuum supporting both the social norms of Appleby, Barnard and Friedrich, and the organizational theoretics of Stene, is purpose. Indeed, defined purpose alone could make sensible Stene's axiom that “The degree to which any given organization approaches the full realization of its objectives tends to vary directly with the coordination of individual effort.” If the objectives are discoverable only by hindsight, a query may well be raised: Does coordination exist because the purpose was realized, or is the purpose realized because coordination existed? Clearly, a well-grounded theory of public administration must be based on a predictively refined approach to the concept of purpose.

The dominant belief among both teachers and graduate students of political science seems to be that political theory constitutes the heart of their subject; yet political theory is not, in practice, the core of political science teaching. Such is the schizoid condition of political science and political scientists that is revealed by the investigations of the Committee for the Advancement of Teaching of the American Political Science Association. The hypothesis advanced in this note presents a dual reason for the unfortunate situation: it is partly that political theorists have failed to keep up with the times and have not engaged in sufficient value-free theoretical study of the raw data of politics, and partly that vast numbers of political scientists have falsely concluded that one of the most important parts of the traditional study of political theory—political ethics—is not susceptible of scientific treatment and should rigorously be eschewed.