I want to sketch a line of reasoning about politics, a way of looking at politics. Every point of view must stand on its own legs; it is not something that can be proved. An analysis is a way of looking at something, a way of seeing something we could not see before we made it. We adopt a point of view because it is suggestive and persuasive in its own inner logic.

More specifically, I want to examine politics as a strategic concept. The concept of political strategy is itself a point of view loaded with implications for the study of politics.

Strategy is the heart of politics, as it is of war.

What are the implications of the concept? Any strategy of politics assumes that there is something that we can do about politics, that we have choices, and that what we think and do and want makes a difference. It assumes that we have something to talk about and that what we think and say and do is likely to have consequences. Without these conditions there can be no political strategy.

When the beginner approaches the study of politics, one of the most natural questions for him to ask is: what is it that political science studies? This is a way of asking what is the political scientist's conception of reality. More often than not, the teacher finds the student looking for an objective physical structure, simplified yet concrete, like the astronomer's reduced-scale construction of the solar system, the biologist's photographic reproduction of microscopic cellular organisms, or the physicist's diagram of atomic structure. It is important for the student of human affairs to realize that while individuals, small groups, mass meetings, and even whole cities can be photographed or diagrammed, social scientists have never succeeded in reproducing satisfactory physical models of such concepts as personality, social structure, bureaucratic organization, the price system, or government. Nor do the ends and criteria of government, like order, justice, freedom, welfare or security, lend themselves to analysis in terms of physical or chemical elements like oxygen, carbon, iron, or uranium. Perhaps the closest physical analogy to politics and government is an automobile engine or an electric power plant; but no one would claim that the driver of a car has learned the principles of the engine if all he knows is how to operate it, any more than the power plant engineer understands generation if all he learns is how to read dials and pull switches. Theory is required, and its function is to identify and abstract from total reality the essential minimal concepts and to formulate statements describing the relationships between those concepts whereby the world of experience becomes comprehensible. Theory is never identical with the totality of phenomenal experience; the propositions and principles of theory provide a means by which aspects of reality can be explicitly analyzed and verified, in the hope that some synthesizing minds will make the efforts toward a synthetic reconstruction of reality on the basis of understood principles.

The rules of the Senate of the United States are only 40 in number and comprise only 49 of the 832 pages of the Senate Manual. Yet, when literally invoked they can bring Senate business to a standstill. They are most often ignored or circumvented by unanimous consent in order that the Senate may operate conveniently as a deliberative and parliamentary body. To pass legislation when they are invoked is a formidable enterprise.

Just as the law is said to be no better than the procedures by which it is carried out, so the substance of legislation is shaped and modified by the procedures that may be required under the Senate rules, or by the mere threat to invoke those procedures, for they are compelling. The procedures preceding and surrounding the passage of the first civil rights bill in over 80 years illumine and illustrate the effect of the rules on the substance of legislation as have few other legislative controversies in recent years.

“On jongle trop avec la structure d'un Pays qui a été, dans le monde, le défenseur de l'individu, de la liberté, du sens de la mesure. Un petit paysan sur sa terre, n'est-il pas humainement autre chose que le chômeur de demain ou l'ouvrier qui sera condamné à fabriquer toute sa vie des boulons?”

Le Betteravier Français, September 1956, page 1.

Large-scale state intervention in the alcohol market in France dates from World War I, when the government committed itself to encourage the production of alcohol. Two chief reasons then lay back of this decision: a huge supply of alcohol was needed for the manufacture of gunpowder, and the devastation of the beet-growing regions of the north had severely limited production of beet alcohol, thereby throwing the domestic market out of balance. A law of 30 June 1916, adopted under emergency procedure, established a state agency empowered to purchase alcohol. At the end of the war, a decree of 1919 accorded the government the right “provisionally” to maintain the state monopoly. In 1922 the beetgrowers and winegrowers gave their support to the principle of a state monopoly which, in effect, reserved the industrial market for beet alcohol and the domestic market for viticulture. In 1931 the state was authorized to purchase alcohol distilled from surplus wine.

Because Mexican politics since the Revolution of 1910–17 have operated mainly within the framework of a one-party system and because in the past strong men have sometimes occupied the presidency, writers in the United States have tended to treat the system as authoritarian. Emphasis upon presidential rule and the corollary explanation of the role of the Revolutionary Party as nothing more nor less than an instrument of presidential domination have served to create an oversimplified picture of presidential power. It is the purpose of this paper to outline at least four checkpoints on which the authoritarian interpretation seems to have involved miscalculation of the realities of the Mexican political system. The nature of membership in the “official” party, the degree of centralization within and without the party structure, the threefold role of the party within the political system, and the ideological bias of the political elite all seem to indicate the necessity of a re-evaluation of the politics of the republic on our southern border.

Liberal democrats, like all those who elect to paddle in the placid waters of liberalism, show a charming imperviousness to the existence of power. It is the ingenuousness which permitted the ideology of individualism to flourish for well over a century in the Western world. But all chickens—political as well as others—eventually come home to roost; and the failure to imbibe the home truths set down by such ungentlemanly characters as Thrasymachus, Machiavelli, and Pareto now accounts for the dilemmas, reconsiderations, and tortured defenses of liberal democracy which we see abounding on all sides.

Liberal democracy—that uneasy compromise which was never a compromise at all—is, from the moral standpoint, the worthiest of political creeds. It can arouse the enthusiasm of the humane, the heretical, and the responsible: in short, of all men of good will. But the tenets of liberal democracy can only be a guide for governors and governed in a community if there exists a halcyon situation in which the traditional status system is placidly taken for granted by all in the community.

The essence of Hacker's construction is the theory of the ruling class. Immediately, one thinks of Marx, Mosca, Michels, Pareto, and several Americans who have espoused, in one form or another, oligarchic doctrines. What most sharply distinguishes Hacker from most theorists of this persuasion is the absence of presuppositions of historical inevitability. Seeking only to describe sequences and relations of the past and present, he makes no claims of omniscience, of knowing what the social process must unfold. Neither is his theory normative.

Yet, apart from details and variations, there is a crucial framework of meaning which discloses Hacker's close affinity with the essence of conventional oligarchic doctrines: the few rule, the many simply obey; the governors, in substance if not in form, are free from compulsion to answer to the governed. Historically, and indeed currently, Hacker asserts, genuine power has been and is the exclusive or, at least, the primary possession of a privileged few. True, the composition and foundation of the governing class have changed, but this change, he continues, did not bring in its wake a widening or deepening of the structure of power in American culture. It merely means the substitution of one set of masters or controllers for another. After all, a monopoly of power is a monopoly, whether its source be deference or manipulation. Both, he avers, “permit a few men to rule many men.” Neither system of power allows the personnel and the general policies of government to be the product of voluntary and active consent. In both contexts, the ruled, not the rulers, are the object of control. “Both deference and manipulation are similar in that they are control.” Such, then, is Hacker's relation to the essence of oligarchic thought. What can be said of the validity of his formulation?

An exhilarating breath of fresh air has blown into the musty halls of political theory with the publication of Robert Dahl's Walgreen lectures, A Preface to Democratic Theory. We now know that discussion of minority rights and majority rule can be carried on with lucidity and serious attention to some of the intriguing intellectual puzzles which arise, as well as with reasonable rigor and a genuinely remarkable economy of expression.

For all his clarity and conciseness, however, Professor Dahl has paid a fourfold philosophical price:

1. His case against “Madisonian” democracy is procedural and perhaps more peripheral than profound.

2. The neo-Spinozistic endeavor to formalize political ideology appears premature.

3. His confessed epistemological perplexity over the ground of “intensity” judgments is peculiar.

4. His refusal to wrestle with ethical issues—a refusal he shares with most “empirically oriented” political scientists—leaves them not only open and unresolved, but even unexplored. Yet, in an important sense, these issues seem to be the central ones.

Following Dahl's example, I shall try to set forth these caveats as concisely as possible, leaving aside qualifications and positive theory construction.

To discuss all of the points at which we seem to disagree would be an unwarranted imposition upon readers of this Review, many of whom, I fear, will not have read the book in question. Consequently I propose to stick to the central issues so far as possible, for to a considerable extent these transcend the book itself; and therefore some purpose will be served even for those who have not read the book.