This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. On May 17, 1954, nine judges, sworn to defend a Constitution which guarantees equal protection of the laws, speaking for a country which declared its independence on the proposition that all men are created equal and which is fighting for moral leadership in a world predominantly populated by people whose skin color is other than white—these nine men unanimously concluded that segregated educational facilities are “inherently unequal.”

Most of the members of this audience can probably still recall their feelings when they heard what the Supreme Court had done. Even those who were in full sympathy with the holding must nevertheless have been awed by the responsibility the Supreme Court had undertaken and shaken by some doubts whether the judicial institution could engage in a controversy so charged with emotion and bitterness without running the risk of political defeat and possible permanent impairment of judicial power.

Our concern here is with the nature of the individual's attachment to the body politic and, more particularly, with the value premises underlying the choices made by certain classes of voters. Our hypothesis is that some classes of voters (provisionally defined as “subcultures” constituted on ethnic and income lines) are more disposed than others to rest their choices on some conception of “the public interest” or the “welfare of the community.” To say the same thing in another way, the voting behavior of some classes tends to be more public-regarding and less private- (self- or family-) regarding than that of others. To test this hypothesis it is necessary to examine voting behavior in situations where one can say that a certain vote could not have been private-regarding. Local bond and other expenditure referenda present such situations: it is sometimes possible to say that a vote in favor of a particular expenditure proposal is incompatible with a certain voter's self-interest narrowly conceived. If the voter nevertheless casts such a vote and if there is evidence that his vote was not in some sense irrational or accidental, then it must be presumed that his action was based on some conception of “the public interest.”

A major theme in political literature since the nineteen fifties has been a “unitotalitarian” approach to the study of modern dictatorships. The principal totalitarian “isms”—Fascism, Nazism and Communism—have been viewed as examples of one common species, containing no doubt some variations and differences; but practically, or operationally, the divergencies have been thought considerably less important than the similarities. The emphasis has been heavily on the structure and methods underlying the exercise of political control by the “Leader” and the “Party.” In what is undoubtedly the outstanding modern study of the subject, Friedrich and Brzezinski have attempted to extrapolate predictive hypotheses from the common pattern of totalitarian dictatorship expressed in a familiar syndrome of six interrelated characteristics.

In chapter sixteen of the Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes develops a quite peculiar concept of representation, which he then applies in the political argument of the rest of the book. He maintains that a man is a representative insofar as he has been authorized, that is, given the right to act. The representative freely exercises this right, while the represented is bound by his action and responsible for it. That this definition is an incomplete account of what representation means, and in what ways it is incomplete, I have tried to show in a previous essay. It remains to demonstrate the relationship between this peculiar, one-sided definition, and the political argument in which it is applied.

By nature men are free, but left to their own devices they will inevitably enslave each other. Of all the “bipolarities” in the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau none is more striking than this tension between natural freedom and the spontaneous march to inequality and oppression in which all men participate. None aroused more conflicting reactions in his own mind. If men are the sole authors of their ills, and not the mere victims of some external force, be it original sin, a malevolent nature or a hostile environment, then there is always hope for self-improvement. On the other hand, if men were alone responsible for inventing and maintaining their own social misery, they could scarcely be expected to overcome conditions they had themselves chosen to create. One could hardly hope that those who had devised and imposed their own chains, would either wish, or know how to liberate themselves. Jf there was no need for cosmic fatalism, there was every reason to despair of mankind's own social powers.

The purpose of this essay is to consider what kind of compromise is produced by party government. Its method is to discover what kind of compromise was produced by the socalled Settlement of 1688, the compromise which laid the foundation for party government in Britain. It will be suggested that the kind of compromise which laid the foundation for party government is the kind which party government, in turn, chiefly produces.

The emergence of political parties performing important functions in the political system has characterized the recent history of much of the African continent. The new party systems have taken various forms, including single parties with a narrow ruling elite, as in Liberia, or with mass support, as in Guinea; two-party systems where one mass party is dominant, as is the case in Kenya; and multi-party systems, as in Nigeria and Somalia. In two states, Libya and Sudan, once-flourishing political parties have been banned. Only in Ethiopia (Etritrea excluded) have there never been political parties. The Empire of the Conquering Lion of Judah can well be termed a no-party state. In Ethiopia today no organization exists that would or could describe itself as a political party.

For centuries men have speculated about the human consequences of work. Slowly, a considerable body of information has begun to accumulate concerning the relationships between people's jobs and other aspects of their lives. Investigators have pointed out the connections between certain types of jobs and certain personality disorders, job satisfaction, productivity, attitudes toward union and management, social relations on the job, leisure activities, and other things. Extending such findings, this study concludes that a particular job situation can have important effects on a man's political outlook.

Political studies have long classified individuals according to occupation, yet there have been extremely few efforts to penetrate within specific occupational categories to discover the causal triggers of occupational attitude differences.