The emergence of American labor unions to positions of actual or potential power as organized forces in election campaigns has stirred a great deal of controversy over the limits and propriety of union political activity. A decade and more after the Taft-Hartley Act provisions on that subject, argument continues as vigorously as ever about the need for, and if a need, then the nature and extent of, legal controls over the power of union leaders to enlist and commit their membership to electioneering goals. Underlying many of these debates is the complex question of union membership solidarity in political affairs. For if, to some, solidarity suggests dangers, it also indicates difficulties in the way of making controls effective. Yet we have only begun to explore the solidarity of rank-and-file attitudes toward union political activity.

On one thing the Soviet and Yugoslav Communists agree: “national communism” is a contradiction in terms. “The very expression ‘national communism’,” say the Soviet theoreticians, “is a logical absurdity. By itself communism is really international and it cannot be conceived otherwise.” Tito was just as emphatic when he told New York Times commentator, C. L. Sulzberger, that “national communism doesn't exist. Yugoslav Communists too are internationalists.”

That the Soviet and Yugoslav positions appear to agree on this point is no accident. Marxist theory has never acknowledged a genuine alternative to socialism or capitalism, and socialism was a profoundly international idea. But in its effort to abolish national strife, create a world-wide economic and social order, and establish political and social internationalism, the socialist movement had to start within the framework of the nation-state. In practice, therefore, socialism was mainly a national affair. The gulf between the necessary national starting point of the socialist movement and its international ideal was, to put it mildly, considerable. Though the international working class solidarity of the Communist Manifesto has been emptied of plausibility by the events of the last hundred years—not least of all by the abandonment in practice of internationalism in 1914 by the socialist movement—internationalism is a fetish to which even the right-wing socialist makes his obeisance.

The Senate of the United States, we are told, is a “club.” The image, while hopelessly imprecise and occasionally quite misleading, does have at least one advantage: it underscores the fact that there are unwritten but generally accepted and informally enforced norms of conduct in the chamber. These folkways influence the behavior of senators to a degree and in directions not yet fully understood. “There is great pressure for conformity in the Senate,” one member (mercifully varying the simile) has recently said. “It's just like living in a small town.” And, as in small-town life, so too in the Senate there are occasional careers to be made out of deliberate nonconformity, sometimes only skin-deep, but sometimes quite thorough-going.

The problem of representation is central to all discussions of the functions of legislatures or the behavior of legislators. For it is commonly taken for granted that, in democratic political systems, legislatures are both legitimate and authoritative decision-making institutions, and that it is their representative character which makes them authoritative and legitimate. Through the process of representation, presumably, legislatures are empowered to act for the whole body politic and are legitimized. And because, by virtue of representation, they participate in legislation, the represented accept legislative decisions as authoritative. But agreement about the meaning of the term “representation” hardly goes beyond a general consensus regarding the context within which it is appropriately used. The history of political theory is studded with definitions of representation, usually embedded in ideological assumptions and postulates which cannot serve the uses of empirical research without conceptual clarification.

There was no change in the personnel of the Supreme Court during the 1957 Term. Nor was there any let-up in attacks upon the Court arising from its recent decisions regarding such touchy subjects as racial segregation in public schools, loyalty programs, the powers of legislative investigating committees, and subversive persons and activities. A great deal of this criticism travelled a pretty low road, but some came from high and responsible sources, such as Learned Hand. Of great weight was a resolution adopted by the annual Conference of (State) Chief Justices on August 24, 1958, by a vote of 36 to 8, which affirmed its faith in traditional federalism and urged the Supreme Court to “exercise one of the greatest of all judicial powers—the power of judicial selfrestraint—by recognizing and giving effect to the difference between that which on the one hand, the Constitution may prescribe or permit, and that which, on the other, a majority of the Supreme Court, as from time to time constituted, may deem desirable or undesirable ….”

Political science, like other fields of social inquiry, has had an enduring interest in questions of stability and change. This interest—until now principally expressed in studies of the rise and fall of institutions—has lately been focused increasingly upon individual and group behavior, in a search for the influences that hold men to their political beliefs and affiliations or cause them to shift about. Such influences are important not only for the study of voting and party membership, but for haute politique as well—for the great and dramatic questions surrounding political loyalty, conformity, deviation, apostasy, and other states of membership or disaffiliation. Although the research reported below concentrates on the former, it is our hope that it may also cast light upon the latter. It is concerned specifically with primary groups—those small, face-to-face, solidary, informal and enduring coteries that we commonly experience as family, friendship and occupational peer groups.

Dwight Waldo, Stephen Bailey, and I, among others who have from time to time expressed admiration for certain litterateurs as sources of wisdom and understanding of the art and science of public administration, will undoubtedly ponder at length a statement in W. Somerset Maugham's latest collection of imponderabilia, Points of View. Maugham says:

Only the very ingenuous can suppose that a work of fiction can give us reliable information on the topics which it is important to us for the conduct of our lives to be apprised of. By the nature of his creative gifts the novelist is incompetent to deal with such matters; his not to reason why, but to feel, to imagine, and to invent. He is biased. The subjects the writer chooses, the characters he creates, and his attitude toward them are conditioned by his bias. What he writes is the expression of his personality and the manifestation of his instincts, his emotions, his intuitions, and his experience. He loads his dice, sometimes not knowing what he is up to, but sometimes knowing very well; and then he uses such skill as he has to prevent the reader from finding him out. Henry James insisted that the writer of fiction should dramatize. That is a telling, though perhaps not very lucid, way of saying that he must so arrange his facts as to capture and hold his reader's attention. This, as everyone knows, is what Henry James consistently did, but, of course, it is not the way a work of scientific or informative value is written. If readers are concerned with the pressing problems of the day, they will do well to read, as Chekhov advised them to do, not novels or short stories, but the works that specifically deal with them.

Writers on foreign aid policy today generally agree that technical and capital assistance from the United States government can contribute effectively to economic growth in underdeveloped areas. There is much less agreement among them, however, on the ability of the foreign aid program to contribute positively to democratic processes of political and social change. There is still less agreement on the proposal that the United States should, wherever necessary and possible, intentionally attempt to stimulate social change within the context of an aid program. Nevertheless, some general considerations not heretofore presented in juxtaposition, and a case history to illustrate them, tend to support this proposal.

It has become a commonplace that the Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is. Scholars of American constitutional law have, therefore, focused their studies largely on the Court's opinions as indices of the Constitution's current meaning. But however well established may be the Court's role as the expounder of the constitutional document, the impact of a decision will depend on many individuals and circumstances far beyond the confines of the Court. This paper will examine the effects of the decision in Zorach v. Clauson on public policy in the seven years since its announcement. It will attempt to follow the repercussions of one Supreme Court decision through the entire political process within one area of political conflict—in this case the conflict over church-state relationships.