It is generally agreed that Rousseau affected a pessimistic posture toward modernity and that this posture resulted from his failure to deal with the problems of modern industrial society. Underlying this failure, I would like to suggest, is a contradiction between Rousseau's economic ideas, i.e., his defense of private property, and his political ones, i.e., his call for the creation of a communal society in which freedom would be realized through obedience to the general will.

In a society based on private property, as Rousseau had to admit, an inevitable conflict exists between private economic interests and the general interest of society. In order to minimize that conflict, so that the general will would have a chance to prevail, Rousseau advocated a return to a simple society based on a primitive economy. This, however, was bound to be a short-lived solution, because, as he very well knew, the forces of economic development could not be arrested, and the appearance of a full-blown competitive economy could not be long delayed. Thus, Rousseau's clear insight into the problems of an emerging bourgeois society, coupled with his inability to find a way of alleviating these problems, constituted the root causes of his pessimism.

With the 1970 passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), federal regulation reached the American workplace. Given the newness of the legislation, any firm conclusion on its effectiveness seems premature. However, there is ample evidence on federal safety regulation of a specific workplace: the coal mine. The federal government has been directly involved in coal mining safety for over 35 years, operating under three major pieces of legislation, enacted in 1941, 1952, and 1969. Opposing opinions regarding the effect of this legislation can be grouped into three categories: radical, reactionary, and reformer. A multiple interrupted time-series analysis indicates that, in fact, the 1941 and 1969 regulations significantly reduced the fatality rate in coal mining. Certain conditions seem related to the effectiveness of this safety legislation: birth order, provisions, enforcement, target population, and goals. The first two conditions would appear to work for the success of the OSHA, the latter three conditions to work against it.

While contemporary political science (as, for example, in such subjects as political socialization, studies of public opinion, etc.) tends to emphasize the study of values and tastes (because of an assumption that political outcomes–like market outcomes–are determined by the amalgamation of individual preferences), the older tradition of political science emphasized the study of institutions. The line of research in political theory followed during the last generation has involved seeking an equilibrium of tastes; but it has revealed that such an equilibrium exists only rarely, if at all. The inference then is that prudence in research directs the science of politics toward the investigation of empirical regularities in institutions, which, though congealed tastes, are “unstable constants” amenable to scientific investigation.

Although the political leaders who wrote the Constitution did not hold the idea of party in high regard, these same individuals (according to many historians) became the founders of a new party system within the first decade of the new government. This article considers the question (on which no consensus exists) of whether parties did develop. The analysis focuses upon one aspect of party development, namely, the agreement among members of Congress in their roll-call voting records. Spatial analysis (multidimensional scaling) permits a visual picture of the increased clustering of congressmen into two party blocs from 1789 to 1803, especially after the Jay Treaty debate in 1796. This very clear trend supports the idea that politics was moving away from a sectional basis to one founded more clearly on partisan grounds.

We apologize for errant proofreading in not catching the consistent misidentification of the author, Robert Lyle Butterworth, in the review of his book (APSR 73, September 1979, p. 934).

This essay analyzes selected publications since 1974 on U.S. secret intelligence agencies. Published works divide into four categories: memoirs defending the intelligence system, whistle-blowing exposés, scholarly analyses, and reports from executive and congressional studies. What do these materials reveal about the variables determining intelligence system influence in foreign policy decisions? And what do they suggest about criteria for evaluating intelligence performance and product? The finding is that little conceptual progress has been made towards defining the functions of intelligence. But a substantial amount of new illustrative material is now at hand to explore hypotheses such as (1) that intelligence agencies report what they think leaders want to hear, (2) that leaders take decisions without regard to intelligence reports, and (3) that costs often exceed benefits in covert action overseas. We need to understand better the functions of intelligence and to develop theories about the interrelations of information, action, and power within the context of American democratic values. Towards these ends, the article urges the exploitation of the variety of evidence recently published.