The resurgence of conservatism may be described as the most significant postwar development in American thought. “No intellectual phenomenon has been more surprising in recent years,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., concedes, “than the revival in the United States of conservatism as a respectable social philosophy.” No longer can one lament, as Alpheus T. Mason did in 1948, that “conservatism, once more than respectable political theology (especially among the educated), now carries overtones of reaction well nigh as discrediting as the rabidities attributed to communism.” Intellectual spokesmen are now, on the contrary, making a concerted effort to revisit and revitalize the conservative point of view.

Although most of this “egg head” element in the conservative camp may be, and has been, dismissed as expressing an anachronistic yearning for the anticommercial traditions evolved in British feudalism, the business leaders whom they neglect have themselves been revising and actively selling a conservatism that appears to be more closely related to the realities of the American social situation.

During 1953 and 1954 two different experiments designed to determine the comparative effectiveness of personalized and impersonalized propaganda techniques were conducted in Ann Arbor. Although “scientific” in orientation, both of them were carried out in conjunction with the teaching of a political science course in public opinion. This not only provided a unique pedagogical opportunity but also made possible the execution of a particularly difficult type of research. In the report following the first year's experiment, the class procedure used and the drawbacks resulting from the use of students were discussed. Here we will present the major findings and interpretations of two years of such experimental work.

Personal contact in political campaigns in the United States today receives a prominent emphasis in the thinking and planning of party strategists. Despite technological improvements in the mass media, especially television, there is today no diminution in attention to programs for personalized appeals to “get out the vote,” unsystematic though such programs may often be. Successful political campaigners in recent years invariably relate their success in part, at least, to the volume of their handshaking, their extensive itineraries, and the intensity of personalized organizational work. In November, 1954 President Eisenhower made history with his initiation of a Republican “talkathon” by telephoning ten party workers around the nation just before election day.

Throughout most of its national history, Venezuela has been the victim of long and tyrannical dictatorships, broken only by brief spells of semi-democratic government. Constitution after constitution has fallen before the whims of self made generals. Numerous major revolts and countless minor civil uprisings have scarred the country, all having the twofold objective of acquiring for their leaders national power for power's sake and the privilege of organizing Venezuela as a private economic and political domain.

In almost all instances the politicians have travelled a bloody road to national power. Having once established themselves in the presidency, they demonstrated considerable reluctance to observe the functional separation of powers decreed by the constitution. As a result of this attitude the legislature and judiciary were weakened to the point of impotency. The raison d'être of these branches thus came to be the legalization of the programs and activities of the executive, even if this meant, as it often did, violating the constitution. The purpose of this article is to examine the evolution and application of executive power.

As a self-conscious discipline among the cluster of specialties or “fields” encompassed by political science, public administration came late and grew fast. Its recent arrival and rapid growth sometimes obscure the fact that its origins are to be found in a process of experimentation with governmental structure that long preceded the appearance of public administration as a subject of systematic study and is likely to continue as long as the nation exists. This process of experimentation goes on vigorously today, and the development of new forms is generating discord more profound and far-reaching than any that has ever hitherto divided students of public administration. It is with the sources and significance of that discord that this paper is concerned.

The central thesis of this paper is that an examination of the administrative institutions of this country suggests that they have been organized and operated in pursuit successively of three values, here designated representativeness, neutral competence, and executive leadership.

Contemporary social scientists generally regard Henry Adams as a brilliant but erratic figure in the history of American thought. Their image of him is that of a gifted but unreliable and unscientific writer. Yet it is striking how, upon a re-examination of his approach to his world, there emerges a cluster of attitudes and preoccupations which clearly anticipate much of what is significant in the work of these social scientists themselves. The reason why Adams is not, however, regarded as a forerunner of present-day students of society is that he never kept himself from pushing his theories to conclusions. If those who share his scientific ideals must ultimately reach his conclusions, the limits of their science might be exposed by a reconsideration of his personal battle, of his peculiar pains, trials, and failures.

Anticipating familiar tendencies, Adams made a case for irrationalism insofar as he pleaded for the conversion of theory into action; for conservatism insofar as he supported the reduction of discords by a manipulative science of means; and for elitism insofar as he permitted the practitioners of empirical science to settle the social conflicts left open to debate by the traditional methods of politics and philosophy.

The rapid succession in which independence or a large measure of self-government has been achieved by dependent territories in Africa has been one of the more striking political phenomena of the postwar period. It would be rash indeed to prophesy the total eclipse of colonialism in the modern world, for the situations obtaining in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, as well as the fears expressed by the Ashanti in the Gold Coast and the southern tribesmen in the Sudan regarding the shape of the independent state, can be indications that political dependency can be reasserted in new forms. Nevertheless, the brand of Western colonialism which reached its zenith prior to World War I appears to be drawing to a close, and in a number of instances the metropolitan power concerned is actually planning the liquidation of its empire.

The causes of this vaporization of colonialism in Africa are complex. In some cases the significant factor is rooted in international politics, as in the military defeat of Italy or the encouragement given by Arab and Asian states to rising nationalist groups. In other instances the financial position of the metropolitan country or the anti-colonial policy of a major political party has been the crucial factor.

The most interesting educational experiment in the world today for the student of comparative administration and business and government is the Administrative Staff College at Henley-on-Thames, England. This College is pioneering the methods which, in any industrialized nation, are needed to restore the flexibility and initiative that must always accompany free enterprise. The College also provides a new approach to leadership training in that enrollees are recruited in fixed proportions from public and private employment by a method that produces balanced management teams among the members (as the “students” are called), and the teaching procedure stresses group work and self-instruction rather than formal lectures.

This original venture, headed by Princeton-trained Noel F. Hall, was founded in 1946 and opened in 1948. Already it is being imitated in widely scattered parts of the world. Henley has turned out some 1,300 policy administrators of the average age of 39, all of whom had been tapped for higher responsibilities by their employers—who incidentally foot the bill—before going to Henley for the three months' session. Each session—there are three a year—is limited to 60 members; six of the 60 members may be drawn from overseas and the rest come from private business, the central civil service, local government, the nationalized industries, and banking.

James W. Prothro's hypothesis is that, while there has been a resurgence of “conservatism” in American political theory and practice, the actual intervention of the New Deal between the conservative government of Hoover and the conservative government of Eisenhower makes the complete rejection of New Deal appeals by a conservative administration difficult, if not impossible. There can be little quarrel with that thesis itself. Once given the assumptions that “conservatism” is an adequate frame of reference, that Hoover and Eisenhower may in some understandable way be classed as “conservatives,” and that, since the administration did in fact reluctantly accept certain New Deal symbols, they were necessarily obliged to do so, there is some question as to whether the thesis is not obvious. Prothro, however, gives serious reasons for buttressing “impressions” with precision, and presents a careful content analysis which strengthens his argument and should serve to enhance our understanding of current political trends.

The experience of modern totalitarian regimes suggests that they are not likely to perish through internal revolt unless that occurs at a time when the totalitarian regime is in mortal danger from an external challenge, as in the marginal Italian case, or these the totalitarian movement in power is about to undertake decisive measures to turn the country into a totalitarian system, as in the case of the counter-revolution against Peron in Argentina. Other than that, and even considering the succession crises, modern totalitarian regimes have shown themselves capable of maintaining their totalitarian character in spite of domestic and foreign opposition. More recently it has been argued (e.g., by I. Deutscher, Russia: What Next) that modern totalitarian regimes, if not overthrown by external forces, will nevertheless in the end be quietly and inevitably transformed into more democratic states by the subtler but irresistible influence of rationality inherent in the bureaucratic and managerial apparatus that no modern state can do without. This proposition will be developed more fully and given critical consideration in subsequent pages in order to test whether rationality, regarded in this context as a certain mode of thought and behavior induced by the requirements of modern industrialized and bureaucratized societies, is in fact incompatible with modern totalitarianism.

It is a commonplace that every period rewrites history in the light of its own problems, and with the aid of wisdom after the event. Changes in the climate of opinion and shifts in the winds of doctrine naturally bring the contributions of earlier thinkers under new scrutiny. Today the mood of critical reassessment is strong, for a significant shift has taken place in English and American political opinion during the past decade; the temper of the times is not visionary, but revisionist, and the pull is not toward revolution, but toward revaluation. The spate of books and articles on the “new conservatism,” the “new right,” and the “conservative tradition,” however, and if ever, defined; the reconsiderations of liberal and reformist thought; the succession of Michael Oakeshott to the chair of Harold J. Laski; the recantations of repentant liberals, and the curious spectacle of revolutionaries triumphantly in reverse; the vogue of Burke and De Tocqueville; and even the difference between D. W. Brogan's earlier acid etching of the American political scene and his recent essay in contentment, all make clear in their varying ways that times have changed.

That there was a continuity between medieval political thought and the body of systematic theory that surrounded the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is by now a commonplace. But when we speak of the medieval contribution to the American political tradition, it is important to avoid the implication that what medieval thought contributed was identical with what American thought received. Between the close of the fifteenth century and the latter part of the eighteenth lie some two and a half centuries of crowded thought and experience, which more or less profoundly changed the meaning of concepts continuously in use. The more we learn of medieval theory, the clearer it becomes that it must be interpreted in its own terms rather than in terms of its derivatives. And the American political tradition, of course, cannot be fully understood in terms of its historic roots. Perhaps the chief service which the history of ideas can offer to political theory lies in providing material for the sharpening of concepts through a comparative analysis. For the full understanding of the meaning of an idea, one needs to know not only what it is, but also, I suggest, what it is not. Thus there may be value in an attempt to define the medieval meaning of some concepts that were a significant part of the medieval contribution: in particular, sovereignty, natural law and natural rights, and consent.

The world listened attentively while the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was in session in the spacious vaulted white and gold Great Hall of the Kremlin palace from February 14 to February 25, 1956. This was the first congress since the death of Stalin, and in the interim events had prompted some bewilderment and much speculation among interested observers everywhere. Specifically, outside spectators looked to the congress to illuminate the pattern underlying a series of developments between March, 1953, and February, 1956: the resignation of Georgi M. Malenkov as Premier; the ascendancy of First Secretary Nikita S. Khrushchev; Soviet assent to a peace treaty with Austria, politically “neutralizing” that country; Soviet withdrawal from bases in Porkkala, Finland, and Port Arthur; the visits of Khrushchev and Premier Nikolai A. Bulganin to India, Burma, and other countries; the announced reduction of Soviet military forces and military budget; the attempted rapprochement with Yugoslavia; initiation of an unprecedented Soviet economic offensive; and many other “unexpected,” Soviet-instigated moves.

The issues which arose during the discussions of the conference fall fairly conveniently into three compartments.

First, we obviously had to settle, with reasonable clarity, what we were talking about: what “political philosophy” is, what “political science” is, and whether they are really distinguishable. The basic issue of the conference was to determine the relevance of the one to the study of the other, and if we had decided that they were really the same thing, there would simply have been no problems for us to discuss. On the whole, we felt that a valid, if not necessarily sharp, distinction was to be made between the “philosophical” and the “scientific” approaches to the study of politics and that we were not discussing absurd or tautological issues. We agreed, however, that all types of political inquiry involve the construction of theory, implicit or explicit, and that the title “political theory” has been unjustifiably appropriated by the historians of political thought.

At the Council meeting in Boulder in September, 1955, Professor Norman J. Padelford, Chairman of the Nominating Committee in 1954–55, presented a proposal for revising the provisions of the Constitution governing the election of officers of the Association. The Nominating Committee was itself divided on the question of the recommendations and the Council, after voting down the proposals, referred them to the Executive Committee for further study.

The Executive Committee decided to ask Professor Padelford to write a brief statement setting forth the proposals and the arguments for them to be published in the Review. At the same time it decided to ask one member of the 1954–55 Committee, who had been opposed to the proposals, to set forth the arguments against them; Mr. Howard R. Penniman was asked to do this. The Executive Committee decided to send these statements to several people from different sections of the country for comment and to print the Padelford and Penniman statements along with the comments in the Review. Not all those asked to comment did so; five replies, however, were received and are printed here along with the two main papers.

Latin views toward the United States are not merely those of the weak toward the strong. They are, by the Latins' own definition, those of the poor toward the rich, the cultured toward the uncultured, the idealist toward the pragmatist. They are those of a people largely inexperienced and misled in the political arena, and without practical criteria for the Anglo-Saxon notion of “democracy,” either political or cultural. But they are bitterly experienced in the ways of dictatorship, economic exploitation, and grinding poverty. Born in Iberian feudalism and Catholic fervor, the Latin plainly does not understand the largely Protestant, industrialized, politically and culturally democratic, radical (and yet conservative) United States. It is certainly a slight exaggeration to say that the most important thing the two groups have in common is the hemisphere in which, by geographic accident, they live.

To them we are Yanquis, past and present exploiters, rich because they are poor, slightly drunk with our new postwar power, and verging toward fanaticism in our anti-communism. But their principal current complaint against us is our overflowing generosity toward Europe and Asia and our niggardliness toward themselves.