‘Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry’, was penned by Jeremy Bentham in 1825, but could as appropriately appear in most contemporary treatments of social choice and rationality. Political economists still use the felicific calculus; they search for ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ by exploring means and consequences of aggregating individuals' preferences to form social choices among competing values. The values are assigned equal weight. The origins and processes of development of individual preferences are taken as ‘givens’, i.e. as irrelevant to the problem of social choice. What counts is rational behaviour, which is said to exist when action is ‘correctly’ designed to maximize goal achievement, ‘given the goal in question and the real world as it exists’.

The declining association between occupational class and political alignment in Britain has now been documented by a number of studies. For the political analyst the decline of a previously important cleavage must raise complex questions of causation. One of the most important possible explanations for such a change is that a new cleavage has arisen or grown in political significance so that its influence on political alignment cross-cuts that of the previous cleavage, blurring its impact and exposing sections of the population to contradictory or cross-pressuring influences. But political commentators in present-day Britain have apparently ruled this out as an explanation of the declining electoral influence of occupational class. Crewe, for example, remarks:

It is difficult to think of any social cleavages or fundamental changes in the social structure in the last twenty years that could have affected national partisan alignments in any way comparable to the substitution of the religious cleavage by the class cleavage in the first three decades of this century. Glacially slow changes in the British social structure have undoubtedly taken place. The emergence of coloured immigrant communities, the growth of white collar employment (and of white collar ‘trade unionism’), the movement of agricultural workers to the towns and their displacement by commuters and the retired rich, a further secularization and a growing disparity of income between the organized and unorganized working class are all cases in point. But in all these cases, shifts in party support have been small, often only temporary, and always localized; no shift in the social structure has produced an enduring, nationwide realignment of party support since 1945.

Since the 1960s, when the concept of totalitarianism began to be critically assailed, Western, and particularly academic, interpreters of the Soviet Union have increasingly moved in the direction of a new convergence. Many scholars have portrayed the political systems of the Soviet Union and of Western countries as increasingly alike, viewing them through the common perspective of ‘pluralism’. Basically, it has been said, conflict and differences of opinion are characteristic of all these political systems. To be sure, the conflicts and differences may be expressed through rather different institutions, and with somewhat different styles or nuances in each case, but they are there just the same.

Observers of the American political scene might at times wonder why the 95th Congress, with nearly two-to-one Democratic majorities in both houses, did not take positive action on many of President Carter's important legislative proposals in 1977 and 1978. After all, it was argued when Carter was inaugurated at the beginning of 1977, the return of common party control to both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue would bring to an end the legislative-executive confrontations of the Nixon-Ford years. Thus, was not the unwillingness of Congress to approve his major programs an indication that Carter was inept, or even perhaps incompetent, as a legislative leader? If Lyndon Johnson could obtain swift approval of an extensive legislative agenda from the 89th Congress (1965–66), which in partisan composition was quite similar to the 95th Congress, why could Jimmy Carter not achieve comparable results?

Although Michael Oakeshott has written on such a wide variety of subjects as religion, jurisprudence, education, science, aesthetics and history, Ishall concentrate in this essay on his political philosophy. As a political philosopher Oakeshott has been concerned with two basic themes: firstly, to develop a conception of the nature of philosophy in general and political philosophy in particular; and secondly, to develop a substantive theory of politics. Accordingly I shall divide this essay into four sections. In the first three sections I shall outline his discussion of the two themes, and in the fourth, assess their adequacy.

In recent research Verba and Nie and Hansen have provided systematic evidence on the positive effects of mass participation on other aspects of the public policy process. Specifically, Verba and Nie demonstrated that for data on American communities, a curvilinear relationship exists between the level of mass political participation and the extent of elite-mass agreement on ‘policy agenda’ items. The effect of this relationship is such that the highest agreement, or ‘attitude concurrence’, is found in those communities with the highest levels of participation. Working with the same data, Hansen3 showed that the competitiveness of elections also influences concurrence independently and that there was an interaction effect of participation and competition on policy-agenda agreement. The interaction was such that attitude concurrence was highest in communities with especially high levels of both participation and competition.