on comparing. governments by samuel, h. … · many polities.1 thus the discipline of comparative...

ON COMPARING. GOVERNMENTS

Patterns of Government. By Samuel, H. Beer and Adam B. Ulam,eds. 3rd ed. (New York: Random House, 1973).

Modern Political Systems: Europe. By Roy C. Macridis and RobertE. Ward, eds. 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1972).Pp. xi, 654.

Major European Governments. By Alex N. Dragnich and JorgenRasmussen. 4th ed. (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1974). Pp.xiv, 524.

Comparing Political Systems. By Jean Blondel. (New York: Praeger,1972). Pp. x, 260.

European Government. By Robert G. Neumann. 4th ed. (New York:McGraw-Hill, I968). Pp. xiii, 885.

T he differences between governments are neither trivial nor con-ceivable in terms of mere idiosyncracy or taste. Further, since

the question of what kind of government might be best or mostpracticable is always a pressing one in changing circumstances, polit -

ical scientists have usually felt obliged to know something aboutthese differences. But more importantly, students of politics-notleast among them the writers of the books under review-have gen -

erally harbored a suspicion that Aristotle was right in believing thatin order to understand politics at all, one must be able to comparemany polities. 1 Thus the discipline of comparative government.

Yet the titles of these, surely among the principal books in thediscipline, refer to modernity, to Europe, and to systems, but exceptfor Blonder s, not to comparison. Comparison-or rather talk ofcomparison-is nearly absent from the country sections (again withthe exception of Blondel who has none) and is limited to the in-troductions. Nevertheless every book but Neumann's makes some

Three of the books, Blondel, Neumann, and Dragnich and Rasmussen (here-inafter referred to for the sake of brevity as D&R) explicitly mention Aristotle.The others, Macridis and Ward (hereinafter referred to as M&W) and Beer andUlam (hereinafter referred to as B&U) merely give one to understand in their in -

troductory remarks that in order to understand politics in general one must knowit in its several manifestations, and that the true character of any one can beknown only in the perspective of knowledge of the others. All references to pagenumbers in the five books under review will not be in footnotes but rather in thetext of the review, within parentheses, immediately following the item referredto.

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claim to providing the student with a framework indispensable forunderstanding what politics itself is all about. Clearly each bookprovides a somewhat different view of the discipline although, de-spite their different titles, they are similarly organized. With the ex-ception of Blondel, all deal with four countries: Great Britain,France, Germany, and the Soviet Union-in that order.

I will now describe the organization and approach of each book.Then, after a brief summary, I will turn to an examination of howall of them deal with a few of the most important facts and questionsconcerning each of the countries they treat.

I'

I have chosen to include Jean Blondel's book in this review-although since it does not treat countries it will not be consideredalong with the country sections of the other books-because it is agood example of a class of studies within the discipline of Compara-tive Government, but set off from it by the label "comparative poli-tics." Works of this kind generally do not treat countries as a whole,but focus either on political subsystems, e.g. Blondel's ComparativeLegislatures,2 on aspects or "problems" of politics, e.g. Lucian Pyeand Sidney Verba's Communications and Political Development3 orlike Almond and Powell's Comparative Politics 4 and Blonderspresent work, try to develop a general comparative framework forthe explanation of most political phenomena. Comparative politicsbooks generally try less to describe than to develop explanatoryframeworks. Of course, although no specific comment made aboutBlondel's book should be directly applied to any other work in com -

parative politics, his book shows at least some of the virtues and viceswhich pertain to that approach.

Blondel tries to define what all political systems are, what makesthem legitimate, to differentiate and define various kinds of par-ties, groups, and administrative organizations as well as various kindsof legislatures and executives, and finally to give a definitive classifi -

cation and explicative morphology of the world's political systems.

Jean Blondel, Comparative Legislatures (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall,1972).

' Lucian Pye and Sidney Verba; Communications and Political Development'(Boston: Little Brown, 1966).

' Gabriel Almond and James Powell, Comparative Politics (Boston: LittleBrown, 1966).

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He certainly means, as he says (p. x), to follow Aristotle's purpose,if not his method, and account for political phenomena importantto the good life. Thus he says he is interested in the relationshipbetween structures and norms. He proceeds, however, by what isgenerally called the "conceptual" method, building-out of defini-tions-a model of the political system, the structure of which explains -the function and operation of parties, groups, etc. In his explana-tion of political parties, for example, he builds a scheme for classifi-cation, and makes a number of interesting propositions such as thefollowing: parties that are out to change society, parties of the left,must be large and centralized in order to impose new ways on peoplewho are not interested in them. Thus, he informs the reader that thesize and centralization of parties are no accident, but rather de-pend upon what the parties exist to do. (pp. 63, 91). Also, the oc-currence of purges in revolutionary parties depends not on thebrutishness of this or that leader, but on the necessity to keep a nec-essarily large party apparatus loyal. 6 He also points out that the riseof large disciplined political parties all over the world is both anhistorical and a logical concomitant of a change in the concern ofliberals away from liberty, which is relatively easy to police, toward"egalitarianism of ends," which is very difficult to impose (pp. 177-78). Quite boldly he says the Communist Party of the Soviet Unionis a party fulfilling a role which other modern parties are preventedfrom playing only by the competition of others. Not constitutions,says Blondel, but "a match between the government and opposi-don (pp. 180-81) safeguard liberty in the modern state.

Nevertheless, such statements are supported neither by full ar-guments from the nature of things, by historical data, nor even bystatistics. Rather they hold together by virtue of their being part ofa general model which is a variation of the familiar view of politicsas a decision-making process which converts inputs into outputs(pp. 15-17). The latter are the resultants (in the geometric sense)of the former. So much is assumed by this sort of process -sovereign-ty, individualism, etc.-and so little explained. The body of the"system" consists in the definition of "sub-functions and "subop-erations, and most of the book consists of passages like the follow-ing: "Rule adjudication is truly at the border between inputs and

6On p. 62 he appears to contradict this insight that the assumption of disloyal-

ty is a quality inherent in large leftist parties by saying that key elements of theparty need to be purged "if they are not loyal."


outputs, however, it can also be seen as one of the elements of thefeedback process'' (p. 20). Now, this explains nothing about judi-ciaries anywhere. What interesting statements about judiciariesBlondel makes between pages 147 and 150 he makes despite andnot because of the method. While the "comparative politics ap-proach no doubt served a useful function by reminding us of thesterility of describing any country's political system in isolation fromothers, it leads us to fix our glance upon imaginary models. This iseven less fruitful. It is not evident that any human being shouldspend even a small part of his life worrying, as Blondel does, follow-ing Almond and Powell, 6 whether "communication" is an "opera-tion or function of the system," or not a function at all but thegeneral means by which inputs can be converted into outputs" (p.22)?

The third edition of Beer and Ulam's Patterns of Governmentincludes two new authors: Suzanne Berger of MIT (the French sec-tion) and Guido Goldman of Harvard (Germany). Adam Ulamrevised his work on the Soviet Union, while Samuel Beer completelyrewrote the section on England along the lines of his British Politicsin the Collectivist Age 7 and added a 113 page introduction that isnothing less than an attempt at a theory of modern politics.

The book's actual organization not only varies from sectionto section but also shows little trace of the four concepts which arebilled as its framework, and which so burdened the earlier edi-tions. They are: "pattern of interests'' meaning the ends-in-view ofthe actors in the political process; "pattern of power meaning theinstrumentalities for making and implementing decisions; the"pattern of policy," that is, the things governments do, and the"pattern of political culture," i.e. anything surrounding the politicalprocess which cannot be squeezed into the categories of "input,decision, and output" so popular a decade ago.

Now about Modernity. Beer senses that democracy is the politi-cal manifestation of an idea which has gained very widespread ac-ceptance in our time: that people have the right to use the powerof government to get what they want. Of course, the desires of individuals and groups clash with one another. Yet the central idea of mod-ern democracy, says Beer, only legitimizes the will of the people-

° Almond and Powell, op. cit.7-.Samuel Beer, British Politics in the Collectivist Age ( New York: Knopf; 1965).

ON COMPARING GOVERNMENTS 269

individually and collectively. It legitimizes both absolute sovereign-ty and absolute resistance to it. Where goals and agreement on goalsare lacking, democracy will not supply them. Furthermore, the ab-solute emancipation of desires is corrosive of any thought, howeverreasonable or just, which might provide goals or support agree-ment. Any ethics, new or old, must impose restraints and directbehavior. In principle this immediately opens it up to attack as anillegitimate restraint upon deviant wishes.... The liberating ethosof modern political culture is not merely neutral toward the prob-lem of purpose, but actively hostile to any solution" (p. 5). Theurge to satisfy desires-unsatisfied ones are defined as "problems"is so strong, because unopposed, that modern people have throwncaution to the wind and have endowed their governments with enor-mous powers. By the same logic, within governments themselves it isthe professional problem solvers, the bureaucrats, that have beengiven power. This is a worldwide phenomenon. Even in the SovietUnion, despite the efforts of a very powerful Party, the armed forcesand the main production ministries gain places in the organs of pow-er, first among them the Party itself.

Beer has lost any illusion that under modern conditions democ-racy can mean rule by the people. If anything should strike the stu-dent of government today, it is that the line between the few whogive and the many who take orders is becoming sharper. Since thepower needed to do things-be these welfare or war-on the scale re-quired by unbridled appetite is so great, it necessarily rests in themany, the people. Yet precisely because lockstep movement on a mas-sive scale requires direction, the many can move only on command(p. 19). But while demanding the results that only mobilization cangive, people are not happy about being mobilized (p. 48). Neitherare the people in charge happy:

.. in the managed economies of Western Europe, the great organ-ized producer groups have become so closely linked with govern-ment as to create a new system of representation alongside the for-mal system of representation based on elections. The nationaliza-tion of industries, even to the point of state socialism, does notsolve the problem. For higher authority must reckon with the skill,knowledge and power of the people actually in charge of industry,whether they are called bureaucrats or capitalists (p. 50).

Still, unhappy as they may be about the impossibility of wieldingtotal control, it is the bureaucrats whose wishes are in the best posi-

270 THE POLITICAL .SCIENCE REVIEWER

tion to be satisfied in modern society. Beer points out that the pro -

cess of demand formation-the very engine which drives modernpolitics as well as economies-has been taken over by technocrats,bureaucrats: Citing Daniel P. Moynihan's article "The Profession-alization of Reform" 8 he discusses the example of the poverty pro-grams in the U.S. in the mid 1960's, the impulse for which came notfrom the supposed beneficiaries but from social scientists and re-forming bureaucrats. Beer should have noted, however, that it wasprecisely these groups that were the principal beneficiaries of theseprograms. Nevertheless, his point stands.

As social scientists and managers bewail the uncontrollability ofthe modern state, the many are becoming less willing to be controlled.Among the reasons for this is that the massive programs designed tobring about health, and well-being-in short, happiness-more oftenthan not prove counterproductive. Welfare programs wreck fami-lies, price controls make prices soar, the conditions of public edu -

cation make it well-nigh impossible for children, particularly ofthe poor, to become educated, and so on. Besides, even when socialand economic progress work, the unequal manner in which theybenefit people causes resentment. Given' that so many of the de-mands which individuals and-groups make on government can onlybe satisfied at the expense of other individuals and groups, thiscould hardly be otherwise. Clearly, if satisfaction of demands is thebasis of consent on which the modern state rests, that basis mustshrink as demands grow. After considering whether a Communist-type system might not be necessary to bind together the warringcorporations and surly subjects of the modern state, and noting thatCommunist systems have proved quite inefficient in their own way,

.-Beer ends by accepting as an ineluctable fact the unhappiness andcorruption of modern politics.

Whether or not Beer is excessively gloomy in his introductionand in the section on Britain, he certainly presents the student witha view of European politics which contrasts with the commonimpression that European countries are, with minor changes, whatthey always were and will always be. In sum, although Beer makessome inexcusable errors-e.g., confusing alchemists and schoolmen,failing to distinguish between philosophy and ideology, and liken-ing two irreconcilable opposites, religion and magic-he gives the

' Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The Professionalization of Reform." The PublicInterest, Vol. I(Fall, 1965).


student cause to think about the interaction between ideas andsecular political changes. But of course what's true of Beer is notnecessarily true of his co-authors.

In the fourth edition of Major European Governments Alex Drag-nich is, for the first time, joined by a co-author, Jorgen Rasmussen,who in fact has written three-fourths of the book. Of all the booksunder review, this is the one most written for students: the chaptersare divided into many subsections, each short enough not to overtaxshort attention spans, the language is elementary, 9 and the judg-ments and distinctions are quite summary in character. As in theprevious edition, indeed just as in the B8cU as well as in M8cW, justabout all talk of comparison and of the insights to be gained there-from is restricted to the introductory section. Such comparison- asdoes occur in the course of discussion of the several countries is be-tween the phenomenon being discussed and the authors' own "mod-el" of political science.

D&R's model has two parts: a division of all regimes into twocategories, democracy and autocracy, and a brief description ofwhat the authors consider the principal features of any politicalsystem. Since the latter appears principally in chapter headings (par-ticipatory structures, policy-making and policy-implementing struc-tures) and hardly effects what the book does, I will confine my re-marks to the democracy-autocracy division. Now, it does not makesense to divide all regimes into only two categories, unless, that is,the categories are those of "better" and "worse." Not surprisingly,it turns out that by "democracy" D&R mean a complex of reason-ably decent Western political things, and by "autocracy," harsherkinds of politics. Although they recognize that democracy is some-thing capable of different manifestations (p. 10), they apparentlycannot, unlike Tocqueville, imagine that democracy can mean bothorder and disorder, liberty and oppression. Thus, for example, theycompletely ignore the Communists ' not entirely cynical claim thatthey, too, are democratic. In their view democracy is characterizedby the "belief that the individual is important .. that the govern-ment exists by virtue of his consent," and by the belief "that mancan be the master of his fate" (pp. 8-9). But surely there is no lack of

° However elementary the language, there are unfortunate mistakes. For ex-ample, the word "millenarian," meaning a thousand years old, is used where theauthors obviously meant to say "millenialist," which pertains to expectations of athousand-year reign of heaven-on-earth (p. 10).

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examples of the "individual" being deemed "important" and findingfulfillment in consenting to terrible things. As for "man being mas-ter of his fate," well, one should keep in mind that where there aremasters there are slaves, and that where there are social engineers atwork, there are people being handled like building materials.

No, the decency of Western politics was the result of a very defi-nite view of men. To refer to it without mentioning any, of its Chris-tian and philosophical tenets just gives the wrong impression. More-over, the relationship between the decency we prize and the variousforms of democracy to which modern nations are committed is thesubject of questions, the high importance and complexity of whichthe authors-in contrast with Beer-do not appear to be aware of.

10

Their understanding of what they call autocracy appears little bet-ter. D8CR begin by calling tribal chiefs autocratic and saying "Vari-ous of these rulers assumed an aura of holiness and divinity as ameans of legitimating their power" (p. 11). Thus do they betray un-relieved ignorance of the nature of monarchy and of what compactexistence under plausible cosmological myths was like. This makesit impossible to see by contrast the enormity of the modern totalitar-ians' enterprise

11Nevertheless, the authors rightly identify what

makes modern totalitarian systems so much worse than past autocra-cies: the total commitment to a total transformation of human life.

The style of Macridis and Ward 's Modern Political Systems: Eu-

io Afew examples from a voluminous literature should suffice, In Book III of thePolitics, Aristotle points out that government in the interest of a part of the com-munity, however large a part it may be, is necessarily at the expense of the whole.Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, recognized that the danger of democraticoppression had become much greater since modern states involve themselves farmore in the lives of individuals than regimes in the past, and most important,recognize no reasons (such as stated in Book I of the Politics) why they shouldnot. The problem of the lack of restraint on tyranny inherent in the notion ofdemocracy was one which Abraham Lincoln faced squarely in his famous debateswith Stephen Douglas. His provisional solution is an elaboration of the moderndoctrine of natural rights.

'' A few examples from a vast literature are sufficient to provide the necessarycontrast: Henri Frankfort's Kingship and the Gods, a Study of Ancient Near-East-ern Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1948). Indeed, Marc Bloch's Les Rois Thaumaturges (Paris, 1961)provides evidence that even modern European monarchies retain some of , the mys-tical attributes of their ancient progenitors. Eric Voegelin, in The New Science ofPolitics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952) and in Science, Politics andGnosticism (Chicago: Regnery, 1966), shows how some of the major modern polit-ical ideologues have endeavored to build, in affront to reality, political systemswhich attempt to elevate political life to ultimate significance and to do awaywith the judgment of things political by natural and supernatural standards.

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rope is a partial concession to the catechistic demands of some oftoday's students: discussions of topics are often summarized byeasily memorizable lists of key points. (E.g., What are the charac-teristics of the opposition in Britain? The answer consists of fiveshort points. What are the principles of Soviet Federalism? Five pointsare provided.) The book is the work of four authors: Samuel Finer(Great Britain), Roy Macridis (France and the Introduction), KarlDeutsch (Germany), and Vernon Aspaturian (the Soviet Union).But the editors state, We have tried also to utilize a common frame-work of exposition and analysis."

Macridis begins the exposition of his framework by making acase for the comparative study. of government. This is supposed tobe like a guided tour of other lands, from which one gains perspec-tives on one's own. When that happens " habit and intellectualconformism give place to critical evaluation and appreciation, themark of an educated man" (p, 5). His critical tools are two: historyand the structural-functional method in political science. He nevermakes clear what he means by the former. As for structural-func-tionalism, It views all political systems both in terms of certain com-mon indispensable functions which must be performed-recruit-ment, communication, the maintenance of order, the adjudicationof conflicts, etc.-and in terms of the structures or institutions whichperform them" (p. 5). He states that doing this makes it possiblefor the researcher to formulate and test hypotheses which co-relateinteresting phenomena. But he does not attempt to demonstrate thisbecause hepoints out almost immediately that, since each countryis unique, such hypotheses are nearly useless for explaining what isgoing on in any particular one. Still, he maintains, even though nocomparative generalizations can tell us anything, our making themsomehow renders it easier for us to recognize the uniqueness of eachcountry when we look at it.

Of course, it does not begin to tell us what we must look at inorder to understand a political system. In fact, Macridis admits,`"We have to be arbitrary about what we choose and what we dis-card" (p. 7). Now, when a writer disclaims the existence of stan-dards of relevance and tells us we must be arbitrary in our choices, heis usually trying to shield from embarrassing questions some standard he uses but knows not how, or cares not, to defend. Macridispredictably follows his disclaimer of objective standards with hisvery own definition of what is political. For example, dictum: `Be-havior becomes politically relevant only when it is addressed to

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governmental action." In fact Macridis' "Framework of Expositionand Analysis" consists of his own structural-functional definitions ofterms such as class, political party, pluralism, and wealth. From themwe learn that, take a little here, give a little there, virtually all ele-ments are present in every system. We are even told that, because itmust fulfill its function as a broker for group demands, not even theCommunist Party of the Soviet Union is willing "to adhere to a rigidideological position" (p. 17). Were one to follow Macridis' lead intowhat Neumann calls "the fairyland where all facts are equal" (p.653), one would have a hard time telling governments apart, ndtto mention comparing them.

The country sections are generally weak on constitutional his-tory, with the exception of Karl Deutsch 's section on Germany. Per-haps the best feature of the book is Aspaturian's lucid explanationof the organization of the Communist Party and Soviet regime. Allcountry sections carry very voluminous socio-economic data tables,especially concentrated in a chapter labeled "The Foundation of Pol-itics," implying of course that what is said and done in political lifeis, whether anyone will admit it or not, ultimately only the reflec-tion of facts reflected in production, income, and opinion poll fig-ures, Proof is never offered for this proposition, however. The pas-sion for statistics reaches its apex in Macridis' chapter on electionsin the Fifth Republic, the longest chapter in the book, where wehave set before us electoral returns to the one-hundredth of a per-cent for even the most minor candidates.

Robert G. Neumann does not claim his is a comparative govern-ment book at all. Rather he sets out to give the reader as much knowl-edge as he can about the politics of four European countries whichhave served and are serving as examples for political men aroundthe world, as well as, uniquely, about the growth of European unity.Others may compare by what method they wish, but he says, "which-ever method is followed, one way of protecting the student and read-er from landing on cloud nine rather than on earth is to give him athorough grounding in the realities of the political systems and in-stitutions of which the life of governments and communities ismade" (p. viii). Neumann neither specifies what these realities arenor, unlike the other writers we have looked at, doeshe attempt todefine politics by building or adopting a system. He is confident thatlong and close acquaintance with political ideas, men, and eventshave taught him what is important and what is not. Of course, since


he is flying by the seat of his pants, he could easily take the reader toplaces no more interesting than one gets to by following Macridis'rigged compass. Yet one soon settles down to the realization that heis reading the sort of thing a wise old diplomat would put into thehands of a young man going off to Europe. He talks about history,law, and perhaps most significantly, about leading political men,how they shaped and were shaped by events. The book does not dis-cuss for us the advantages and disadvantages of parliamentary andpresidential systems and the like, nor does it have nearly enough ref-erences to the United States. But then again, no other book doeseither. But if one must do comparisons on one's own, it helps to haveclear images from which to begin. The book is at its very bestwhen tracing chains of events and interpreting legal systems. It is atits worst when considering the role of pressure groups-Neumann(like every other author with the exception of Beer) does not appearto realize that interest groups are becoming so important in the livesof modern democracies as to constitute functional channels of repre-sentation alongside the formal parliamentary ones. Finally, itwould be wrong not to mention that Neumann's book stands apartfrom all the others because of its skillful and tasteful use of the En-glish language.

Our conclusions on the books under review must be that theydo not actually compare governments because their authors do notappear to know what they might want to learn from comparison.One must know specifically why he is comparing governments in or-der to do it at all. Without some defensible notion of what is polit-ically healthy and unhealthy, better and worse, it is difficult to evenformulate meaningful questions. This applies as well to the argu-ment that information on other polities will help us to understandour own. Only if we, like Bagehot and Tocqueville, know what help:and harms men, and have the order of our own country firmly inmind, are we likely to benefit by looking at other countries. One canonly lament that none of the textbooks has a section on politics inAmerica.

The books under review are also alike in their approach to cer-tain fundamental matters. None addresses the question: what ispolitical life in that country for the citizen? For the practitioner?Likewise, there is no section on civil liberties, although the question"what can they do to you there?" and the comparison of civil liber-ties in different countries are profoundly interesting from a practi-

TBE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER276

cal as well as a theoretical standpoint. Likewise none deals at anylength with the mores and faiths prevalent in the four countries, thisdespite the testimony of common sense, of men like Aristotle andMontesquieu, that, especially in democracies, nothing is more impor-tant to the character of a regime than the character of its people. AnAmerica without the Protestant ethic, Tocqueville might have said,would resemble France more than it would America.

Moreover, although each of the books briefly mentions the or-deals of past wars and none is oblivious to the interrelationship ofdomestic and foreign politics, none even attempts to deal with aquestion of self-evident importance, to wit: to what extent does thekind of politics prevalent in a given country affect the willingnessof that country's population to make sacrifices in its defense? His-tory, after all, teaches that nations do not survive gratis. Political scientisfs all too. readily dismiss military matters as belonging to theconcerns of retrograde, violence-prone men and states. But this is anerror which the study of comparative government ought to correct.Surely consideration of the Swiss political system would oblige eventhe most pacifist of students and teachers to take seriously a fact oflife which is as ubiquitous as it is unpleasant. But does this meantextbooks should include a section on such a minor country as Swit-zerland, just because in it one can find an important facet of politi-cal life dealt with in an exemplary way? Not necessarily; althoughno mention of the role of the military in modern society is completewithout the Swiss example. In the same way, no discussion of therole of proportional representation or of the existence of anti-sys-tem parties today should be considered adequate without mention ofmodern Italy. Indeed, unless one has in mind the example of thedisintegration of the Italian political system in the 1960 ' s and 1970's,one may not realize that the harsh words which describe the cor-ruption of peoples, the suicide of nations, and the grisly task of thosewho see themselves as benefiting by the process, have any meaning.

Comparative government uses what merit being called "text-book cases" to teach what politics is all about. Discussion of any coun-try's law-making body, for example, should be the occasion for illus-trating by means of judicious comparisons just what kind of law pre-vails in that country. Talk of a country's liberal or illiberal waysshould aim at identifying what makes for liberty and its opposite:Only by means of examples can one begin to answer the practicalquestion of how much and what kind of liberty is enough. In a sim-


liar way, description of a country's electoral system ought to showwhich among the many tendencies in peoples are representd by thatsystem. Contrasts can then show the results of alternate notions ofrepresentation. The demanding task to which these examples pointhas rarely been accomplished, e.g. Tocqueville, and never satisfac-torily in a comparative government textbook.

In short, there is no reason why one should prefer a single vol-ume which binds within its covers four separate book-length sec -

tions-usually by different authors-over separate books for eachcountry, unless one decides that a given country section is more in-formative than any available separate book in the field. 12 But sinceit is impossible within the scope of this essay to review a great deal ofwhat each of our books has to say on each of the four countries andto compare that with what the best studies of individual countrieshave to offer, I will restrict my consideration to how the books treata few exemplary features of each country. Since Britain, France,Germany, and the Soviet Union claim to be democratic, scrutiny ofour books' treatment of democracy offers the best opportunity ofgaining some insights into the character of each book under review.

II

The two texts which have appeared most recently-Beer andUlam, and Dragnich and Rasmussen-depart significantly from theview so familiar to us all, according to which some undefinable geni-us residing in the bones of the British has enabled them to fashion ahappy, mild, amalgam of fire and water, of forms and ideas, theconflict of which has brought tension and misery to other peoples.Here, so goes the view which still largely dominates the literatureon British politics, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, the med-ieval and the modern, complement each other. Absolute sovereigntyand socialism coexist very well with individual liberty, and partisangovernment serves the common good. The student can hardly fail

'2 On Britain, textbooks of Comparative Government have to compete in myopinion, against Sir Ivor Jennings The British Constitution 5th rev. ed.; Cam-bridge, 1966), and Samuel Beer's own British Politics in a Collectivist Age.On France, they would have to surpass Philip Williams and Martin Harrison,Politics and Society in de Gaulle's Republic (Garden City, N. Y., 1973), andPierre Avril, Politics in France (Baltimore, 1969); and on Germany, Alfred Gross-er, Germany in Our Time (New York, 1971). On the Soviet Union, one among manystandard works is Merle Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled (Cambridge, 1964).


to be impressed by accounts-in all the books under review-of howthe innovative, collectivist House of Commons retains the physicalstructure of the Middle Ages and is presided over by a Speaker withhis wig and quaint way of calling the House to order. Samuel Finer,in M&W, is very much in accord with Neumann and with the pre-vious editions of DScR and B&U when he says The importance ofthis tradition is that it has preserved not only the medieval form,but the medieval essence, which in sum said: the king governs-butconditionally, not absolutely" (p. 31).

In his previous edition, Beer (pp. 77-80), after stating thatBritish politics is informed by a blend of ideas, had weighed thepossibility that, since ideas must be embodied in something societysays or does in order to remain politically significant, the complex ofideas which surrounds democracy may be gradually smothering allothers and turning Britain into as unambiguously modern a place asany other in the old world. Precisely this proposition, rejected in thesecond edition, is the organizing principle of the third. Here Englandis pictured as a place where collectivism has made even democraticnotions of popular accountability and control of government intomemories. D&R likewise unambiguously state "The period of great-est accountability in British politics may be past" (p. 48). Even asB&U and D&R, following the flow of news from Britain, report thatthe British system of welfare and economic regulations is a politi-cal as well as economic catastrophe, no doubt future books will beunable to write as Neumann did in 1968: .. in her civic disci-pline, as well as in the free association of her commonwealth, theworld may find much to admire and emulate" (p. 4). But I submitthat any account of what is happening in Britain which is not firmlybased on a clear understanding of what it was that once made Britaindifferent must not only be insufficient but also misleading.

Every text agrees that what makes, or made, Britain differenthas something to do with the Middle Ages, but only Neumanneven begins to describe how medieval laws were shaped and limitedby precisely that which made them worthy of respect in the eyes of aGod-fearing people-their subordination to divine law. In the Mid-dle Ages neither kings, nobles, nor both together could simply do asthey pleased because individuals, families, universities, crafts, all thecomponents of society were seen as creatures of God, entitled to ful-fill their intended purposes in God's world. Centuries later, Bage-hot noted that England was unique in Europe in that government


and society were not coterminous, the latter having its own lifeand hierarchy and therefore no need to prosper or wither accordingto the political accidents of the former, or to follow any fashionpolitical whim might order.1

3Neumann points to Bagehot's insight

by giving the impression that despite things like the Bill of Rightsof 1689, which established the sovereignty-in the absolute modernsense-of Parliament, somehow Britain does not live as though itbelieves the sovereign can do anything. But although Bagehot wouldstill recognize most of the forms of today ' s British government, asBeer notes, the symbols which refer to pre-modern things are nowvirtually empty of meaning.

It was, of course, an error of the first magnitude for those whofollowed Bagehot to assume that he had described a settled condi-tion, rather than a fleeting moment in time when things like partygovernment and popular sovereignty were just strong enough tocounterbalance what unpleasantness was associated with the weak-ened forces of aristocracy, but not strong enough to afflict the nationwith their peculiar ills or to change the character of Britons. Butthe unwritten constitution has not ceased to evolve, and the thingswhich Bagehot had called the dignified part of the Constitution"had become, by the time Beer wrote his second edition, a merefeast for the senses. Visitors to Britain sometimes still marvel at thegentle good manners of the British, of which perhaps a sign in asubway is a good example: "If you can refrain from smoking here,please do so," but when men want to lay their hands on others andask "Why not?", how long will mere custom restrain them?

But who is this sovereign to whom the evolution of British poli-tics hasgiven all power? What restraints keep him decent, and what- -kind of order does his rule keep? Neumann cites Disraeli's statementthat "England is not governed by logic; she is governed by Parlia-ment," and only he gives a detailed legal and historical explanationof what that means (pp. 5-26). Its tone, however, differs little fromthat of the perfunctory ones given by the other texts, to wit: the his-tory of the rise of parliamentary power is that of the rise of demo -

cratic liberties. Every text recognizes, of course, that Parliament nolonger rules in anything more than a formal sense, that the Cabinet,or the Prime Minister, or his party, actually rule. MScW, however, isthe only text which still appears to harbor the illusion that liberty

13 Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (London, 1963), pp. 41-47.


is more secured by the opposition between the Cabinet, which bydefinition controls a majority of the House, and the minority, thanit had been by the clash between the king and the barons in theGreat Council, who were more nearly his match. D&R and B&Uhave recognized that time has brought less liberty, not more, and thelatter has even identified the cause: the voluntaristic, rationalisticspirit of modernity.

But is there an alternative? Is it possible to maintain the sort ofpolitical balance necessary to keep from putting all earthly powersinto the hands of one man or one body without allowing unelectedlords and monarchs to exercise power? The experience of the UnitedStates provides an interesting contrast. The Philadelphia Constitutionrecognizes, through the amending power in Article V, that given alarge enough majority the American people have what elsewhere iscalled sovereignty.1 4 Yet the same Constitution makes it well-nighimpossible for that sovereignty to be exercised by any person orbody. There is no "Government" in the United States in the sense inwhich that term is used in the rest of the world. The government ofthe United States is an enterprise carried on at least by the threebranches of the federal government and by fifty state governments.But in the rest of the world the word Government signifies one bodyof men who rule and are more or less responsible for what they doto an assembly which can usually debate, approve, or disapprove ofthe Government, but not itself govern. While thoroughly commit-ted to popular government, the founders of the American Republicmeant to establish a system in which not this or that man would rule(for one cannot rely on rulers being of good judgment), but inwhich the best judgment of men would become law. Thus, electionsdo not decide who will rule, but whose judgment will be allowedto contribute to the making and interpretation of the laws. What isthe basis of the difference?

In England, Beer argues with some support,1 5 Parliament itselfwas never a law-making body except for short periods in the eigh-teenth and early nineteenth centuries. Except for those times, stat-utes were made by kings and cabinets (the Crown) in a mannercalculated not to alienate Parliament. But neither B&U nor any ofthe other texts sheds' light on why this is so or what it means. This is

14 The words 'sovereign " and "sovereignty" do not appear in the U.S. Con-stitution.

"C. H. McIlwain, The High Court of Parliament (New Haven: Yale Univer-sity Press, 1934).


regrettable, for the subject is an important one. In fact, nowhere inEurope is law-making seen as the function of a deliberative body. Butthis is precisely what the American Congress is. Its acts, althoughthey often bear the names of sponsors, almost invariably are thework not of anyone's will, but of unnumbered men who, whetherthey like it or not, must, in order to have any influence at all, de-liberately bend their wills to what is required for the common good.Each American Congressman, because he is firmly expected by hisconstituents to vote a certain way on only a small number of issues,is quite free to use his judgment on most. On any given bill a fewinstructed and many uninstructed legislators must come to somekind of agreement. Moreover, American legislators must also actwith an eye to gaining the consent of the President, who representsthe people quite as much as Congress although in a different way. 1 6One then might well reply to Disraeli that America is governedneither by Congress nor by the President, but by the deliberate sensethat the constitutional system squeezes out of the . people's represen-tatives. But if Britons have chosen a different way of making laws,it must be because they have different ideas as to what laws are. InBritain, laws are written by government departments in consultationprimarily with interest groups and with the government's princi-pal supporters. Except on rare occasions when the latter revolt, par-liamentary approval is strictly a formality. More importantly, theHouse of Commons only gets to pass on about sixty such laws eachyear, while ministers exercise their authority to promulgate ordi-nances withthe force of law between two and three thousand timesa year. Moreover, it is claimed that this way of doing things is farmore democratic than what goes on in the United States.

Now democracy, here and everywhere, means that the majoritymust get its way over the minority. At election time Britons areconfronted by two different organized parties with more or lessclearly defined programs. According to the Tory view, the elec-torate chooses a party because it trusts its leadership, while theLaborites prefer to say the electorate chooses a party because itwants to see its program enacted. 17 In any case, the party chosen by

le See Willmoore Kendall, "The Two Majorities in American Politics," TheConservative Affirmation (Chicago: Regnery, 1963).

17 This difference, far from being trivial, divides, at least in theory; plebiscitarydemocracy, under which people choose measures about which they are notequipped to make informed judgments, from representative democracy or re-public, where they choose men whose worth is readily ascertainable by their fel-lows.

THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER282

the majority is entitled to do with the country as it sees fit, untilthe next election, and, by common agreement, to discipline itsown members elected to Parliament in order to keep them pullingin the same direction. Thus, at election time, the people divide intoa sovereign majority whose chosen men need only agree amongthemselves in order to do whatever they want, and a minority who,strictly according to the system, count for nothing until, at anotherelection, they can become a part of the majority and count for every-thing. Not surprisingly, the law-making process in Britain containsno more deliberation than is necessary for the leaders of the "major-ity party to decide what, after all, they are going to do. One cannotargue, that the nation as a whole deliberated before the election,then expressed its judgment and left the job to its executors be-cause clearly millions of voters have neither the mutual contact northe information required for deliberate judgment, and in any case,governments necessarily deal with matters not foreseen at electiontime.

What, then, happens at election time? Edmund Burke, in hisfamous speech to his constituents in Bristol, said that he would notbe bound by their wishes because government is not a matter ofwho wills what-if it were, the wills of the many ought to prevail-but rather a matter of judgment about what is best. Burke's days,however, were among the few when Parliament made laws andtherefore when individual members of Parliament could, by meansof deliberation, arrive at judgments about the common good andenact them. The fact that Burke, of course, lost that election con-firms that his view was not very popular even then. Bagehot, writingin 1867, largely agreed with Burke. If members of Parliament aremerely to enact the views of their constituencies, then there wouldno longer be parliamentary government. His words are: "constitu-ency government is the precise opposite of parliamentary govern-merit."18 But by the time he wrote; the party system had becomestrong enough that laws were made by cabinets and their parliamen-tary supporters. It was not yet so strong, however, as to preventMP's from occasionally defeating governments they did not like.As a result, he said, Parliament lived in a perpetual state of choice.But in this century, the strength of parties has grown so that theMP's latitude for choice has shrunk to nearly nothing. Clearly,

"Bagehot, op. cit., pp. 129-30.


even if we accept the Tory view, elections have just about no rela-tionship with deliberation.

Beer rightly notes: "but the drift of the theory is that all, lead-ers and followers alike, are instruments of the purposive partisanmajority of the voters" (p. 197). Thus, what is to prevail is the sup-to a parliamentary majority and the parliamentary majority to amajority of the voters (p. 197). Thus, what is to prevail is the sup-posed partisan will of the majority. Let us be clear as to what thismeans; clearer, I think, than any of our textbooks: no dialogueneed go on at all between Government and Opposition, nor isthere anything in the system that would stay the hand of the for-mer if it desired to harm the latter. To be even more explicit, wemust say that the decency which still characterizes politics in Britainowes very little to the British conception of democracy. Its operat -

ing principle, as Bagehot noted long ago, is partisanship, the evils ofwhich are moderated only by the British heritage: "The body iseager, but the atoms are cool. If it were otherwise, parliamentarygovernment would become the worst of governments." 19 In fact,Neumann and Beer, who are clearest on this matter, appear to ad-mit, as footnotes to awed descriptions of parliamentary govern-ment, that parties in power are limited only by the fine sensibili-ties of their own supporters. It remains to be seen in what direc-tions this view of democracy tends to alter the sensibilities of Britons.

But the nature of the beast can best be seen when contrastedwith the results of American and Soviet practices. Now, the found-ers of the American Republic did not suppose that the people wereincapable of factious conduct, so they set out to make it difficult, ifI may be excused the expression, for American atoms to combineinto hot critical masses: National elections were not supposed toproduce a corps of men bound to do anybody's will but rather aCongress in which, and only in which, the legislative power of theUnited States is vested. The American Founders did not supposethere would be, on every national election day, a winning majorityand a losing minority. For them majority rule is something whichtakes place primarily within Congress, and that can only be becausethey had, and we Americans live, a different view of what ruling isall about. They did not think political matters were to be decidedby the number of untutored wills that could be ranged on either

1B Ibid., p. 126.


side of them, but as matters where the judgment of men chosen fortheir good judgementought to prevail. Such men cannot be sup-posed to always divide into the same two groups on every subjectyear after year. To suppose that there must be a party position oneverything is not only false but ultimately corrupting of the facultyof judgment. In fact, in the American Congress a different majorityand minority exists on nearly every vote, and in order for any billto get through the labyrinth of the Congressional committee system,there must be countless accommodations with potential opponents.This means, no doubt, much "useless" politicking, but the systemwas designed as much to produce a certain kind of political manas to produce actions. Majorities emerge when enough of a needis felt. Majority rule still takes place, but the concept of majorityrule as practiced in Congress fosters "cool atoms" indeed.

In contrast, consider the Soviet Union. There is not even theneed for a legislative body to be in session for very long because,according to Leninist doctrine, the overwhelming majority of thepeople in the country, the working class, are united in their deter-mination to do a great number of things to advance their interest athome and abroad. This class majority has confided its mandate tothe Party of its class: this is Party government characterized by itsconstituency's supposed burning desire for action of a certain kind.The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in turn, in order to un-dertake its task, engages only in as much deliberation as is necessaryto keep its supporters as warmly in support as possible via the opera-tion of democratic centralism. Naturally the Party must take intoaccount what the managers of the economy or the military can begot to do, but basically those who hold power are accountable onlyto their supporters. Of course, there are neither opposition norcontested elections, but that is due to the peculiar consistency of theCommunist Party's program with the exclusive interests of the classit represents, not to the fact that a party is exercising the full powersof sovereign government.

Since it appears that the kind of politics that will prevail underparty government depends so much on the kind of parties available,it is important to ask what the texts under review tell us about thenature of British parties. Neumann gives by far the longest, mostfact-filled history of any text of the Labor and Conservative Parties'development in this century. To find a better account of the per-sonalities and events which have made the parties what they are, one


would have to go to Jennings or MacKenzie. 20 But perhaps the bestaccount of what the differences between the Conservative and LaborParties mean for democracy is to be found, albeit in embryonicform, in D8cR. The essence of the matter is this: despite the factthat, especially while in office, the Labor and Conservative Partieshave behaved in a very similar manner, each embodies its ownview of democracy and each does things the other considers undem-ocratic. The Tories, for example, did not, until 1965, elect theirleaders-one became leader when one became Prime Minister-nor is the Party's organization in the country, the National Union,allowed to even formulate policy, much less exercise influence onthe Party in Parliament. In fact, the leader of the party in Parlia-ment until recently would not even address the organization'smeeting until it had officially adjourned. This is because the Toryparty originally grew and conceived of itself as a body of parlia -

mentarians who supported the king's government. The government,they thought, belonged wholly to king and country. Members of theParty, while they offered themselves for the approbation of the na-tion at election time, did not, until the current leadership of EdwardHeath, even feel comfortable talking about what they would do aft-er the election. They could not, though party men, prejudice whatthey might find it necessary to do in the service of king and country.If the electorate trusted them, they would be elected; but they wouldnot purchase election by mortgaging the benefits of the govern-ment-which belonged to all-to a part of the people, be this eventheir own. Such, at least, was the theory.

Labor is different. D8cR note: "Unlike the Conservative Party,which was organized from inside Parliament, the Labour Party wasorganized from the outside" (p. 87). It was, from the beginning, aparty in the modern sense, for it tried to capture government firstand foremost to benefit its own members-largely members of tradeunions. According to the Party's statutes, its members in Parliamentare obliged by the dictates of the annual Party conference, whichalso elects the National Executive Committee which controls theParty's professional staff and conceives of itself as a policy-mak-ing body. Although the leader is elected by Labour members of

20 Sir William Ivor Jennings, Party Politics (Cambridge University Press,1962); and R. T. MacKenzie, British Political Parties (London: Mercury Books,1963).

286 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE. REVIEWER

Parliament, he is responsible to the NEC and the Conference. Infact, the charge most often leveled by Conservatives against Labor-ites at elections is that they are not responsible to the country in gen-eral, but agents of one sector of society. But while Labor Prime Min-isters have time and again shown that they are willing to pursuewhat they consider the national interest despite opposition from theparty, it cannot be denied that the latter's claims are impossible toignore and, as trade union leaders become more militant, will befar harder not to adopt.

The movement on the part of both Conservatives and Labor-ites-but much more by the latter-toward greater responsiveness tothe demands of their troops outside Parliament is a serious mat-ter, for in the words of D8eR: "Parliamentary democracy requiresthat governments and MP's be responsible to the electorate ratherthan to some limited section of society" (p. 93). Perhaps what isleast mentioned is most important: the electorate is shaped-broughttogether or split, ennobled or abased, warmed or cooled-by the ap-peals and practices to which it becomes accustomed.

In other countries, of course, the electorate has long becomeused to thinking of government as an enterprise run for the benefitof those running it. In France we see the world's oldest modernpolity.

III

Since modern democracy was born out of the French Revolu-tion, its peculiar characteristics have been shaping France. But,whereas when discussing the Soviet Union every one of our text-books makes at least some effort to relate what goes on there to thetenets of Marxism-Leninism, their discussions of France generallydo not explain the ideas of the Revolution and fail to put French poi-itics into the perspective of democratic government's paradoxicaltask: to rule over people whom the regime's own theory deems sover-eign 21 D&R-the only text that goes beyond casual remarks on the

'' Neumann mentions the Declaration of the Rights of Man in passing, but hisreference to it as a "natural law concept" shows he is simply out of his field. Infact, the Declaration has nothing to do with natural law, an ontologically basedconcept its authors rejected, but deals in the currency of modern natural rights.For an introduction to the difference see Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952). Neumann also mentions that , sev-eral authorities have linked the French Declaration with its American counter-part. For an introduction to the contrasting meaning of the latter, see Harry V.Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973).


Revolution-does not tell us about what it opposed, the kind of po-litical order it sought to bring about, or about the difficulties pe-culiar to that order. The few comparisons we find between the OldRegime and the Revolution are superficial and sometimes misleading.For example, Macridis indicates he believes the Revolution merelychanged the symbol in the name of which absolute government wascarried on. But although the propositions The King can do nowrong" and The people are always right" (p. 163) seem to beidentical affirmations of sovereignty, they are not. As Neumannbroadly hints (pp. 187-88), quite in accord with Beer's introduc-tion, popular sovereignty implies constant revolutionary action be-cause it implies no definite ends for which power should be exer-cised and no persons who should rightly exercise it. It is radicallyincompatible with constitutionalism and perhaps even with stabil-ity.

Every one of the textbooks notes that governments in Francehave been unstable, yet none makes a real effort to explain this in-stability in terms of the way the French have understood democra-cy. Nevertheless, every one of the books points to one of the mostobvious symptoms of this understanding when they remark a cer-tain ambivalence about political power in France. Whether it'scalled "the representative versus the administrative tradition" or"a combination of resentment and expectation, this is the reason-able attitude of men who are supposed to be at once completemasters and total subjects. But this line of inquiry is not pursued far.Rather, the three books which try to explain instability, M8cW, B8cU,and DBcR, do so in terms of the conflict between Royalists and re-publicans, Catholics and laicists, oppressing and oppressed classes,and, of course, in terms of the supposed passionate individualism ofthe French. Neumann is wary of such general explanations. Butwhereas DBcR as well as BBcU, having given their views, do not ac-

tually try to use them to account for what happens in France. Ma-cridis, who stresses the importance of socioeconomic classes, does(e.g., "This class sought . . . " etc., p. 151). Consequently, for exam-ple, he accounts for the decline of the center parties in terms of so-cioeconomic data on the decline of certain classes, hardly mention-ing that it was de Gaulle's purpose, via the Constitution and its elec-toral laws, to turn French politics into a recurring winner-take-allcontest between the Communists and those wrongheaded enoughto stand with them on one side, and everybody else on the other.Facts do not daunt Macridis who, because it somehow fits into his


system, even tells us that the 1968 riots in Paris were "some of thebloodiest it had known in a long history of violence" (p. 153). Thisdespite the fact that, in 1968, no one was killed.

But the rise and fall of governments in France is not really to beunderstood either in terms of old blood feuds or subconscious atti-tudes. After the Count of Chambords' obstinacy had doomed theRoyalist cause, the course of French policies between 1875 and 1914

was remarkably steady despite revolving-door governments. Al-though French republics continued to be agitated by importantcontroversies, especially that between Catholics and secularists,government power remained in the hands of good republicansthroughout. Nor can revolving-door governments reasonably be at-tributed-as B&U does-to the greed of French politicians, unless oneis prepared to argue they are greedier than politicians in the UnitedStates, which experienced no such turnover. But although contro-versy about the republican regime was in the background, and thelust for office no doubt moved many a deputy to desert many acabinet, instability could not have occurred without a certain un-

derstanding of the role of Parliament, and this in turn depends on adistinct view of democracy.

Now, according to this view, the people are the supreme powerin the state. Because the people cannot all meet, they elect Deputieswho meet in their stead. The term deputy implies a kind of repre-sentation that is both plenipotentiary and provisional. When theDeputies meet in Parliament they are the body politic. Yet sinceno group of people numbering in the hundreds can carry on withthe dispatch of a sovereign, the business must be entrusted to a small-er body.22 Following the usage of older times, this body is called thegovernment and claims for itself all the power to govern. When stu-dents ask why on earth cabinets should resign just because Parlia-ment refuses to go along with just one of their proposals, they canfind no explanation in their textbooks. The reason they resign isnot spite, but that old doctrine of the indivisibility of sovereignty.Trammeled power is not real political power, and is not worth hav-

22 In his Second Treatise (134-169) Locke argues that just as the only act ofwhich political society is capable is to grant power to a legislature, the latter, inturn, can hardly do more than to grant it to a smaller executive body. Likewise,according to Rousseau's Contrat Social, especially Book 3, Chapter 1, the generalwill merely inspires a government. One could say of it that while it must reign, itcannot govern.


ing. Political power can be shared only if it is not conceived of asabsolute and, therefore, indivisible. But if the people or even mostof their representatives at any given time cannot rule and, to makematters worse, find life unpleasant, how can they satisfy themselvesthat they are not mere subjects? How can they exercise the powerthe theory says is theirs? Certainly overturning the government ispossible, although after they've done it, they can do no more thaninvest another government with the same powers. Without denyingthe disastrous effects of government instability, we should not over-look its democratic usefulness, an idea of which can be gainedfrom the words Vincent Auriol, former President of the Republic(IVth), spoke against a proposal for "Presidential" government inthe Vth Republic. Even though separation of powers would give tothe deputies far more legislative power than the 1958 Constitutionhad taken away, it would remove from them what little power theyretain to topple the government. `When there are no more minis-terial crises, there will be no more liberty,"

23he said. Better an occa-

sional, even an illusory, touch of undivided power than a largeshare of something divisible. In addition, crises and succeedinggovernments, each backed by different majorities of deputies, tend-ed to rotate membership in the "majority" and the "minority," inParliament and, vicariously, in the country, at least once a year.But this hint of American shifting majorities was at the direct ex-pense of an article of democratic faith: a connection between elec-tions-where alone the popular will is expressed-and government.

What is to be done when the people clamor for action but, pre-cisely because they feel their needs so urgently, cannot agree onwhat to do, or what to do first? The predicament is not France'salone. The French after World War I and during the Fourth Re-public dealt with it by successively voting governments "full pow-ers," and then voting them out of office. Thus, for example, Poin-care was granted dictatorial powers for economic reasons, and Rey-naud for military ones. But although our texts, especially Neumannand B8cU, note the tendency of Parliament to throw itself into thearms of "consuls," they do not remark that a pretty straight consti-tutional line links these practices to the turnover of full powers toPētain and de Gaulle for the purpose of ending the Third andFourth Republics, respectively, and leads to the relationship be-

23 Le Monde 24 Nov. 1959.


tween Parliament and Government established in 1958. It is nooversimplification to say that, under the 1958 Constitution, govern-ments may do what they wish unless Parliament can muster a largeand consistent majority against them. I refer especially to the pro-vision in Article 49, according to which any bill so designated bythe Government is deemed passed unless a successful censure mo-tion against the Government is made within twenty-four hours.Some very important bills have been passed this way, notably theauthorization for the nuclear Force de Frappe. On the one occasionwhen censure was voted in 1962, the President immediately dissolvedParliament and called for new elections, recalling a similar move bythe Third Republic's first president, Marshal MacMahon, on May16, 1877. But, unlike MacMahon, de Gaulle saw the ranks of hissupporters much increased by the election. Had they been depleted,the President and his government, just as under the Third Repub-lic, would have been able to act decisively only when Parliamentcould not agree on positive measures but demanded action none-theless. As it is, with few qualifications, law is what the govern-ment says it is as long as the country is unwilling to support amassive denial of the government. A glance at the teachings ofHobbes, Locke, and Rousseau would confirm the democratic pedi-gree of this situation, while comparison with, say, the Americanand British examples would show what other conditions are com-patible with those teachings. It is to be regretted that although allour books mention the MacMahon incident, none draws either theappropriate parallel with the situation under the Fifth Republic orany of the lessons to be learned therefrom.

What amounts to government by blank check is also quite con-sistent with the doctrine of majority rule. However, the meaning ofthe term "majority" in France has been altered, chiefly by thepressures of the constitutional and electoral systems. Both Neu -

mann and B8cU give good accounts of these. Briefly, because theGovernment is largely the creature of the President, and the Pres-idency is the object of a national election which, at least on the sec-ond ballot, divides the nation's political forces into two, every poli-tician in France must decide, usually around presidential electiontime, which of two broad alliances or "teams" he is going to sidewith. Because the President's government is safe against any but themost massive parliamentary attacks, the President need not bringinto his councils any but those who helped make up his "majority."


For about a decade now, French national politics has been a run-ning battle between "majority" and "opposition." This, as B&Unote, is the single biggest change the Fifth Republic has brought.The 1974 Presidential elections were the occasion of the Socialistand Communist Parties' alliance for the purpose of capturing thePresidency. But although the candidate, Mitterand, really didaccept a "Gaullist" interpretation of the Constitution, his Commun-ist allies held this against him and he was forced, in order to keeptheir support, to run his campaign as though he did not.24

But what kind of "majority" rule is this? What are people tryingto do when they vote for the Gaullists and their allies? The answer issimple: not be engulfed by chaos or ruled by Communists. Beyondthis, supporters of the "majority" do not readily agree on much. Infact, the Communist Party is the true catalyst for the "majority."Were it not so large and powerful, the opposition would not have afocus. Were it not so obviously and dangerously subordinate toMoscow, it might draw around itself enough support to become themajority. 25 As it is, the diversity of the majority's electorate com-bined with the traditional independence of French deputies and themore than vestigial party ties of those who make up the majority,makes for an almost American level of bargaining and logrolling,which often spills over to include all but Communist deputies andproduces different majorities within the "majority" on a wide vari-ety of issues. None of our textbooks provides a satisfactory ex-planation.

The new French majority, it seems, has elements which recallboth American and "Party government examples. First, althoughthe "majority" is composed of several parties and does not im-pose upon its members quite the same level of discipline which Brit-ish parties and the Soviet Communist Party impose upon theirs, it

"For Mitterand's interpretation of the Constitution, see my Modern France(LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court,. 1974). For his attitude during the presidential elec-tion campaign see Claude Harmel, "Comment s'est Operē le Rapprochement desCommunistes et de M. Mitterand," Est et Ouest (Paris, 16-80, April, 1974), pp.1-5.

26 All our textbooks, except M&W, agree that the French Communist Party isnot a "party like the others," either in structure or in aims, and that it is thefaithful servant of Moscow. Macridis, on the other hand, on p. 201 speaks trulywhen he says most of the PCF ' s members are not revolutionaries. He, however,neglects the importance of the fact that the ones who run the Party most certainlyare.


still coheres in order to support a government which, because ofit, can expect to pass whatever laws it

.

But in no sense can the"majority" be said to embody a set of programmatic aims the achieve-ment of which the electorate "mandates" when it chooses "major-ity" candidates. Insofar as it resembles a government party, theFrench majority most closely resembles the British Tories of about acentury ago.

Although textbooks no longer treat French parties as politicalfamilies deeply rooted in social class and social thought and lockedin mortal conflict, and acknowledge that the conflict betweenCommunists and non-Communists seems to be, as B8CU note, theonly political choice before France, they do not, in my view, explainwell enough the cause or the meaning of the change.

On the level of electoral politics, all parties share and propoundthe concerns of a people almost all of whom are now largely depen-dent upon decisions of the state for their well being and largely resentful of their powerless dependence. All parties promise a bet-ter life, defined as more material reward for less effort expended. Buteven as they do this, many French politicians realize that appealsto that kind of unenlightened self-interest do not really help to keepthe country together. Indeed the voters themselves seem to demandsomething more. Hence all parties talk a great deal about "struc-tural reforms."

Certainly the major complaint of Frenchmen, beside the risingcost of living, is that they resent being ordered about for no reason.Gaullists, Radicals, Socialists, Communists therefore bore people withsimilar sounding claims that their party will bring about grass-rootsparticipation of individuals in public life and endow the whole ofnational life with meaning. But providing reasons for political exis-tence is not easy! While there is no shortage of great tasks to bedone in the world, doing any of them is likely to be costly in money,lives, or both. Since no party feels in a position to propose costs,perhaps the most popular proposal in the air" is that for a UnitedEurope.2 6 This term, emptied of anything which might imply

20 Neumann 's section on the European Economic Community and related in-stitutions, which includes excellent descriptions of the events surrounding theirgrowth; and of the institutions themselves, must be faulted for not paying nearlyenough attention-even as the civil servants who designed and staff these institu-tions do not pay sufficient attention-to the fact that political existence requiresreasons in the name of which men obey, act, and sacrifice. The "rationales forEuropean cooperation which regularly come out of Brussels hardly raise the eye-lids of those who write them.


cost or effort, is offered as a vessel for never-dreams and has becomeall things to all men. It hardly occasions yawns. Much less does itlend authority to the political process. As for grass-roots participa-tion, French administrators face a dilemma no different from thatof American officials who praise "community involvement" but areever ready to enforce "guidelines" on localities, If local governmentswere allowed to exercise real powers, citizens already predisposed totake as much from and give as little as possible to the state mightuse them to fight the state. Besides, democratic theory recognizesonly individuals and states. So what can participation mean? Only afew radicals really propose to lessen the powers of the central gov-ernment. The others are generally concerned with how to increasethe feeling of participation.

Our texts, with the notable exception of B&U, do not see the im-portance of the massive new attention to social groups-primarilyeconomic ones-that French governments have pioneered (and oth-ers are imitating) in an effort to foster participation of some kind.As long ago as 1946 but especially since 1958, General de Gaulle's fol-lowers have tried to organize France on the basis of what is called"contractual policy"; that is, a system of negotiations between pro-ducer, labor groups, and the government on wages, prices, profits,productivity, expansion, etc: The participant groups pledge them-selves to accept certain conditions arrived at with government guid-ance, and the government seals the bargain. Above all, the Gaullistswanted to weave the various "living forces" of French society intohabitual patterns of cooperation. The French "plan" is wrongly la -

beled "economic." Rather, it deals with every area of life, from education to leisure. Based as it is on cooperative contractual consulta-tion between groups and administrators, it has strengthened groupswith official sanction where it has found them, and called them intoexistence where none had been. It is no less than an attempt at a newsocial articulation which bypasses previous representative forms. Inview of this, Macridis' statement that "their [the interest groups]influence even spills over into the executive branch" (my emphasis)is difficult to take seriously.

One example of contractual policy will suffice. In 1972 the gov-ernment was beset with demands for costly changes to the pensionsystem. Instead of working out a new plan and then "selling" bothbenefits and costs to the interested parties, it let representatives ofemployer and employee groups work out the plan and, in effect, im-pose the added costs upon their own members. Whatever the char


acter of the deal, the more have a hand in it, the fewer are likely tocriticize.

Doubtless thousands of leaders of labor and management havelong since been broken to the pattern of "cooperative consulta-tion." Yet one need only recall the events of May and June, 1968

to see that the sort of participation that has been achieved is of lim-ited political value. What made that crisis serious was precisely therejection of the few who were involved in dealing with the authori-ties by the many who necessarily were not. Therefore, it seems thatunless millions of individuals can be induced to believe that theyreally have influence when they have not-and that cannot evenbe imagined without the sort of thought control that goes on in theSoviet Union-the proliferation of consultative committees is notlikely to fill the need for "participation" that politicians of everyparty see. The Communists may well be more correct than otherswhen they claim that only they know how to reconcile the oppositesof centralization and grass-roots participation, of life in mass societyand vicarious participation ingreat adventures.

French politicians of every party share in the modern belief thatsociety is artificial and that, if left to itself, it will fly apart. Thus, theFrench state; like other modern states, is engaged in monumentalefforts to control, primarily to stave off urgent demands from onequarter or another. Yet in the process of authoritatively allocat-ing resources, it raises more demands-demands for satisfaction ofdesires some of which are intangible, even spiritual, and which nomodern state may be able to fulfill. The struggle to survive in a thor-oughly modern democratic system allows men of state precious littletime to worry about the spirit.

IV

- The history of Germany shows that political changes alone havebeen sufficient to turn one of the most sober and decent peoples onearth to a murderous enterprise, and back to a kind of society whichmay be as shellshocked as it is decent. It appears that in twentieth-century Europe, just as in pre-Christian times, the regime is thegreatest and nearly the only source of form in society. But runningthrough every one of our textbooks' treatment of Germany is thetroublesome realization that Nazism was made possible by a Con -

stitution, an electoral system, and economic troubles which, afterall, are not so uncommon. Furthermore, no one disputes that Hitler


came to power legally, and that for most of the time he was there,most of the people did not care too much what he did to those whoopposed him. The connection between democracy and decency, itseems, is a delicate one, and the "people" can be dreadfully wrong.Unfortunately, possibly precisely because the questions raised bythe German experience are so sensitive, and because the very sub-ject of Germany has been clouded by the passions and propagandaof two wars, 27 our textbooks' treatment of German government isnot as enlightening as it could be on the fragile relationship be-

tween democracy and decency.In any case, every one of the textbooks is quite solicitous about

the depth of democracy's roots in Western Germany. Karl Deutsch,in M&W, for example, prefaces his discussion of Germany with acheck list several pages long (pp. 312-16), containing fourteenpoints against which one can check whether a country is democratic.But the second through the twelfth of these points refer to featuresnot peculiar to democracy at all. Some, e.g., respect for privacy, fordifferent kinds of people, freedom of speech and association, andlegality are features of decent governments, whether monarchical

or aristocratic, ancient or contemporary. Others, e.g., equality andwelfare, are the aims of some modern states. Their zealous pursuit,alas, has been known to conflict with respect for differences, privacy,etc. Another point, "'T'he opportunity for direct participation by in-dividuals in decisions which affect them seriously," if applied in1974, would surely exclude from the ranks of democracies everymodern state with the possible exception of Switzerland. Direct par-ticipation, unless we concede that it exists whenever people can begiven the feeling that they are in on things, can exist only where unitsof local government are small and free, and where central govern-ments do not necessarily exercise great influence on people's lives.But given that, for example, in most nations, the prices of the neces-sities of life are determined by bargaining between leaders of pro-ducers ' groups with government administrators, who also protectthese groups from competition, (e.g. the French Plan and the Amer-ican ICC, CAB, etc.) and that the content of education is determinedin analogous ways (England has even come close to outlawing pri-

"Although none explicitly ascribe everything troublesome connected withGermany to some peculiarities of the German people, whether these be historical,geopolitical, or cultural-read "racial"-there is more than a little hinting inthis direction, especially by D&R (pp. 281-83).


vate education altogether), talk of direct participation is, to say theleast, problematic. In the remaining three points, Deutsch tells usthat a democratic regime must deliver to the people the thingsthey want together with the "sense of being in charge of their ownlives, and having some control over their own fate ..." and, ofcourse, live by the axiom of majority rule. But his caveat that it isentirely possible for majorities to be illiberal certainly does not denythat the Nazi regime successfully mustered behind itself a majorityof the people and that, at least before the war, it helped satisfynot only their material needs but also their desire for a sense ofbeing important, of being in on a meaningful enterprise, the suc-cess of which each wanted very much. Surely the men who wrotethe Weimar Constitution were no less well intentioned nor anymore confused than Deutsch.

The vestiges of partisan quarrels also burden our textbooks:what killed Weimar, and what kind of phenomenon was this Naz-ism, the resurgence of which everyone would like to guard against?For Guido Goldman, of B8cU, who gives the fullest account of theNazi conquest, the villains are clearly the men of the `old order,"the reactionaries who stood in the way of democracy during theWeimar Republic: This attitude-buttressed by innuendos morethan by arguments-is shared to varying degrees by all. So eager isDeutsch, for example, to indict anything connected with the oppo -

sition to the left that he tells us in worried tones: to this day, over60 percent of the German voters prefer notions of social and na-tional solidarity to ideas of class conflict (p. 325)," as though thelatter went along with social peace and the former with Nazism!But the message is clear: Nazism was not a disorder of modernity,but an attack upon it; and the Weimar Republic died not becauseits authors' concept of democracy carried the seeds of indecencybut because of the conservatives, to whose ranks Hitler belonged.But the facts, even in the contradictory manner in which Goldmanpresents them (pp. 489-503), tell another story.

The electoral system of the Weimar Republic-proportional rep-resentation and large districts-fragmented political power andturned it over to party bureaucracies, each pursuing its very pri-vate interests and goals. The weak constitutional position of theChancellor and the President, unless the latter chose to invoke Ar

-

ticle 48, made the executive subordinate to Parliament. This wasto be party government. But since no party came close to a majority,Parliament could only act insofar as the parties' wills did not con-


flict. As a result, neither the government nor the parliament but theparties that warred within it ran the country. No one can argue theparties did not represent the people-after all, people voted forthem-but it should be noted the parties represented the peoplepolitically insofar as they differed from one another. This institu-tionalized what divisions existed and made sure that whatever classor ideological conflict existed would be fought out with politicalweapons. If pluralism be the hallmark of democracy, as Goldmansuggests, the Weimar Republic was very democratic, indeed. Fur-thermore, the provision for referendum made this exemplar toolof democracy extraordinarily available. There surely was not an ex-cess of authority. Therefore while the old monarchist Right caredfor it not at all, the Socialist Edouard David called it the most dem -

ocratic democracy in the world" (BBcU, p. 492). Who killed it? Theevidence suggests that it died of an overdose of bad democracy andthat just about every party had a hand in burying it. Goldmanrightly mentions that Stalin's policy of fostering a strong, antiVersailles Germany was reflected by the Communist Party's virtualalliance with the Nazis against the Social Democrats, and goes on tosay in many respects the S.P.D. and union leaders were as pettyand self-interested as their conservative adversaries" (p. 498). Fi-nally, he has to admit the Nazi victory was democratic. The aristo -

crats in the army did not aristocratically order that Hitler be takeninto the government, and neither did the oligarchs of steel buy otherparties' assent to Hitler's entry. No, Hitler got to be chancellor be-cause his was the largest party at the time, and it got that way be-cause his harangues, his pageantry; his organization, and his promis-es bested the other Weimar parties at the divisive game so many ofthem were playing. Hitler, however, played for keeps.

However, Goldman rightly notes that Nazism itself, far frombeing conservative, was a radical revolutionary movement which, inthe short time it had, abolished what social and economic relation-ships it found in society, atomized it into individuals, took awaywhat independence local governments had left, subjected economic,educational, religious activities to bureaucratic direction, and fos-tered the growth of countless new organizations to give society co-herence in its new form. The name of the program, Gleichschaltung,is translatable as equalization or, as Goldman prefers, coordination:How is one to understand Goldman 's insistence that this was notmilitant modernity but a reaction against it?

Solicitousness for the health of democracy in Germany is so


great as to occasion our textbook writers to point with concern topractices in Germany which exist in far more developed form else-where. For example, Neumann (p. 412) criticizes German politi-cal parties for being too disciplined and oligarchic while they, es-

pecially the Christian Democrats, are obviously less so than Britishparties. This sort of thing is quite harmful to the comparative studyof governments. Although the politics of postwar Western Germanyhave been shaped to some extent by the lessons Germans havedrawnfrom the political practices of, especially, Britain and theUnited States, yet meaningful comparison of German with foreigninstitutions is lacking from our texts. For example, although B&Umention that the Bundestag has features reminiscent of both theU.S. Congress, i.e. relatively influential and specialized committees,and of the House of Commons, i.e. a disciplined party system, weare not told what this means. Specialized committees, especiallywhen, as in Germany, the opposition party shares power in them,ensure that the legislative branch will be both able and willing to doits own work. This, in turn, tends to maintain, at least to some de-gree, the separation of powers that disciplined parties tend to ob-literate. Despite this slight American flavor, however, Neumannnotes that the provision that only parties be entitled to assign seatson committees effectively nullifies the stipulation in Article 38 of theBasic Law that every deputy is the representative of the whole peo-ple, and goes a long way toward making each deputy the creature ofhis party. He agrees with B&U's summary that it is really more thecontending pressures within their own party or coalition than theformal opposition in Parliament that poses constraints , ... " (p. 543).

So, even as in England, what determines the quality of politicallifein Germany is the nature of the parties. And just as in England,there are two major parties, each embodying a different view ofdemocracy, although the difference is not as pronounced as that be-tween the British Labour and Conservative parties. Again, whileNeumann, B&U, and D&R give reasonably good descriptions of theCDU and SPD, the reader must, even as I have done, draw his owncomparisons. What, for example, is the meaning of the SPD's (andthe Labour Party's) practice of collecting substantial kickbacks fromthe salaries of their Deputies in Parliament? If one knows that Com-munist parliamentarians in France and Italy actually turn in theirentire salaries to the Party and then receive a stipend from it, andthat 'these, just like parliamentarians' in Germany during the Wei-


mar Republic, have deposited undated letters of resignation with theparty leadership, one sees that the practice signifies, at least to somedegree, that the deputy does not "belong" either to the , countrywhose people employ and pay him, but to his Party. There are, how-ever, at least as many signs that the SPD is becoming more like theCDU-a relatively loose coalition of local organizations and interestgroups reminiscent of the French "majority"-as there are in the op-posite direction,

But perhaps the most interesting feature of contemporary Ger-man government is the Federal Constitutional Court, the establish-ment of which constitutes the first serious attempt anywhere toimitate the American practice of judicial review. The German ex-perience with it is adequately described by DBcR and especially byNeumann who does his usual good job on judiciaries. But to under-stand adequately what judicial review means in Germany one wouldhave to know not only what it means in the United States, but alsowhy neither England nor France have it. None of this does any ofour texts attempt to provide. The American practice of judicial re-view, as described in Federalist 78, is based on the following reason -

ing: since the people and their representatives when they ratifiedthe Constitution were acting by a larger majority and in a moredeliberate manner than the Constitution itself requires for ordinaryacts of government, any such act is not as authoritative an expres-sion of the deliberate sense of the people as is the Constitution.Therefore, while acts of government have the force of law, the Corisitution itself is a higher law. Now, since it is the duty of judges try-ing cases to apply the law, they are bound to apply the higher anddiscard the lower when these conflict. But why no judicial reviewin law-loving England? Simply because in Britain (and elsewhere)the authoritativeness of an act is not dependent on the nature of theact but on the identity of the actor. Law is not a matter of deliberatejudgement but of sovereign will. Therefore, no act is more authori-tative than an act of the sovereign, and British tradition has it thatthe sovereign's will is expressed by a simple plurality in the Houseof Commons. But if acts of Parliament cannot be held unconstitu-tional, does this mean the British Constitution has no binding force?What ,may be hazy in the ' case of England becomes clear across theChannel. Whereas in the case of England one could lose one's bear-ings in the complex interaction between the desires of public menand the half-revered, half-forgotten documents and practices that


form the Constitution, in the case of France, which has both a writ-ten Constitution and the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, onemust say it: sovereign government and limiting constitutions can-not co-exist. The latter are undemocratic. As Charles de Gaulleangrily told the Council of State-the closest thing the French haveto a Supreme Court-no one has the right to stand in the way ofthe officer charged by the people with doing their will.

28Of course,

in any democratic country no court can prevent a large majorityfrom changing the Constitution, but it can at least, by putting itselfbetween a majority's lips and the cup they wish to drink, force thepeople's representatives to go through some procedures and perhaps,on the way, to deliberate on the wisdom of what they are doing.The distance between the majority's cup and lip is not quite thedifference between government by will and government by judg-ment, but it tends to add an element of judgment to politics. No onecan claim the Germans have established the power of courts to stopgovernments from doing what they really want merely by providingfor a constitutional court in the Basic Law: After all, judicial reviewis nowhere provided for in the U.S. Constitution. It exists because(1) we the people of the United States believe government isinstituted to do certain things and not others. (2) we exercisedself-restraint for over a century and did not press our governmentto overstep willfully the limitations of the Constitution, and (3) weonce so embodied self-restraint both in our public rhetoric and inthe structure of our government that, until very recently both poli-ticians and judges felt constrained to give this "constitutional mor-ality" more than lip service. Even today its flagrant violation canbe politically disastrous.

The point, it seems, is to devise ways of making democracycompatible with a decent state.

"It would be well to throw overboard all this chatter about theState ... as the State is only a transitional phenomenon which mustbe made use of in the revolutionary struggle in order forcibly tocrush our antagonists, it is pure absurdity to speak of a Free People'sState. As long as the proletariat needs the State, it needs it not in the

28 Charles De Gaulle, Memoires d' Espoir, Vol. II, L'e$ort (Paris: Pion, 1971),pp. 76-77, 46-48.


interests of freedom, but for the purpose of crushing its antagonists;and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of Freedom, then theState, as such, ceases to exist (italics are Engels'). [Next to thesewords of Engels', V J. Lenin wrote the initials N.B. (Nota Bene)].29

Were this, in fact, noted by those who write on the regime foundedby Lenin, they would hold at least one key to understanding thesometimes puzzling behavior of the Soviet Union. To wit: the Com-munist Party of the Soviet Union does not govern a State in the dic -

tionary meaning of the word, but rather runs a military enterprisemeant to utterly crush its antagonists, which crushing will make im-possible the further existence of anything resembling the repressiveapparatus of the State. Thus, the Soviet Union is not a State but ananti-State that, for the purpose of forever eliminating repressionengages, for a transitional period, in the most total campaign of re-pression any state has ever engaged in. How total is total? How ut -

terly are the enemies of progress to be crushed? One can gain anidea from Adam Ulam's citation in B8cU of an incident in Sholok -

hoe's book Upturned Virgin Soil. A model peasant, as a reward forhelping the cause, is invited to join the Party. But,

he begs off for the moment, saying he is still not worthy of mem-bership in the party of Lenin and Stalin, because whenever he seeshis cow, he still has a twinge of regret that his property has been"communalized." The old Adam of bourgeois mentality is not en-tirely dead, and until he is laid to rest, the new Communist mancannot take his place! (p. 681)

One can only wish that not only Ulam, but the other textbook writersas well had written about the Soviet Union with some such examplein the forefront of their minds. Had Ulam -done so, he would not,for example, have given the impression (p. 688) that terror in theSoviet Union was a phenomenon either of the 1930's or of collec-tivization-industrialization. Had Neumann done so, he would nothave had to say, No authoritative answer to the `why' of terror ispossible.... 130 They would have had to write in the language of

20 Friedrich Engels, "Letter to Bebel" (March 18, 1875), an appendix to Karl

Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (New York: International Publishers,1933), pp. 79-80. This edition includes selections from Lenin '

s notebook "Marxismand the State," of which his marginal notes on Marx's "Critique" and on Engels'letter on the "Critique " are part.

90P. 531. This statement of Neumann's is especially regrettable because on the

following page he quotes Lenin's approval of terror as useful or even essential.


political science what Solzhenitsyn wrote in the language of suffer-ing: that terror is the necessary concomitant of an enterprise whichaims at remaking man. Communist Party rule has turned the Rus-sian state upside down: instead of protecting its citizens, it seeksthem out to alter them.

But perhaps even more serious is our writers' failure to take seri-ously the Soviet leadership's claim that Leninism is more democraticthan the bourgeois democracies. While Aspaturian (M8cW), forexample, does mention that "in their eyes ... Western democracy isa dictatorship over the working masses, while Soviet democracy is adictatorship over the former capitalist ruling class," he treats theclaim as a mere "symbol" used "because of its obvious appeal" (p.478). Nevertheless, however unpleasant it may be for us Westerndemocrats to contemplate, the Leninist view of democracy has muchto tell us about the possibilities inherent in our own democraticregimes. Lenin quite bluntly says: The concepts of 'freedom' anddemocracy are usually treated as identical and are often used in-stead of each other.... In fact, democracy excludes reedom."31

Why? Because democracy is the rule of one part of the populationover another, for the interest of the ruling part. Since there is nosuch thing as the common good, government obviously can be car -

ried on only for the interest of those who govern. These, of course,cannot reasonably be expected to grant to those against whose in-terest they rule the freedom to defend themselves. The only ques-tion remaining, according to Lenin, is whether those who rule areto be the majority of the population or not. The more people onthe oppressing side, the more democratic and the more oppressivegovernment will be. 32

Now Lenin was not the first to say that un-der democracy one part of the population pursues what it sees asits interests at the expense of the other parts, or that democracyimplies and fosters the harsh rule of partisan parties-that was Aris-totle3 3 But to see this in democratic theory is to recognize that Neu-mann is mistaken when he says the term democracy means "entirely

consciousness."- V. I. Lenin, "Notebook on Marxism and the State," in Karl Marx, op. cit., p.

81."Ibid., pp. 86-95.83 Aristotle, Politics, Book III.

But on p. 533, he concludes the thought by saying that while the system "encour-ages" it, it does not "call forth'' the terror of Stalin. What calls forth terror, how-ever, is precisely the regime's raison d'@tre: total destruction of a certain type of

ON COMPARING GOVERNMENTS 3Q3

different things" (p. 510) in the Soviet orbit and in the West. It isalso to recognize that the entire concept of government supposedlyat the service of a "purposive partisan majority in the country" touse the words with which Beer described party government in Brit- .ain (p. 197), is not just dangerously open-ended, but is open pre-cisely in the direction from which the worst temptations come. Thus,recognizing that to resist the temptations of party government, asMadison pointed out, is not easy, the student of Comparative Gov -

ernment would have to be on the lookout not for features which aremore or less democratic, but for ones which offer the least encour-agement to partisan spirit, and foster the advancement of men leastlikely to succumb to it.

But understanding this sort of thing requires the realization thatthe nuances of ideas often make for big differences in practice. AsNeumann points out, We are sometimes wont to consign politicaltheory to the realm of 'propaganda'-the useful little word whichgives us the illusion of shrewdness when we are merely ignorant"(p. 546). In fact, with the partial exception of Neuman, and forprecisely the reason he cites, our texts mislead the student aboutMarxism-Leninism almost as much as they inform him. The errorscan be obvious and trivial; e.g., D&R's assertion that Marx believedin "thesis," "antithesis," and "synthesis" (p. 395), while in fact thosewords are nowhere to be found in Marx, and the strong impressionit gives that Marxism is primarily meant to end the suffering of theproletariat (p. 393)-whereas in fact the tract Socialism, Utopianand Scientific was written precisely to deny this. Aspaturian (M&W), on the other hand, sees this clearly (p, 515). Sometimes theerrors are subtler but of greater significance; e.g., Aspaturian's de-scription of Marx as a discoverer of new social norms (p. 513),while in fact a positive description of Communist ethics is simplynowhere to be found in the vast writings of Marx. In the works ofMarx, references to human relationships after the revolution areinvariably in terms of opposition to or absence of the norms in "pres-ent-day society:" Thus, Aspaturian turns the student in the direc -

tion of the false belief that Marxism implies some kind of social or-der rather than the denial of all human experiences of order. Infact, Lenin drew the correct conclusions from Marx when he adoptedthe requirements of the struggle against present-day society as thesole principles of human organization in the Soviet Union. Neu-mann, in his excellent treatment of the Soviet legal system, is quite


clear on the subject: "Law is in essence that which furthers the aimsof the Socialist revolution" (p. 626).

But the first requirement for victory against all that has everbeen must be the unity of those on the side of the future. But unityaround what? Since nowhere in the book" is any positive preceptgiven, unity must be around the line the Party leader lays down atany given moment. Interestingly, although the fact that there is notlikely to be much more support in the Marxist classics for one man'sidea of what the line should be than for another's certainly encour-ages factionalism, the imperative necessity for there to be only oneline makes repressive purges inevitable. For similar reasons, themasses are required to be politically active, but cannot be sufferedto stray. As Neumann hints (p. 551), quite in opposition to Aspa-turian (p. 522), these considerations and not the personality of Jo-sef Stalin are responsible for the horrors of Soviet rule. Neumann'scontrast at the end of the section between the "maximal politicalpurpose" of the Soviet government and the "minimal political pur-pose" of the American government is the barest beginning of wisdomin these matters.

Despite horrors that even in the beginning were never reallyhidden, the Soviet Union has always exercised a certain attractionfor Western intellectuals. Thus, Neumann tells us: "The Webbs sawin the Soviet Union a pluralistic multiform society in which all gov-ernmental functions were shared by a number of interacting 'pyra-mids,' i.e., mass organizations, rising from level to level and culmi-nating in the Kremlin. According to the Webbs, every citizen has adistinctive part in this structure because he participates directly orindirectly on some level or other" (p: 559). But although none ofour textbook writers is at all attracted by life in the Workers' Para-dise,they give the student precious little understanding of thosefeatures of Soviet government which, although illiberal, are reallyand dangerously congenial to democratic ways. First of all, the Com-munists, like other democrats, believe that only the will of the peo -

ple is the source of power. 34 Because they believe this so strongly,

34 Government, for Marxists as well as for modern democrats, is a matter ofwill not judgment. The latter is part of the superstructure of society-a mere prod-uct of class conditions. Use of the term "judgment" can only confuse one as to theimmediate absolute class character of government. Of more immediate practicali mportance is the fact that whileorie can not easily organize judgment, the or-ganization of wills poses far fewer difficulties.

ON COMPARING GOVERNMENTS 30 55

they take no chances with the formation of that will and organizeto raise up the right kind. If one thinks that Soviet citizens walk

` around with pistols at their temples, he will only deceive himself, andfurthermore, may fail to recognize the parentage of some of the"organizational reforms he may be considering for his own demo-cratic society.

No one perhaps was more concerned with participation thanStalin. Ulam refers to a speech in which,

... he compared the Communists to Antaeus of Greek mythology:Antaeus was invincible when he was in contact with Mother Earth;only by lifting him up and depriving him of this strength-givingconnection could Hercules defeat him. And so this thoroughly to-talitarian and oligarchically run organization is forever seeking tohave its contacts with the masses of the population (p. 683).

The "pyramids that the Webbs so much admired, the local gov-ernments, the unions, the youth organizations, the cultural associa-tions, etc., all tied together by the Party, are really there, doing atleast part of their job of giving every citizen the habit and, if he'lljust let himself feel it, the sense, of being in on great big things. Eachof these organizations is a "transmission belt"-a term all too scarcein our textbooks' discussion of them-via which the Party transmitsits norms and directives to a given sector of the population while it,in turn, gives the Party requests and support. But even though thesemass organizations are precisely the primary means for the sup-pression of liberty or, to be more exact, for the destruction of every-thing in society which does not emanate from the will of the Party,they do effectively organize the participation and the consent of thegoverned. Not without right do Communists claim that the SovietUnion has achieved the sort of participation that some modernbourgeois democrats are groping for but cannot achieve becausethey believe in nothing. Not without right do they claim that peopleare more politically integrated and fulfilled when, every few days,they go to meetings where every effort is made to get one to vote for,or even perhaps to speak for, resolutions having to do both with theworld and with people one knows, than in bourgeois democracieswhere they go once every several years to perform the seeminglymeaningless act of pulling a couple of levers on a voting machine.Communists argue strongly that, no matter whether the Laboritesor Conservatives win in England, or Gaullists or Socialists in France,the same economic and bureaucratic oligarchy will continue to run


people's lives with no hope for the future. Certainly Communistpropaganda is built on millenialist hope. But the Party's relations,even with the social groups it creates, are troubled by the necessityof keeping them both powerful enough to do their jobs, and spine-less enough to be easily controlled. These difficulties are particu-larly serious with regard to the army, the government, and the se-cret police, and no satisfactory solution has been found. B&U, M&W,and Neumann all mention that the standard method of control hasbeen the institution of competing and cross-checking bureaucracies.These, however, according to Neumann's perceptive and thoroughaccount, produce unbearable pressures for corruption in Sovietofficialdom as well as the stultifying desire to please" (p. 615).This, added to the fact that in a country where everything is plannedthe inevitable errors of even the most unruffled planners have mon -

umental consequences, makes Soviet administration massively spas-modic to say the least. In summary, the Soviet Union is a most dis-orderly country where large bureaucracies made by the Party tocontrol society clash with each other for access to, representationin, and influence upon the Party. As they do, men prosper and die.

While three of our textbooks, Neumann, B&U, and with somequalifications, 1\1&W," give a reasonably good description of theSoviet Union, they do not suggest what lessons we might learn eitherfrom the great disparities or from the few similarities which existbetween the Soviet Union and other countries which call themselvesdemocratic." The scope of this paper allows only the mention of a

° The most serious faults in M&W's treatment are: (1) an uncritical use ofSoviet statistics, Aspaturian knows well enough how gross production-worth fig-ures in the Soviet Union are rendered nearly meaningless by false reporting and,more importantly, by differential-price policies. (2) Uncritical acceptance of theSoviet claim that because of collectivization the Soviet Union achieved prosperityand industrialization faster than it would have otherwise. Adam Ulam and theInternational Labor Organizations statistics do not agree. (3) A serious misunder-standing of the Soviet strategy of "peaceful coexistence." See Richard V. Allen;Peace or Peaceful Coexistence (Chicago, 1966), for a compilation of the principalstatements of Communist leaders on the subject. Cf. Aspaturian, p. 524. VernonAspaturian, however, gives by far the fullest and clearest description of the or-ganization of the Communist Party apparatus this side of Abdurakman Avtork-hanov's The Communist Party Apparatus (Chicago, 1966).

se Sensing that it would be somehow inappropriate to write about the SovietUnion without comparing it to the West, Neumann adds a "conclusion" section-something which he does with no other country. However, his performance incomparison, e.g., his reference to the Soviet Union's "outdated" political methods,does not reach that in his description.


few examples of what fruitful comparisons might be made. One isstruck, for example, by the similarity between Neumann and Aspa-turian's description of the Soviet Parliament (the Supreme Soviet)and all our textbooks' description of the functions of the othercountries' Parliaments. Of members of the Supreme Soviet, Neumannwrites: "In particular, they are supposed to be a link between theirelectors and the government, and they become, therefore, the recip-ients of numerous complaints and other grievances of their constitu-ents, which often give the government an idea where the shoe pinch-es (p. 609)." Although, according to the Constitution, the SupremeSoviet officially passes all laws, the Council of Ministers or the Pre-sidium really make them all, and in addition really rule by decreee.Because the Party controls its members, laws are always voted. It isdoubtful whether, from a structural-functional perspective, onecould perceive many differences between the Supreme Soviet andthe Mother of Parliaments. The real differences between the Sovietand Western governments follow from the differences between thepurposes which animate the leaders of the CPSU and the leaders ofpolitical parties in the West. For Westerners who, however loosely,remain within the Christian tradition, politics is the means by whichsociety provides for some of its needs. As society's servant, politicalpower has its place, outside of which it may not properly step. Ofcourse individuals and groups in the West disagree on what areproper and improper uses, and continually tinker with the balanceof society in order to gain particular advantages. Nor is it unheardof for one group to "reform" another without its consent. But onlyfor Communists is politics an all-absorbing, all-important war to bewaged against society until, in Marx's words, not a pillar of the houseis left standing. Only Communists build economic units, socialgroups, and governmental institutions with the primary purpose ofdestroying economic, social, and civil relationships in the name of thefuture.

However, while no party in the West, with the exception of theCommunists, has the desire to build a controlled network of socialand economic groups in order to supplant society, every party incontrol of modern government is obliged precisely to maintain anetwork of contacts with important social groups extensive enoughfor the planning and running of society and economy. Certainlythe decisive, unbridgeable difference between Communist and non-Communist parties is that members of the latter do not act in the


name of a revolutionary ideology. But since modern peoples appearto be demanding that governments control their lives and providethem with meaning and hope, and since modern parliamentarygovernment is inescapably party government, democracy may wellrequire that modern parties become revolutionary, lest they perishby revolution.

The books under review provide some information about thegovernment of four countries. By looking at how they treat selectedtopics we have gained an idea of how much help or hindrance eachcan be to the student who wishes to learn what politics is about. Itrust I have shown that students and teachers will have to regard thebooks, in most cases, merely as source materials. Unless they areusing Neumann, they must draw from their own reservoir of his -

torical data; and whichever book they use, they will be, at best, ontheir own with regard to the political theories which underlie theseveral political processes.

But even the scholar with the keenest sense for the most fruitfulcomparisons to draw, using the best raw data from England, France,Germany, and the Soviet Union will find it well-nigh impossibleto fulfill the purpose of the discipline of comparative governmentas generally-but rightly-understood by our books' authors. Thisis because the four countries examined have political systems whichessentially belong to one family: modern democracy. By judiciouslycomparing them one can learn a great deal about that-but moderndemocracy, too; cannot be fully understood unless it is seen in theperspective of democracies which have certain non-modern airsabout them, such as the United States, of thoroughly non-modernones, long past, and of thoroughly non-democratic regimes as well.To understand politics, Aristotle had to lay out before him exam-ples from the several kinds of regimes he knew. We should do like-wise, keeping in mind that only a fraction of the political systemswe know of are actually functioning in our time. If, for example, westudied modern England alongside the England of the mixed regime,we might more easily identify the combination of mores and struc-tures that made for so much decency. Knowledge of bygone tyran-nies would help us to see the uniqueness of the Soviet enterprise. Butmost of all, the inclusion of other regimes might lead us beyond corn-paring democracy with democracy, to comparing democracy withgoodness. ANGELO CODEVILLA

on comparing. governments by samuel, h. … · many polities.1 thus the discipline of comparative...

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