Carl J. Friedrich

THE AGRICULTURAL BASIS OF EMOTIONAL NATIONALISM

Since I926 Dr. Friedrich (University of Heidelberg, Ph.D. in Economics and Political Science, 1925) has been teaching at Harvard University, where he is now a Professor of Government. He is the editor of Studies in Systematic Political Science and Comparative Government. In addition to many articles, he is the author of Responsible Bureaucracy, Responsible Government Service Under the American Constitution, and Constitutional Government and Politics. This paper illustrates how election data may be used under certain circumstances to evaluate the influence of an important factor in the opinion forming process.

The Rise and Decline of the Spoils Tradition

I T IS customary to think that the spoils tradition arose with Andrew Jackson. Senator Marcy’s swagger, often attributed to Jackson himself, that to the victor belong the spoils, has earned Jackson this unenviable reputation. Historical research has long since dispelled the idea. It has shown that the picture of the Western popular hero strutting into Washington and seizing governmental offices for a mob of job-hungry followers is almost a

MILITARY GOVERNMENT AS A STEP TOWARD SELF-RULE

IN formal terms, the military administration of civil affairs in an occupied area is not concerned with the transition from military to civilian control. Yet, as Dr. Friedrich points out, the decisions which a military administration is called upon to make will indeed affect the nature of the transition. Since military government has as its primary object military victory, not social reform, the problems of transition must be secondary. But in so far as the Rules of Land Warfare provide for the reestablishment of government by law and not by men, a first step toward self-rule will be taken. Beyond that, common sense and the situation will be the guides. In this article, the author discusses, legally and commonsensically, the nature of the task. Dr. Friedrich, Professor of Government at Harvard, is Director of the newly founded School for Overseas Administration at that institution and is now actively engaged in the crucial work of training the men on whom the success or failure of our occupation policy will depend. His most recent book, The New Belief in the Common Man, has been received warmly by the critics.

Rebuilding the German Constitution, I.

On May 8, 1949—the fourth anniversary of unconditional surrender—the Parliamentary Council adopted at Bonn the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany. This date was chosen intentionally to remind the German people that this provisional constitution is a way-station on the road out of the chaos which the collapsing Hitler regime left behind it. Any consideration of this Basic Law should start from the fact that the charter is not the creation of a free people, and that it will have to function within limits, both territorial and functional, which severely handicap its chance of becoming a genuine constitution, securely anchored in the basic convictions of the people. Its limits territorially are imposed by the refusal of the Soviet Union to permit the Germans living in their Zone of Occupation to express themselves freely concerning the charter. This raises the presumption, confirmed by other evidence, that these Germans would, by a considerable majority, accept the Basic Law if given a chance to do so. The charters functional limits are imposed by the Western Allies, who decreed three basic limitations upon the German peoples autonomy and independence: (1) the Occupation Statute, (2) the Ruhr Statute, and (3) the Inter-Allied Security Board. Of these, the Occupation Statute is much the most important, and encompasses the other two by its provisions. This is shown by the fact that the Letter of Approval, issued by the Military Governors on May 12, 1949, notes that acceptance of the constitution is premised upon the understanding that all governmental power in Germany, federal, state, and local, is “subject to the provisions of the Occupation Statute.”

The Deification of The State

It is a Common heritage of English and American liberals to denounce state absolutism, to deny it as regimentation, paternalism, etc. etc. Indeed, Englishmen and Americans have always been inclined to adopt a condescending attitude towards other traditions which seemed to exalt state power. French and German, Russian and Italian tendencies have in turn been pictured as “naturally” inclined toward state “absolutism,” and when anyone in rebuttal mentioned Hobbes or Bentham or Austin, the “exceptional” position of these thinkers has been emphasized. Still, can there be any question that the idea of the state as an ultimate source of authority has been as strong in Great Britain as anywhere? For reasons which will become plainer in the course of the argument, English-writing thinkers have accordingly been in the vanguard of those who sought to construct the “state” as the “highest” of all human communities, thus following out the Aristotelian heritage. In spite of all the titter-tatter about national character, muddling through and the rest, the fact remains that Britain has provided us with the most radical, deep-laid expositions of an “absolute” state. This much admitted, one might add that the limited state also has found eloquent and epoch-making exponents in English-speaking lands. In short, the whole gamut of modern political philosophy has been most thoroughly expounded in English.

Some Thoughts on the Relation of Political Theory to Anthropology

The study of developing areas has, in recent years, caused political science and theory to be increasingly aware of realities of non-Western government and politics. Comparative politics and its theory no longer, therefore, can avoid utilizing the results of the research of anthropologists and ethnologists in a way comparable to the use of historical data if they wish to be comprehensively empirical. Since the political theorist will not, as a rule, be able to become a practising anthropologist, the basic problem of such cooperation turns upon whether the investigating anthropologist asks the crucial, the basic questions in the first place. A broad survey of their reports and writings, such as the Human Relations Area Files afford, shows that this is by no means generally the case. Nor is this easy to achieve, for political scientists and anthropologists differ in their objectives. It has been suggested that the anthropologist is primarily interested in diversity, in how many ways something could be done, whereas for the political scientist and theorist such divergencies are important mainly as they lead to political insight and verifiable generalization. The utility of the writings of anthropologists for the political scientist is seriously impeded by the over-simplified and misleading understanding of the nature of power and authority held by many of them.

Rights, Liberties, Freedoms: A Reappraisal

When President Roosevelt proclaimed the “Four Freedoms” in 1941, he accepted a new conception of human rights far removed from the natural rights of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The conception of rights which inspired the British Bill of Rights (1689), the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) is grounded in simple natural law notions. Man was believed to have a fixed and unalterable nature, to be endowed with reason, which gave him certain rights without which he ceased to be a human being. These natural rights, summed up in the Lockean formula of “life, liberty and property” (later broadened to include the pursuit of happiness), were largely concerned with protecting the individual person against governmental power. Each man was seen as entitled to a personal sphere of autonomy, more especially of religious conviction and property; the inner and the outer man in his basic self-realization and self-fulfillment. These rights depended in turn upon the still more crucial right to life-that is to say, to the self itself in terms of physical survival and protection against bodily harm. This right to life was recognized even by absolutists, like Thomas Hobbes. It was believed immutable, inalienable, inviolable. Locke exclaimed at one point that these rights no one had the power to part with, and hence no government could ever acquire the right to violate them.

The World Significance of the New Constitution

men of his general outlook might well be perplexed by the earnestness and determination with which men have set about in recent years to make constitutions. France, Italy, a dozen German states, the German Federal Republic, and India, not to mention the so-called people’s republics of the Soviet orbit, have given themselves constitutions, and the six nations of the European Coal and Steel Community (Schuman plan) are now at work in the same pursuit. Yet the spirit of all this activity is neither optimistic nor enthusiastic. Surely the temper of the men now setting about the European constitution is, in the w6rds of The (London) Observer, &dquo;cool and set.&dquo; Although many of these efforts are revolutionary in their implications, the outlook of contemporary constitution-makers is devoid of revolu-

The Peace Settlement with Germany— Economic and Social

I T GOES without saying that the same difficulties and uncertainties which surround the political aspects of arriving at a peace settlement with Germany confront the economic and social aspects. They are, if anything, aggravated by the radical divergence in general outlook on economic and social questions which separates the U.S.S.R. from its erstwhile Western Allies. The economic development of the eastern zone, which has been going forward rapidly since 1945, is producing an economy patterned after the Soviet model, with its state trusts, state-controlled trade unions, administrative inefficiency, and general decline, especially in agricultural production. In this latter sector, so-called land reform under which productive agricultural units have been replaced by farms too small to be operated effectively and devoid of the necessary capital equipment, is preparing the ground for an eventual push in the direction of the &dquo;collectivization&dquo; of

The Ideology of the United Nations Charter and the Philosophy of Peace of Immanuel Kant 1795-1945

1945-the year which witnessed the final rout of the forces of Fascist and National Socialist reaction in Europe, and the drafting of a Charter for a new world of United Nations1945 is also the 150th anniversary of the appearance of Immanuel Kants Essay on Eternal Peace. The wizened little man with the giant mind, so provincial in his personal life as never to have left his native city of K6nigsberg, so universal in his sympathy as to feel himself a fellow of the American and French revolutionaries, hammered out in his seventy-first year a brief discourse of prophetic insight. He sought to show and to prove as best he could that peace, eternal, universal peace, was not only desirable, (that had been done by many others before him), was not only conceivable, (that too had been done repeatedly), but was necessary and inevitable. Clothed in the quaint and involved eighteenth century German which was just emerging from medieval Latin, the short Essay is nevertheless as inspired as anything Kant wrote. And far from being a marginal by-product of his old age, this little treatise flowed from the very core of Kants feeling. It develops more fully ideas which crop up again and again in other places in his writings on ethics and social philosophy. It rests squarely upon Kants extraordinary philosophy of history. What is more, looking back from San Francisco in 1945 we can test his ideas by the intervening century and a half,