The Modern Government in Action 9780231895552

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T H E MODERN GOVERNMENT IN ACTION

THE MODERN GOVERNMENT IN ACTION By E R N E S T S. G R I F F I T H Director of the Legislative Reference The Library of Congress

Service

19 4 2 COLUMBIA U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS N E W YORK

COPYRIGHT

1942

C O L U M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS, N E W Y O R K Foreign agents: OXFORD U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS, Humphrey Milford, Amen House, London, E.C. 4, England, AND B. I. Building, Nicol Road, Bombay, India M A N U F A C T U R E D IN THE UNITED STATES OF A M E R I C A

Preface T H E U S U A L pictures of our government are unreal. Residence in Washington, accompanied as it has been by unusually close association with both the administration and Congress, has borne this home upon me for some years. The old categories of legislature, executive, and judiciary somehow did not convey the old meanings. The letter of our Constitution remained intact; of its spirit and the institutions it created one was much less certain. Consequently, when cataclysmic changes took place in the government of most of the industrialized nations, I was moved to explore these changes and compare them with our own. The results of this inquiry appeared about two years ago under the title The Impasse of Democracy. This earlier study for the most part still retained the old categories, the legislative, executive, and judicial processes with which we had become familiar. It did, however, indicate grave doubts as to their serviceability for contemporary society. Consequently, when Swarthmore College invited me to give a short series of lectures, the invitation furnished the opportunity needed to take a further step and to explore the possibility of formulating a new set of categories, more realistic than the old and hence more useful to the present generation. The lectures, with but minor changes, form the text of this book.

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Inasmuch as the technique of cultural analysis is frequently used in the pages that follow, a word is in order for those who may not be familiar with this particular technique. Its underlying assumption is that there is always present a basic tendency for all major elements in a culture—economics, technology, government, philosophy, social and religious life, aesthetic and literary expression—to achieve a substantial harmony each with the other. A major change in any major cultural segment introduces an element of instability in the culture as a whole and sets in motion changes or adaptations in the other major segments. T h e coming of the super power age in technology is producing or has produced such an evolution. It is the emerging pattern of the new and modern government in action that is the subject of our analysis. In concluding this brief preface, I wish to express my gratitude to the Cooper Foundation and the Department of Political Science of Swarthmore College under whose joint auspices these lectures were given. In particular, I want to thank the late Professor Robert C. Brooks and his colleague and successor at Swarthmore, Roland J . Pennock, for making the necessary arrangements and also for contributing many helpful suggestions as to form and content. L u c y Salamanca, of the Library of Congress, has given generously of her time in aiding in the final revision. M y wife, Margaret D. Griffith, has been unstinting in her assistance, and I owe her a deep debt of gratitude for this. E . S. G . Washington, D. C. March, 1942

Contents THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE OLD ORDER VALUES, LEADERSHIP, AND THE PUBLIC PLANNING, ADJUSTMENT, AND RESEARCH INDEX

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The Disintegration of the Old Order T H E intellectually comfortable world in which we of the middle and older generations acquired our thought patterns has gone, never to return. It was such a nice world. All conduct was either sinful or righteous—and we in our more respectable moods were against sin. T h e immediate end of man was to make money without violation of any of the Ten Commandments—save, of course, the tenth, where the quaintly obsolete word "covet" constituted a convenient disguise. Behind this disguise one did not penetrate, for fear that the more modern words "compete" or even "profit" might there be lurking. Then, too, heaven was our destination, and the ticket there was purchasable through a most modest amount of unselfishness in the uses to which we put our profits. T h e pattern of government was likewise fixed for all time. It was to be a government of laws and not of men. T h e echoes of this dictum still rustle like ghosts through the corridors of our politics, haunting us like cosmic consciences in our modern governmental debauches. Laws were made by the consent of the governed—the legislative function. Laws were carried out by an executive who was held responsible. Laws were interpreted and the Constitution safeguarded under

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the judiciary—an independent judiciary dwelling on the pure Olympian heights of intellect and equity. The legislative, the executive, the judicial powers or functions—these were government; these always would be government. But this nice, comfortable, respectable world exists no longer. N e w patterns of ethics, of economics, of government, crowd in upon us. One has no quarrel with those who cry out in protest at the passing of the old ways. Would that there might be words of reassurance for them and for myself. But today, of all days, is no time to indulge in any such verbal massage. A much more drastic measure is necessary; it is not enough to stroke the fur of the conservative cat to make the body politic purr again. This especially must be clear at the outset—in what follows I am not advocating the many and drastic changes described or predicted, nor, for that matter, am I opposing them. Neither to advocate nor to oppose, but to observe and analyze and predict—these are primary to the present purpose; and these are my intention. If the diagnosis leads, as it apparently does lead, to a prediction of the inevitability of major and possibly catastrophic change in our governance, this should surprise no one. Those who are students of history realize how true it is that major changes in one area cannot fail profoundly to disturb the equilibrium in other major areas of life. T h e mass production of the more recent decades of the machine age is such a major change. Hence any picture of government or economics or social life which antedated this mass production must be accepted with great caution as regards its present-day applicability. It is accordingly altogether proper to raise the

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question of the utility, the continued adequacy, of that particular pre-machine-age picture of government which classified its powers merely as legislative, executive, and judicial.1 Is there perhaps another basis of classification more realistic, more intelligible, more useful to us of the present day? And conceivably this new basis may also serve us well when we consider the form which statecraft of the future will assume. W e shall search for such a classification in deep humility— a humility that arises in part from the confusion and the obscurity and the nightmare into which government in so many lands seems to have fallen. Thus at the very outset one finds it difficult to conceive of a workable general pattern which will make it possible to observe and discuss common elements in nations as diverse as Germany, England, Russia, the United States, Japan. Yet it is these common elements that must furnish the basis for classification, if a basis is to be found. Our humility springs also from the enormous importance of the subject itself. Not merely does it deal with matters of the first magnitude, for size and significance are not necessarily synonymous. It is rather that, in its successful handling and understanding by someone some day, there may lie great hope for the peoples of the world. Only by such means will intelligence, rather than drifting, characterize the quest for a satisfactory government. W e who believe in democracy stress intelligence deliberately, for dictatorship, in the last analysis, is escapist. It is an abdication of man's intellect, a denial of his capacity for self-control. It 1

Or one which, with Willoughby, adds the electoral and administrative.

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constitutes a rushing to an emotional air-raid shelter, before problems too vast for cowards to face. i It comes as a surprise to many to discover that the thought pattern which classified government into the legislative, executive, and judicial processes is relatively recent, dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. N o r did this trilogy or triumvirate of processes crystallize all at once. T h e major contributions were made by Locke and Montesquieu. As with most great thinkers, the creative thought of these men played upon their experience with the institutions of their time. It was their thought which rendered articulate and logical the emerging governmental structure. In turn, their doctrine shaped many a subsequent government and constitution, down almost to the present day. Yet the pattern they evolved, dominant in its time and epoch-making in the long march of civilization, now stands as no more than a mere façade disguising a new order coming to fullness of stature behind it. Even more vital than the contribution of these two men to these familiar political doctrines was the cultural pattern in which the doctrines found a congenial setting. Theirs were ages of protest, of revolution—of protest and revolution against the arbitrary, the privileged, the autocratic. Everywhere, in every walk of life, the individual was asserting himself. In religion he expressed himself through Protestantism. Socially, he was more migrant, less bound to soil and homestead. H e had begun to invent more frequently.

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Individualistic capitalism and enterprise were ascendant in his economic life. Capitalism wanted order, but it also wanted freedom from restraint. It wanted the executive to be curbed, the rule of law to give surety, the government to spring from the governed, and the state to confine itself to a role which would allow maximum freedom. All these were the dynamic ideas of the culture in which the threefold aspect of government seemed God-ordained. By such separation of powers tyranny could be curbed, rights safeguarded, and order established. This pattern reached its heyday in the United States. Our founding fathers, enamoured as they were of Locke and Montesquieu, wove the principles of these men into the very texture of our Constitution, and of the state constitutions that preceded it. The Supreme Court soon thereafter rose to its full stature and became the Constitution's guardian, the guardian of the Constitution's characteristic features—that is, of its federalism, of separation of powers, of the bill of rights, of property. Our justifiable pride in the vast achievements of our people was easily transferable to pride in these aspects of our fundamental law—and it became as heretical to question the latter as the former. n W h y then question the pattern today? Has it not served us well? Within the world of its own making, it is neat enough. If government means merely to pass and enforce laws, the pattern does fairly well. But what are laws? A t this point,

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it is necessary to agree upon a definition. By a law we mean the establishment of a rule of conduct in understandable and general terms. But we must wake up to the fact that in the majority of industrialized nations, "laws" in this commonly accepted use of the word are a relatively minor part of government. Most obviously, for example, one does not wage war with laws of this son—and the preoccupation of most governments today is with waging war. However, it is not so much war conditions as the normal peace-time processes which are under discussion. Here also the same minor role seems now to be assigned to law as w e have defined the term. First, one should note the all-pervading change which has brought in the day of the "quasi": quasi-legislative, quasi-judicial. W h a t are these terms, anyw a y , except a tacit confession that the orthodox categories of legislative and judicial are breaking down? T o call all such phenomena "administration" is not necessarily helpful —for the term administration corresponds to nothing in particular. It indicates no Gestalt, no pattern of the social order, such as legislative, executive, and judicial represented. Nevertheless, its widespread use does witness to the increasing sterility of the old categories, without, however, helping us in our search for new ones. Secondly, there is little or no consistency in the use made of the prevalent legal forms. By w a y of example, we may mention three quite different rituals, the net effect of which in each instance is price-fixing. The Federal Trade Commission observes judicial—that is to say, quasi-judicial —rituals in its regulation of trade practices. Many of its orders are

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exercises in price determination. The Department of Agriculture, by what is known as an executive act, determines the quantity of crops to be produced and hence their prices. Congress, through legislative measures such as the Sugar Act, has its own part to play in price determination. Examples may be multiplied indefinitely, but the core of what we wish to indicate is that it is not the juristic category into which the legal device falls which really matters, but its operative or concrete effect or purpose. Other nations are not so gentle with the old forms. Their revolution in institutions is overt or violent, not subtle or gradual. The words "legislative" and to a considerable extent "judicial" simply do not exist in their old meanings in Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, France, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, and many a lesser state. It is too easy, too glib, merely to say that these nations were not suited to democratic institutions. The uneasy possibility remains that for some reason or other the parliamentary' governments of these peoples simply were not adapted to the major underlying factors in a social and economic order crying out above everything else to be effectively organized. We shall see later that organization, rather than law, is the chief contemporary imperative in the field of government, and few governments have as yet provided this organization. One final symptom of the disintegration of the old order calls for notice. Strange new institutions are emerging, the like of which the nineteenth century never knew. Planning boards, ministries of propaganda, government corporations, corporate states, plebiscites—what do they all mean? Even

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we in the conservative United States have or have had our National Resources Planning Board, our "information" offices, our Tennessee Valley Authority, and our National Recovery Administration. Moreover, their counterparts are discoverable in virtually all industrialized nations—democracies and dictatorships alike. Can it be that these strange new emergent institutions, which refuse to be herded into any of the old pigeonholes, are in fact the stuff of which the government of the future is to be made? Are they perhaps to overshadow the courts or parliaments which were government's characteristic expression hitherto? At least we may say that there is need for reexamination. HI

T h e time has come to state explicitly the major premise of this work. I have already pointed out that the cultural synthesis, in which the individual expressed himself through capitalism and Protestantism, determined that government should be thought of in terms of legislative, executive, and judicial. Correspondingly, it is my basic contention that one must examine the dominant characteristics of the underlying or emergent cultural synthesis of today in order to determine the nature or genius of the government of the next twentyfive or fifty years, or one hundred years. At the outset, one must determine what these dominant characteristics of our contemporary culture pattern really are. T h e outstanding, the all-pervading strand in this pattern is that which we variously call the machine age, technology, or mass production. This, in turn, has entered into combina-

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tion with certain other culture traits, especially certain attitudes and institutions. Among these traits, three may be singled out as of paramount importance in determining the character of the total picture. These are ( i ) the system of individual rewards, in the shape of wages, salaries, and profits, designed to induce productive effort; (2) the emphasis upon political rights (still enormously potent, even in dictatorships); (3) the use of the money device as a measure or instrument of power to obtain goods and services. These three factors are so all-pervasive that I believe we must reckon them a part of any cultural synthesis for as much of the future as it is wise to discuss. With these, together with machine technology, as our alphabet or tools, we are ready to explore the nature of government inherent in such a setting. Three aspects of technology appear to have particularly important implications in determining the nature of governmental processes. These are ( 1 ) the possibility of plenty, (2) the interlocking nature of machine production, (3) the specialization of the individual and group. The first needs but a brief discussion in this connection. Technologically speaking, we in America need no longer be poor. This is an enormously important political fact. As this fact slowly but surely seizes the imagination of the multitude w e may expect that the insistences of individuals and groups that poverty be ended will mount higher and higher. There is no reason, for example, to suppose that our people will tolerate mass unemployment any more than the Germans did—though our resistance at this point may express itself in

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a different fashion. Let us admit it. Mass unemployment is psychologically intolerable; it is blasphemy against the machine. At the end of this war, here and in other nations, there will arise a turbulent humanity that will not be denied— marching, rushing, demanding. T h e restless, imperious forces of mankind will cry out for an end to all that stands in the way of the dreams that are rightly dreamed, dreams of material plenty and of a satisfying fullness of life. Woe be to that nation whose statesmen do not solve the riddle, the riddle of the organization of technology to its full in the service of humanity. In all this, probably the most important word is again organization, for organization is demanded by the second characteristic of technology, which we shall now considernamely, its interlocking nature. It is relatively easy to speak in generalities of the need for "planning" or "integration" or "organization." It is infinitely more difficult to force ourselves to think precisely and concretely concerning it. N o t many have really followed this need through to its full implication. In orthodox economic theory the need for integration is allegedly met by the flow of consumer purchasing power, coupled with individual (or corporate) plans for meeting (or creating) such effective demand. This is our old friend, the law of supply and demand. Without entering upon the intricate and somewhat debatable field of the causes for the breakdown of this theory, it suffices to point out that it has not succeeded for years—if indeed it ever did succeed —in organizing or integrating the full productive capacity of this or any other

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nation. On the contrary, of recent years it has failed miserably on a number of counts. It has failed to assure consumer demand sufficient to absorb the products of its technology. It has failed to establish the requisite ratio between saving and spending, to keep the economy on an even keel. It has failed, above all, to eliminate those rigidities of price which even the advocates of the system have recognized as barriers to its proper and flexible functioning. In nation after nation there is recognition of the fact that planning of some sort is needed to bring about the aforesaid organization or integration. When we speak of such organization or integration, we mean something deeper and more fundamental than merely its economic aspects. Ultimately such integration is a technological or engineering problem. It has been made so by the interlocking nature of the machine age. First of all, this inherent interlocking demands the synchronization of the several parts within a given factory. It is the root principle of the assembly line. In the second place, there is a vital interdependence at each process within one industry upon numerous processes in other industries. N o industry can function fully unless it can count upon the flow of materials to and from countless other industries. I repeat, this is a technological imperative and is quite apart from the need under capitalism of a sustained consumer demand for continuous or capacity operation. Under the economic order now passing, it was tacitly assumed that the choices of myriad consumers were to guide the channels of production. T h e instrument for such guidance was the law of supply and demand. We must leave to

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the economists the arguments as to whether such a system ever did, or for that matter ever could function. The fact remains that today it has broken down. The assumptions of the free operation of supply and demand upon which it rested are no longer true. We may as a community still decide to salvage from its word pattern its belief that the maximum satisfaction of consumer demands should be our chief community objective or value; yet the process of attaining this particular objective is still no different from the process of attaining other alternative objectives more popular with the contemporary world—such, for example, as national defense. Whatever the objective, organization and integration are alike required. Conversely, once one admits the need for community organization or planning, this very admission postulates the existence of community objectives. These objectives may be democratically arrived at, or they may be the decision of a dictator or oligarchy—but they are objectives nevertheless, or, if one prefers the term, values. If the realization of such values is to be the objective of integration, here then is the definition of an economy of use, in which each economic group may be spoken of as junctional. Conversely, it follows that any activity which remains unintegrated is, at its best, lost motion; at its worst, the source of positive harm. Hence, regardless of whether such objectives or values are to be those of the community or of the dictator, it ipso facto follows that serious activity (or inactivity) to the contrary can scarcely be tolerated. We

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already accept this dictum in the instances, for example, of theft or of sabotage, and in some circles of price rings. I believe the time will come when we shall regard the causing of unemployment as an even great crime. What then are to be these values, these objectives? One is not yet ready to answer, at least at this stage in the discussion. It is, however, essential to point out, as will presently be done in more detail, that the adoption of over-all values or objectives is a governmental process, a governmental process as implicit in the government of the future as legislation was in the government of the past. If these values are to be community values democratically arrived at, they may be such things as maximum productivity (actually a secondary value, for the questions will remain—productivity for what, and of what?), military strength, enrichment of personality, or even the Kingdom of G o d on earth. If the values are to be those established by a dictator or an oligarchy, they may still be maximum productivity or military strength; but they are more likely ultimately to become the objectives of power and exploitation by a man, a group, or a class. With all this we are not presently concerned, but only with the conclusion, stubbornly arrived at, that integration is a necessary derivative of the interlocking nature of technology and that the adoption of values or objectives is a necessary derivative of integration. In the third place, the technology of the machine age implies specialization of the individual or group. This is true from the simplest technical act on the assembly line to the

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most complicated problem of the industrial engineer. It is virtually as true in agriculture as, f o r example, in transportation or in the professions. T h i s all-pervading specialization has at least t w o consequences. These are ( i ) the premium placed upon technical competence and ( 2 ) the partial nature of individual experience. Far-reaching political and governmental derivatives trace their origins to these two. T h e need f o r technical competence shows itself in the higher level of professional competence at which g o v e r n mental problems must be faced. B e f o r e the days of public health, the location of the t o w n pump was a political problem, solvable b y the layman in t o w n meeting. T h e modern equivalent of the t o w n pump is or should be left to the technical competence of the sanitary or hydraulic engineer. T h e early provision f o r the poor was settled b y ordinary men in their religious or philanthropic moods. T h e modern approaches to the problem of poverty, stressing prevention and rehabilitation, are the province of the economist and trained social worker. These are but random instances of a basic, all-pervading f a c t about modern government. M o d e r n g o v ernment demands technical competence in the solution of all save an infinitesimal fraction of the problems w h i c h face it. Looked at f r o m this angle, one of government's major problems becomes the discovery, the utilization, and the control of such technical competence. Moreover, whether w e like it or not, it is implicit in modern technology that such technical competence be accepted b y the uninitiated rest of us.

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Yet this is not the whole truth. We have also spoken of values, community values; and in the light of these there must be an accountability somehow demanded of the technically competent government official in terms of results— that is, of results measured in the light of these values. If technology demands the acceptance of the authority of the technically competent as to means used, then it should demand of the technically competent that they on their part accept the community values or ends as the effective standards in governing their conduct. In other words, the specialist must think of his activity, not as an isolated phenomenon, but as junction in an integrated or organic community pattern. Perhaps the words "demands" and "must" are too strong. T h e loose, unintegrated pattern of American economic and political behavior may last for a long time, if the majority ever become convinced that there is no democratic way of planning or integrating. Yet it is by no means certain that even w e Americans would permanently prefer a partially functioning economy, with freedom, to an integrated but dictator state —if, which God forbid, these were the only alternatives. We must never forget that the essential element in dictatorship is not authority, but nonaccountability. The acceptance of authority as to means may be written in the texture of the machine age, but so long as the ends remain in popular hands and so long as there is accountability in terms of these ends, a nation may remain a democracy. T h e failure on the part of the masses to accept technical competence and the

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failure on the part of specialists freely to accept the role of function are among the symptoms which have ever characterized the prelude to dictatorship. While specialization produces the age of the technically competent, by the same measure it condemns these technically competent to a narrow and partial experience. Our forefathers on the frontier farms and in the N e w England towns could encompass within their experiences most of those things in life and the social order which had significance to them. T h e harshness or plenty of mother nature; the simplicity of community social activity; the ministrations of the town church and the village school; the sales at the village store and transactions with the itinerant peddler; even the occasional national question of war or peace—all these presented a closely knit and intelligible set of experiences which were not too much for intelligent political behavior. Few questions were faced at the ballot box or the cracker barrel which were not part of the living experience of the individual. T o d a y all is changed. Wheat fanners and steel workers have sets of experiences so different and at the same time so limited that the orbits of their political comprehension are worlds apart. So also with the banker, small-town merchant, manufacturer, physician, share-cropper, longshoreman. Each has a set of experiences which to him constitutes political and economic reality. Out of these limited and restricted experiences arise most of his dominant political and economic motivations. This by itself is difficult enough; but it is further compli-

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cated by another fact. It is of the highest political significance that, for the most part, these partial experiences are common to an entire group and become the basis for group organization and group action. Parity price for wheat, doctor-patient relationship, high hourly wage for laying bricks, the basing-point system for cement prices, the open shop, the closed shop, high interest rates, low interest rates, more imports, less imports—these and innumerable other economic and political objectives are the product of the partial and shared experiences of a particular group. T h e y inevitably become the objectives of organized group action. T h e wielding of group power in the field of politics to attain these ends •eventually furnishes the political insistences that are transformed into conflicting and incompatible legislation. T o a state and society so unintegrated and torn apart by this inconsistent and conflicting group action we shall apply the term "dispersive." Such dispersiveness, resulting as it does from organized group activity, expresses itself in countless clashes of group interest. Most of these clashes concern prices, wages, working conditions, trade practices. T o the process by which these clashes are resolved we shall apply the term "adjustment." If our reasoning is sound, such adjustment is inherent in organized group activity, with its use of power to attain its ends. This activity, in its turn, we have seen to be the sociological derivative of specialization. Here again we sense the presence of something basic in contemporary culture and likely to have its counterpart in governmental activity. It is important to recognize that this adjustment process

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itself is inescapable, if once economic groups substitute power and the so-called administered price for the automatic play of supply and demand in an atomistic or free economy. There are alternatives as to the means and ends of adjustment, but none to the fact itself. T h e root cause of dispersiveness lies in the fact that hitherto w e have largely left this process of adjustment to be settled by relative strengths. Frequently these strengths add the political to the economic. W h e n governmental action becomes largely the projection of the political insistences and strengths of groups, w e have the dispersive state. It is in this stage that we, for the most part, find ourselves. Accordingly, it is all the more important to realize emphatically that there are alternatives to such dispersiveness. For example, adjustment may be by means of an arbitrator. Initially, this is most attractive, for it rings a bell in our nineteenth century cultural heritage. We may readily concede that such a solution is likely to be a distinct improvement over adjustment by power and power alone. Yet in actual effect such arbitration may represent a mere compromise between no more than two of the many groups with a stake in the decision. It may totally fail as an instrument of that integration necessary to realize the community values or objectives. On the other hand, the adjustment may be by arbitration in the full light of these community objectives. Perhaps this is better spoken of as integration, an integration of the relationship between the groups with these community objec-

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tives paramount. This is the real ideal, the ultimate operative meaning of the concept "public interest." There remains finally the possibility that this adjustment process may be effected through institutions or organizations which themselves are specifically designed to produce continuous integration. This is the root idea of the corporate or organic state, by no means necessarily an undemocratic concept. For example, where relationships require constant adjustment, if regulative agencies could be devised which would represent all the interests having a stake in a given decision, the outcome might be a device for carrying out community values in the particular case. Our discussion hitherto has been almost exclusively of technology and its derivatives. These derivatives—the need for integration and consequent values; the need for acceptance of the authority and responsibilities of technical competence; partial experience, and its implicit social and political results—all these exist quite independently of other cultural elements. They are inherent in capitalism; they are also inherent in fascism and communism. They exist in democracies and dictatorships alike. Their emphases and by-products may differ, yet as a group they contain most of the keys to the underlying political processes of today and tomorrow. Nevertheless, for us in America and in many other nations these derivatives of technology operate in a heritage of liberal, capitalistic culture. T o ignore this in a discussion of governmental processes is to be unreal, for this culture is likewise part of the experience of humanity, etching itself for

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all time into its ideas and ideals. With it we must reckon, and reckon powerfully. Here we are on more familiar ground. T h e ground may even be so familiar, so taken for granted, that there will be some surprise that any one should regard it as necessary to include these cultural traits in the discussion. I mentioned earlier that at least three traits must be so included if w e are to formulate our total picture. These are ( i ) the system of individual rewards to induce productive effort, (2) the emphasis upon political rights, (3) the use of the money device as a measure and instrument of power over goods and services. T h e system of individual rewards and individual rights has already been spoken of as a part of the nineteenth-century cultural synthesis. Powerful as these concepts still are, there have been serious questions raised as to their cultural compatibility with certain major characteristics of the developing machine age. In the first place, it is foolish, to put it mildly, to base a system upon individual rewards for effort—when that system calls for integration, cooperation, organization, planning — unless the rewards to the individual are at least roughly proportionate to his social contribution. T h e problem faced at this point is not difficult to grasp. In a free, expanding, and atomistic capitalism there will be a certain rough-and-ready approximation to equality between reward on the one hand and productivity in terms of consumer needs on the other. In a capitalism with a closed frontier, with numerous instances of profit through deliberate scarcity, and with prices

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which fail to respond to alterations in supply and demand, the facts no longer coincide with such an assumption in an ever-expanding sector of our economic order. Rewards are far too often chiefly for those who withhold goods or exploit men or otherwise interfere with the operation of the economic order. T h e approaches to this difficulty (that individual rewards do not coincide with social usefulness) are twofold—to discover alternative motivations looking toward social ends and to work out institutions which will harness greed itself to social uses. For the moment we must leave this line of thought, but with the suggestion that we shall not lose such a deep-seated ideology overnight. In any event, it is or should be at least evident that the thought patterns and word forms o f "rugged individualism" far too often blur the need for integration; and thus lend themselves to exploitation by those who would profit by artificially induced scarcity, or, as Veblen puts it, by "the conscientious withholding of efficiency." Profits and rewards have for so long been identified by people with individual effort that most people still naively commit the economic error of believing that wherever there are profits and rewards, there must, ipso facto, have been a socially useful individual effort. T h e traditional political thought forms are almost equally unhelpful. Full allegiance there should be to the great individual freedoms of the Constitution and the great social freedoms or rights so recently added to them in our national thinking. Yet one trembles to think how often democracy is defined exclusively in these terms. For surely it must be evi-

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dent that integration, organization—yes, "team play," if you will—call, not for rights primarily, but for duties; not f o r anarchy of action, but f o r cooperation. It is by no means certain which ultimately will prove the greater imperative should the two come into conflict—the psychological imperative of freedom or the technological imperative of organization. T h e latter may have as its ally another psychological imperative, that of security, unless freedom is self-disciplined and duty transcends rights. From the very birth of democracy, the language of protest has been so strong that duty and sacrifice seem politically never to be evoked except in time of war. This is the most serious peril in our entire nineteenthcentury heritage. T h e operation of the money device as a measuring rod and instrument of success and power is equally subtle and equally pervading. Because it has come to its full fruition in an age of specialization, it lies back of the "producer-mindedness" of our political behavior patterns. T h e effect of a high income in one's occupation is dramatically, continuously evident to the individual. It focuses his attention upon those relatively f e w trade practices and governmental measures which will promote it. B y contrast, the myriad effects—or rather the causes—of a "high cost of living" or lessened purchasing power are diffused and obscure. T h e y are correspondingly difficult to remedy legislatively—partly for want of knowledge, partly for want of the necessary political cohesiveness and drive. This is especially true when the high costs are associated with the incomes of a politically insistent producer group.

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Here we come up against a reinforcing cultural factor, which further underscores the dispersiveness we have already noted as ultimately technological in its genesis. Money as the measure of income and power strengthens these individual and group insistences. It operates in and strengthens the hold of a culture which stresses individualism in its word rituals, but which in its dispersiveness cries out for cooperation and over-all organization and planning. The dispersive state and the dispersive society, with their pull and tug of organized and warring groups, their continued mass unemployment, their wars, are the death rattle of a way of life which technology has now rendered obsolete. Out of their passing will spring new orders. It remains for the will, the intellect, and the spirit of man to determine whether these new orders will conserve the truly great achievements of the old—its incentives, its freedoms, its inventiveness—or whether a blind, iconoclastic revolt will sweep the good and the bad into the selfsame limbo. IV

Much of this may seem to the reader far afield from our central theme. What has all this to do with the classification of governmental processes? Will not the old categories of legislative, executive, judicial serve us and our children, as they did our forefathers, even though much of the setting has changed? I doubt it. For one thing, by their very terminology they suggest that government is something separate or aloof from the economic life of a society which goes merrily on in its own sweet way. What is government in our new

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social order? We are not ready yet with the full answer, but it is already evident that at least some of its major aspects are an essential part of the economic order, that part which integrates and adjusts and even perchance organizes the productive mechanism. Perhaps even the very categories of "government" and "business" will themselves someday dwindle to mere word rituals and eventually fade altogether into the single category of "organized effort" or "administration" of the total productive mechanism. Many a nation is already far down this path. Moreover, these terms "legislative," "executive," "judicial" are products of that cultural situation which exalted rights above duties; which laid (and for the time being, correctly) the paramount emphasis upon freedom. T h e y have little or no operative meaning in an age or situation which demands the primacy of duty, cooperation, sacrifice. T h e y serve only to obscure the great realities of an emerging government even now struggling for birth. Those things which we earlier observed as symptomatic of obsolescence—the era of the quasi, the revolutions of the irrational against even the great constructive achievements of the old order—are now seen to be but stages in the casting off of an old and outgrown garment, preparatory to the putting on of a new. T h e new garment is one more suitable to the stature of the technological manhood to which mankind has grown. In conclusion, we shall call but brief attention to the more concrete evidences of the culture lag, the unreality, and unsuitability of institutions, conceived in the old terms.3 3 See the author's Impasse of Democracy, f o r extended analysis.

especially chaps, ix-xii, xiv, xv,

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The legislatures of the world, what are they? Those that remain—and those that have been superseded or largely ignored—are or were elected from geographic constituencies. As "representative"bodies, with what have they been faced? Not with questions of objectives and values, or even with laws in the old sense. Rather have they been forced to deal with technical questions, questions of the detail of means whereby situations may be dealt with which have been so specialized and ever-changing that of necessity there has been a tacit abdication to the expert. This is true even where the legislative façade has been retained and the legislative rituals of nineteenth-century political theory have been duly observed. Moreover, a geographically elected legislature inherently shies at measures of integration. Behind this geographic disguise, the pressures of groups in a producer-minded electorate operate. These pressures naturally impose penalties upon the curbing of the special groups themselves, into which for political purposes the electorate is characteristically organized. The result is the dispersive state, with masses of laws uncoordinated and often contradictory in their operation. An executive and an administration reflect the chaos of legislative policies in their irrational organization. Each group powerful enough to secure a law normally creates by that law a bureau, commission, board, or department to further its interests day in and day out. There is not a board or a bureau in government which does not have its clientele among the group-dominated electorate. Once established, the boards and bureaus become the most prolific sources of further similar legislation.

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The judiciary functions in a lost world. Its major cases (major from the viewpoint of the magnitude of interests involved) concern the powers of groups. It arbitrates in such power situations in terms of an individualistic jurisprudence. It does this without technical competence in the field arbitrated and it operates largely without a realization of the existence of interests other than those of the immediately opposing parties. It has no operative definition of "general welfare" or "public interest," and frequently has not even the haziest idea that such an operative definition is needed. Finally the judiciary, with but few exceptions, does not even sense that the situations with which it deals in the realm of economics usually involve, not questions of rights to be adjudicated, but of powers to be adjusted. One is not criticizing the motives of the persons in these institutions. These motives are not infrequently as disinterested and as public spirited as the prevailing culture will allow. They are more often ahead of, rather than behind the electorate as a whole. Moreover, sheer necessity often forces usages which are realistic in dealing with the concrete problems, thus making the actual governmental practice more suitable to the situation than the ways of talking about it or the forms observed. Nevertheless, the gap between technological reality and political and economic ritual is so great and so serious that one is justified in a search for alternatives to the contemporary symbols of government and the contemporary folklore of capitalism. What is the fashion of the new terminology? Of what texture shall it be woven?

Values, Leadership, and the Public L E S T the reader shall have found the discussion thus far too disconcerting, not to say alarming, one may offer a few reassuring and even conservative statements. In the new order there will apparently be at least three familiar landmarks from the old. In the first place, I see no reason why we should anticipate any major break with the principle that men shall be paid according to the work they do. Even in Russia there are signs of a return to this principle. Stripped of its ideological façade, this is the root principle of "Stakhanovism," which Russia now hails as a pillar of the new communism. True, there have been and will be other incentives—power and prestige; aesthetic, mental, and physical enjoyment in the job; the desire to serve. Yet, so long as money remains the measure and instrument of man's control over goods and services, it will continue to be among life's major objectives. Even shifts of sentiment, from love of self to love of family, from hoarding to philanthropy, will still leave people wanting more money. T h e y will want it because more money will bring the same greater power for giving expression to the new motivations as it did for the old ones. This desire for money will and should be harnessed to productivity under

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any system of political economy that we can now foresee. In the second place, I hold that rights, properly speaking, are not debatable, once we accept man as end and not as means. If man be but means—means to a super state, the satisfaction of a conqueror's whim, or a chemical and physical experiment, where then are rights? If man be the chief end of a cosmic purpose, an absolute in the eyes of God, then his rights are rights indeed. W h a t shall be included in these rights is open to discussion and rests upon one's thesis as to the nature of man. Moreover, if man is end and not means, then the realization of man's nature becomes the supreme value for man's organized, collective activity as well as for his individual effort. A paradox emerges at this point. How, then, can man in particular realize his nature without interfering with such self-realization on the part of others? Probably only the Christian view of the nature of man (and views akin to it) can truly resolve this paradox. This view may well foreshadow a "Christian democratic integralism" as the basic principle for government. T h e totalitarians reserve such selfrealization for a privileged class or race and hence find life more simple. In the third place, adaptability has ever been one of the hall marks of a good constitution, and our Constitution is a good constitution. We are ready to accept its adaptation: we do not believe it should be superseded. This is in harmony with the nature of social growth and social change; and woe be to those who resist this adaptation. T h e y are the midwives of supersession, violence, revolution.

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These three intentionally reassuring remarks are offered by way of preface. We may accordingly direct attention once more to the main thread of the argument. There have been major, not to say catastrophic changes in the technology of production. These changes have directly or indirectly contributed to the disintegration of certain characteristic institutions and ideas of the political and economic order, causing these institutions and ideas to be no longer culturally compatible with the new productive mechanism. It is therefore appropriate—even imperative—that we shall not content ourselves with a mere reappraisal or criticism of these institutions and ideas. We must go far beyond this and try, as far as our limited powers will allow, to sketch in clean-cut words those features of the new government and the new political economy which are implicit in the new technology. In clean-cut words, I say, for ways of talking about things do matter. Under ordinary circumstances, the arguments of a Thurman Arnold are cogent, to the effect that man needs his rituals to reassure him and will accept drastic change, in fact, if the old ways of talking about things remain sacrosanct. And yet times come, and this is one of them, when there is great need for articulating the pattern of the new order in clear and concrete terms. Given such a skilled articulation, the picture therein presented should begin to condition men's minds. Such realism will suggest the new channels of constructive statesmanship and political behavior called for by the new circumstances. The alternative we have thus far chosen, that of jealously safeguarding the old symbols

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and ideology, has reached the point where it constitutes an enormous handicap in the necessary adaptation of our governmental institutions. In this waste land of the obsolete belongs that division of all government into legislative, executive, and judicial processes. For these categories are no longer primary, are no longer grounded in the major realities of a social order needing above all else to be organized. More and more their correct use will be circumscribed, until it is confined to purely personal matters—to things like matrimony, mayhem, and madness. Perhaps even here there may be areas better discussed in new terms, but one may withhold judgment as to this. For the time being, we may accept the fact that laws can still be passed for these personal matters—laws which can mean the same thing or substantially the same thing for all persons under all circumstances. These laws may be enforced and interpreted by the executive and judicial branches as of old. One further premise must be explored before we attempt to outline the basic processes of the modern government in action. We need a clear definition of government itself. If we turn at this point to the political scientists for help, we find no clear lead, but we do find much by way of stimulating suggestion. A long and respectable line of political scientists holds that government is that particular organization or institution which represents the community as a whole. Such theorists speak of government as expressing the general will; its objective as the good of all, or public welfare, or the general good; its title, the guardian of the public

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interest. In the days of laissez faire these theorists held the function of the state to be nothing save only to preserve that measure of law and order which would maximize the free enterprise of the individual in his other spheres of life. Hence the term, the "police state." Our own age has been marked by the rise of a social consciousness. This view of the state as constituting the instrument for the general welfare has undergone a drastic change and has blossomed into expressions or titles such as the positive, the constructive, or even the socialist state. In the emerging order, the chief characteristic is the existence of centers of power, centers which ought by all means also to be made centers of function. For this new order, the focal problem of government as defined by this particular school among political scientists is the problem of integration—to see that these centers of power so function and are so related to each other that the general welfare emerges. There are other traditions among political scientists; and a second school of thought that deserves more than passing attention is the one which defines the central problem of political science as the study of power and its acceptance. Much of the stimulus which lies back of the flourishing of this particular school arises from the all-too-evident fact that the aforementioned centers of power represented by the special groups have been a major, and probably the major political reality of contemporary society. Hence the definition, "Politics is the battle of interests masquerading as principles." T o these realists, the task of the political scientist is to unearth and analyze the location of power wherever found, to de-

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scribe the élite which wield it, and to discover the means whereby it is preserved, changed, exploited, dignified. Ideals, even of general welfare or the public interest, are irrelevant to such a study, except as culture traits at a given moment which can serve as motivators in the exercise of power. It is not to criticize this school of political scientists, if one points out that ultimately such a theory of the nature of government will lead to its identification with any and all organized effort and activity, wherever and whenever found—in church and home, as well as in the state and business and trade unions. This is so, because all organized effort involves some measure of power. Pluralism1 of some sort is the inevitable philosophic resting place of such a theory—for no dictatorship, however monolithic its claims, can escape being influenced by the lesser organized units within its realm. If compelled to take sides in the dispute between the two schools mentioned, I would probably range myself with the second, for I view all human relations as a continuum, each event having some effect upon every other subsequent event. Within this continuum, there must of necessity be foci of organization for one purpose or another or for many purposes. In the furtherance of such purposes, the friendly or hostile attitude of other groups is often decisive in the success or failure of any one group in its efforts to carry out its purposes. Consequently support is enlisted wherever possible from these other groups—from the church for business; from 1 Pluralism is the doctrine of that school of political scientists which holds that there is no one single sovereign state for a given geographic area, but rather a number of foci of power in various organizations —church, trade union, cartel, as well as government.

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government for religion; from the school for a political party; from a political party for a trade union—until the original purpose of the organized action of a particular group is blurred. Yet it is at this very point that the general-welfare concept of the first school of political theorists becomes most useful. For purposes of argument let us concede to the philosopher—or the psychologist—that there exists an absolute general good. This general good conceivably would have as its expression the maximizing of individual self-realizations. One would then be justified in calling that particular organization "the state" which attempts the integration, toward the objective of a general good, of the otherwise unintegrated activity of all those groups which possess narrower or less catholic objectives. Yet no sooner is this concession made to the first school of political scientists than it becomes obvious that upon integration the lesser groups themselves become instruments of government. They are such instruments because, in their subordinate or decentralized activity and exercise of power, they too further the general welfare. 1 A t this point, we may resume the main thread of discussion. A preliminary view has already indicated certain fundamental processes inherent in the new government. If it is imperative for effective functioning of the social order that there must be integration, then there must also be either a single dominant purpose or value, or at least purposes and values that are harmonious, to serve as the integrating norm. It is therefore fitting that the first process which we shall con-

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sider more fully shall be the process of value formation and adoption. We are also ready to list at least five other fundamental processes. Leadership is one of these. Thirdly, there must be ways and means for implementing or reflecting popular influence, acceptance, and rejection—both of ends and of means. In effecting integration in the light of value, there must, in the fourth place, be planning of means; in the fifth place, adjustment between groups in accordance with the plan; and, finally, research. It is the tentative hypothesis of the author that these are the six major governmental processes that are culturally inherent in the modern government in action, in the same sense that the legislative, the executive, and judicial processes were culturally inherent in the police state of an individualist, expanding economy. 3 This is said with full awareness that at best such a list of processes as given above can never be more than an approximation, for there is no such thing as a perfect cultural equilibrium. H o w ever, in the job of living, a substantially correct analysis of the major elements in a society is surely the first step toward success; and the amazing number of failures in the world's leaders as well as among its teeming millions bears witness, perhaps, much more to their blind spots, their ignorance, than to original sin. 2 T h i s is the sense in which the author occasionally uses the term "basic." T h i s term, basic, is used, not in any permanent sense, but as meaning culturally inherent, given certain other major characteristics of an existing society. L . C. Marshall uses the term more correctly to indicate those processes present in all cultures at all times.

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11 The first process to consider is the process of value formation and adoption. Without such value adoption there can be no integration. Without integration there can be no respite from the limping, even the breakdown, of organized activity; from the millions of frustrated individuals that such limping produces; from the aggressions, hates, and emotional storms that accompany frustrations. We must recognize that the process of value formation is in part tangential to our central theme. Value formation goes on everywhere and at all times. The school, the home, the church, the neighborhood, all play their part. We must necessarily be selective and direct our major attention to the later stages of the process, that is, to the actual adoption or determination of those values which are to be dominant in integration and organized community activity. Let us recapitulate briefly the process of reasoning which has led to the conclusion that community values there must be. Purpose is implicit in organization, and purpose also implies value. It has remained for our modern society to evolve a productive technology so interlocked in its operation that it demands community of purpose for its full functioning. Thus diversity or disharmony or incompatibility in the objectives of its constituent members are translated into the breakdown or imperfect functioning of the whole, as well as 'nto the frustration of the individual purposes of the several parts. This is a facet of a still larger truth, that conflict and

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frustration result in the social organism as a whole unless the activity of society is unified or harmonized around an objective or objectives, themselves in harmony with the nature of man. 3 There is a kinship here with the personality of the individual, who is ever seeking harmony in the relationships between his inborn drives; and ever wondering whether such harmony is indeed possible. T r u e or ultimate value in such a frame of reference becomes that which brings abiding satisfaction to the individual's inner nature. This then becomes our more precise definition of value. Value is the ultimate objective of human activity, that quality in goods, activities, thoughts, motives, which individuals believe will satisfy their nature. Wherever a dictator gains control of a community, the integration becomes an integration in terms of his values—personal power if it be a Mussolini; the working out of earlier frustrations, if it be a Hitler; the Kingdom of G o d on earth, if it be a Salazar. There are, of course, many minor notes in each of the nations ruled over by these men, in part derived from the dictator's own subsidiary motivations, in part from the necessary extension of a measure of initiative and control to his henchmen. T h e fact that nowhere is there complete unification of values does not invalidate the major premise that it is inherent in the successful functioning of the contemporary productive mechanism that there be at least an approximation to such unification. Pervading all industrialized societies is at 3 T h i s statement opens up alluring philosophic vistas of which the limitations of this work allow only a suggestion, but it is part of the total philosophic and sociological setting in which the subsidiary conclusion belongs.

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least a measure of that dispersiveness, that conflict of narrow, selfish objectives, which springs from the partial experiences of the various occupational groups. This particular aspect may be more obvious in democracies such as the United States and Great Britain, for their constitutions and culture make possible a more effective articulation of such narrowly conceived objectives than do the dictatorships. In the latter, the error is more fundamental. It rests in the arrogation to a small group of the right to identify its values with those of the whole. T h e millions and millions of degraded, frustrated, suffering humans in Italy, Russia, and Germany bear witness to the failure of such an order. We may concede that Germany has had more than a measure of success in unifying its productive mechanism, yet this but indicates the need for integration and the adoption of some unified values as a prerequisite to effective functioning anywhere. At the same time, it bears witness to the stark evil and the utter tragedy which result, if military strength and racial dominance are the values chosen. If the adoption of compatible values be imperative for a fully functioning, contemporary technology, one should be able to discover trends toward it and also to identify the institutional pattern followed in such a development. A brief survey of the leading nations makes this trend unmistakably evident. In Russia, regardless of the letter of its formal constitution, the prevailing values and objectives are determined largely in the Politburo of the Communist party. It is as secretary of this organization that Stalin wields his power. Out of its deliberations have come the campaigns for collectivi-

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zation, the building up of heavy industry, the shift of emphasis to military strength. In Sweden the torch of value formation seems to have been largely carried by the Social Democratic party and by the cooperatives. Here the boards of directors of the cooperatives, almost as much as the Swedish parliament, may be the instruments for formal value adoption. In both cases the values appear to be the universalizing of middle-class comfort and security, together with a measure of cultural opportunity. If we turn to the Orient, the military clique and group of superpatriots that largely are contemporary Japan have sanctified and unified their objectives as the extension in East Asia of the rule of the Son of Heaven, whose self-designated exponents and administrators they are. Assassination awaits the articulate doubter of the benefits of such integration, and war is its chosen social instrument. T h e values of the new Eire are consciously those of a democratic Christian commonwealth; 4 and who shall say that a fair measure of success has not attended such an attempt at integration through constitutional channels? Mussolini and the Fascist Grand Council have blue-printed an integration of purpose, value, and activity for Italy largely in terms of military strength; but old culture traits and the violence done thereby to human nature seem to be defeating the attempt. Even in this brief recapitulation, we are struck by the variety in the institutional forms through which such values are adopted. Sometimes the values are determined by a dictator, sometimes in the ordinary administration, some4

A p a r t f r o m the complicating objective of a unified Ireland.

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times in the council of a party or the democratically chosen legislature. What of the United States? I think our underlying assumption has been that the objective of our political economy is the maximum satisfaction of consumer desires. In actual operation this has been enormously complicated and impaired by the "producer-mindedness" of our political behavior, with its resultant dispersiveness. Hence all kinds of subsidiary objectives have cut in—objectives such as parity prices for agriculture, a protected home market for manufacturers, the union shop. At the present time we are in the throes of being forced to choose between the aforementioned consumer satisfaction and an apparently incompatible value —maximum military strength. We are writhing intellectually and emotionally in the midst of this dilemma; and our political instruments—Congress, the President, both political parties—all reflect this writhing in their political behavior. Other general objectives are likewise politically powerful and reflect themselves in organized action. Examples of such objectives are equality of educational opportunity and the conservation of the soil and other resources. Roosevelt's "four freedoms" represent still another attempt to articulate a code of values designed to dominate our political and economic activity. I wish there were a more general awareness of the need for unification of these and other objectives, but we must build on what we have. Once we realize such a need, not only will we formulate and adopt our objectives, but also we will undertake the requisite research and planning designed to blue-print the attaining thereof.

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Has enough been said to demonstrate both the need for, and the potential existence of over-all values in the government of the present day? Again we repeat that recognition of the necessity for integration of such values is written in the very nature of our machine age. Our choice is not whether to integrate, but when. We may also choose from competing values. If the dominant note is to be military strength, our technicians will be the generals and the masters of economic and psychological warfare. If, on the other hand, our goal for our postwar world is to be the enrichment of human personality or the realization of man's highest and best nature, then the psychologist, the physician, and the preacher must take their place among the architects of the future. Whatever our choice, the engineer must have his high place, in order to provide those instruments of production which are designed as the means to the agreed-upon end. Yet there is always the uncomfortable alternative that degenerate types may prevail. We, for example, may for years on end still languish in the convenient obscurantism of our American producer-mindedness. In Germany, lust for power for its own sake may multiply the parasitic growth of henchmen and spokesmen designed only to perpetuate the control of a particular élite. In Soviet Russia, a mechanistic view of the nature of man may poison the crusading zeal of the Communists of the early days and result in the emergence of a generation of self-seeking schemers, the logical by-product of the materialistic philosophy on which communism is based. All such speculation is intensely interesting, but is incidental to our central quest for the basic processes implicit

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in all government in a technological age. Survival belongs, not to these degenerates, but to those persons and peoples who realize the need for common objectives and values that accord with human nature and who take the necessary steps toward their realization. HI

The need for adoption of values leads at once to other processes and notably to the process of leadership. There was a day when farms were largely self-contained, when craftsmen plied their trade in simple fashion, when the geographic frontier beckoned. In such a day and in such an atomistic society, the role of national political leadership was limited. Much time was occupied with largely irrelevant considerations—survival of dynasties, territorial aggrandizement, triumph of party or clique. In a social and economic order inherently organic, interrelated, interlocked—and not functioning successfully unless its integration reflects this fact—the role of leadership is of transcendent importance. The process of leadership in such a setting consists of the articulation of values and their attendant means in such a fashion as to induce the necessary support for them. This is not the process of actual devising of means, for this function belongs to the processes of research and planning. It is the process of obtaining acceptance once the means are devised. The ways of obtaining such acceptance run the whole gamut from slave labor to convictions induced by the rational processes of free men. It is the universal experience that the latter, if its attainment be possible, is not only more

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desirable but is also more efficient, as an engineer would view efficiency. W h y , then, is it not attained? The most obvious answer is probably also the correct answer. There is not the requisite free time in a man's life to master the technical knowledge necessary for intelligent followership, if the issues before the public are presented one by one. For today's problems of government are largely specialized technical problems. They call for the skills of the public health officer, the engineer, the educator, the economist, the social worker. Faced with such a situation, there is an obvious temptation for one to interpret the acceptance of leadership necessarily in terms of the surrender of the reason and will of the perplexed and baffled to the adequacy of a Fiihrer or a Duce— a pathological adjustment to frustration easily recognized by the psychologist. One must be blind to contemporary realities to ignore the fact that this element of surrender has been one of the major components of the rise to power of persons as diverse as Roosevelt and Hitler. Even in these terms the individual reasserts himself, once the frustration is removed; and a new appeal is needed if the same leadership is to continue in power. More usual than the techniques of intellectual surrender are the techniques of propaganda on the part of the leaders, actual and potential. The conservative isolates and emphasizes the favorable factors in the status quo, the radical rubs salt on existing wounds and then offers curatives. According to the multiplicity of frustrations and the skills of propaganda, now the conservative, now the radical obtains acceptance, in those nations where democratic provision is made for

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change of leadership. We know less about the ultimate results when the leader is also dictator and when he controls not only the police power, but also most of the channels for manipulating opinion. If intelligent planning is neither available nor acceptable if available, there is a virtually inevitable deterioration of the leader into a politician in the worst sense of the word. In a dispersive society, the leader-politician becomes a mere broker between inherently contradictory objectives of selfseeking, unintegrated special interests—feeding the populace upon the husks of symbols, political gestures, and laws whose declared objectives are not attainable by the means devised. Leadership of ends is far from the exclusive prerogative of the man or men connected with the government. The church claims this prerogative as ultimately its own, and hence the hostility of many dictators to the churches. Other foci of leadership are found in the press, the movies, the trade unions, and, for that matter, wherever ends are implicitly or explicitly expressed. Nevertheless, with the ever-expanding sphere of government and with the dawning appreciation of its integrating role the world over, man is looking to the heads of his state for leadership even as to ends. This turning to the state is even more true as to means; for, while it is increasingly clear that the devising of means belongs to the technical expert rather than to the president, representatives, or dictator, it is equally clear that it is the function of these latter to secure the necessary acceptance, once the technician has spoken. Without such acceptance the blue prints of the experts remain blue prints and nothing

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more. Woe to the nation, even the leaders of which are unwilling to listen to its scientists! In this connection, there is need for study of the devices whereby the technicians can make their views known to the leaders. Patterns of communication vary, and the personal element still figures largely. Many in our Congress, for example, are still resentful of the fact that the technician is needed at all. Appropriate Congressional procedures to secure the requisite technical advice are still in the experimental stage. Hearings, legislative reference services, supporting memoranda from the administration, lobbies—all are used. Likewise the technician faces great difficulties in obtaining the ear of the President; though the device of the specialized administrative assistant has already demonstrated its possibilities in this connection. This reaches its most extensive development in the Office of Emergency Management, reporting on defense and war problems and progress. Among the basic ideas going into the establishing of the Office of the Coordinator of Information was the thought that thereby the pooled judgment of mature scholars would bring about a synthesis of the day-to-day reports on foreign affairs received through the War, Navy, State, and Agriculture Departments, and other sources. These and other new devices have long since superseded the cabinet meeting in advising the President. Everywhere there has come to be an institutionalizing of this process of leadership. Sometimes there is a discontinuity, and the old forms undergo violent change or supersession. Thus Italy and Germany enunciate and give a degenerate

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constitutional form to the "leadership principle" in their new orders. In the United States the process of institutionalization is more gradual. It is evidenced chiefly in the new concept of the presidential office and in the ascendancy of the executive at the expense of Congress within the existing constitutional framework. This is not a shift in the formal, constitutionally coordinate nature of executive and legislative powers; it is the adaptation of our flexible Constitution to the new social forces which call for new processes. The contribution of Congress to the government of the present and future is significant and can be made more so; but it is the contribution of the critic, the board of review, the reflector and guardian of public opinion, and not that of the leader. So also in England, where the classic supremacy of Parliament has paled before the ascendancy of the Prime Minister—whose epitome is a Churchill rendering articulate the values and ends and goals of a whole people and gaining the necessary acceptance of the means involved. It is worth calling attention in passing to the enormous difference the radio has made in the effectiveness of leadership. A president, a Fuhrer, or a prime minister can reach virtually an entire nation thereby. Given the necessary skills in manipulation of opinion, attitudes can be developed or changed by the leaders almost at will. Their power and responsibility are enormous. W e have already suggested that leadership must be exercised in a society where the technical and specialized nature of most of the measures proposed preclude their general acceptance on completely rational grounds. The difficulty

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thus created is made immeasurably greater by the fact that existing prejudices and vested interests in the status quo can so easily obscure and complicate the issues involved in proposals f o r change. Here, if anywhere, is the basis for justification of the techniques of propaganda and manipulation of opinion practiced by dictators and democrats alike. Only thus can issues hope to be clarified, with so many interests having a stake in their confusion. In our own government, virtually every Federal agency maintains its public relations officers, by whatever name they may be called. Press releases, annual reports, speeches, fireside chats are all carefully studied with the effect upon the "official program" in mind. Clipping services study the public reactions; and strategy— in part factual, in part propagandist—is shaped accordingly. T h e Blue Eagle of National Recovery Administration days dutifully soared to promote compliance, as democracy sought to obtain that cooperation and acceptance b y free men which dictatorships attained b y the full and undivided control of all major channels of opinion. T h e latest arrival in this field is the new Office of W a r Information which is to coordinate and integrate all the other public information agencies and thus provide a coherent morale-building program in support of the war effort. There is something inherently repulsive in all this to the scholar and the scientifically minded and even to the lover of the democratic w a y . Obviously our present situation is transitional, until such time as the people become aware of the nature of the problem. W h e n this time comes, except as they may be specialists in a particular area, they may become

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content to pass upon the results on the one hand, and the soundness of the methods whereby the technicians arrived at their solutions on the other. Objectives or ends may be popularly determined; means for the most part are the province of the technician. Here, briefly, is the basis for assigning a social role in politics to education and religion and to the leaders of each. It is for education to aid in securing acceptance of properly devised means and to demonstrate the need of ends. It is for religion to formulate these ends and to impose the duty of functioning within the means designed to attain them. But all this borders upon the third process—the process of popular influence and control; and it is to this which we now turn. IV

Leadership is temporarily successful, insofar as it brings to a focus and renders articulate the relatively unformulated but insistent desires of the individuals concerned. These may be and usually are in large measure colored by the existing mores. Leadership is more likely to be permanently successful if the means chosen and the ends expressed do in fact coincide also with the inner nature of man, and not merely with his prejudices of the moment. A further element of permanence is added, if the means chosen give to the persons concerned a sense of creative participation in attaining the ends. The participant is ever more loyal than the spectator, if the game played or the crusade conducted or the law or policy adopted really yields abiding satisfactions.

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However much the fact may be at a discount in certain quarters, the individual after all remains the unit dynamo of political behavior. Dictators ride to power on his shoulders; and it is doubtful whether a dictator can long remain in power in the modern age unless he enjoys a fair measure of acceptance. This acceptance may be synthetic, manufactured, localized—but some base there must be. Hence the plebiscites in the dictator nations and the fanfare accompanying them—all designed to create the illusion of maximum support. One is very much less sure as to what the institutions will be in the future which will be the means for giving expression to this particular political process of popular influence. T h e plebiscite of the dictator state is discredited, even as a reflector, because of the notorious coercion and probable fraud associated with it. N o r are the usual institutions of representative government faring too well, save by comparison. Our congresses, parliaments, and chambers of deputies based on geographic representation often become fronts for the battle of the special groups which characterize a dispersive society. Local governments have likewise traditionally been vehicles for democratic expression. Yet these, too, are finding their role increasingly circumscribed, as the problems with which they are habitually concerned are more and more approached on a national scale. It is fairly easy to say that popular opinion steps outside its correct role, if it attempts the technical formulation of measures for which it is qualified neither by education nor by experience. It is, however, much more competent to pass.

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upon results. For example, referenda as to continuance of a given measure, or even commissions of inquiry may be quite as useful as the arbitrary substitution of a new set of representatives at the time of a general election. Perhaps the essence of the democracy of the future may not actually lie in the debates and discussion designed to arrive at a decision, which many have regarded as the earmark of the democracy of the past. Rather it may lie in the accountability of its officials for results. Regular or irregular elections are only one among the possible devices to attain such accountability. Commissions of inquiry inside or outside the formal governmental framework, auditing and surveying agencies incorporated into the bureaucracy itself, devices for publicity—all may play their part. We have already mentioned many times the extreme difficulty, if not the impossibility of intelligent general discussion on the multiplicity of technical questions confronting the state. Is the electorate then to abdicate altogether in this sphere, save for the threat of the political guillotine as the penalty it will impose for failure? I think not, if the electorate can be really educated to appreciate what are the prerequisites for successful and disinterested action on the part of its officials. There is not time nor is this the place to explore such prerequisites in detail; but obviously specialized technical competence in the officials is one prerequisite, and a disinterested, public-spirited attitude is another. The science of public administration has pointed the way—competitive examinations, educational qualifications, career service, periodic audits of

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activity by independent experts, efficiency ratings, selective recruiting, established procedures of research and over-all planning—all these devices are important parts of the picture. B y these and similar means, technical competence is fostered and service of the public is built up as a profession. These considerations are all part of the new government, and their role is eminently teachable at the high-school level and in adult education programs. Hence a successful democratic adaptation to the necessities of the new government will have as a prerequisite a genuine popular interest in the major devices designed to assure good administration, skilled decisions, adequate programs. Creating this interest lies at the very heart of civic education. If our education is to be directed —as it should be—toward the ordinary individual's acceptance of technical competence in government, then this policy has two corollaries, if exploitation and bureaucratic tyranny are to be avoided. These are, first, a diffused knowledge of the prerequisites for such technical competence, and, secondly, adequate devices for holding the technically competent accountable. These, too, lie within the reach of the science of public administration. We should elect our presidents because they are good administrators as well as because they are skilled formulators of community ends. Failure as the former invalidates success as the latter. Another fruitful approach to democracy is to take decisions out of the hands of the national government, wherever possible without doing violence to the attainment of community values. Experience is too scanty to warrant conclu-

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sions, but there is a reasonable possibility that certain parts of the administered order can be at least partially segregated and placed under the immediate direction and control of those groups with major interests at stake in the decisions made. For instance, the prices, output, wages, labor conditions, and trade practices of a given industry (for example, steel, building materials, agricultural implements, or milk) might be placed under the control of a board elected by the interests involved. If such representation were duly weighted to give effect to general welfare or community values, the resultant "corporate state" might well mark a reconciliation of democracy and integralism. In any event, such a "corporation" or board would allow a measure of democratic participation to the individual in elections and decisionmaking in those areas where his technical competence qualifies him. The processes of leadership and popular influence and control are inextricably interwoven. A leader in one field is a follower or juryman in another. Even the most insignificant of mortals may be said to have an element of leader in him if he in any measure influences his fellow men. This dualism is perhaps best appreciated in an examination of the devices whereby the so-called leaders in government are themselves made aware of the opinions of their followers and are to a greater or less degree influenced by them. B y w a y of illustration, the clipping services and studies of press opinion have emerged full fledged as a staff arm not only of the chief executive but also of many of his subordinates. Incidentally, press reaction to Congressional hearings is apt to

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be a fairly accurate mirror of the temper of the public. Congress thus is not necessarily to be censured insofar as its hearings are "headline hunters." Moreover, it is entirely possible that the various polls of public opinion are now a more significant political fact than Presidential or Congressional elections. These devices permit, as the elections do not, discrimination between issues, and even refinements of the public's idea as to solutions. N o officeholder can remain uninfluenced by trends in these polls. If our society is becoming increasingly complex—and it certainly is—we may expect and not be unduly disturbed by straddles and generalizations at election time. These are virtually inevitable, amid the general confusion of issues so numerous and so technical that intelligence can scarcely operate. All the more significant, then, is any device which permits measurement of reaction and opinion in greater detail. The public-opinion polls can isolate a single issue and present many alternative attitudes and solutions; ordinary elections seldom, if ever, can do this. Measurement of intensity of opinion lies just around the corner and may provide a further implement of influence on the part of the populace. In a sense, our politicians have always had their informal Gallup polls through the precinct captain, who has been quick to interpret shifts of opinion to his boss. Hence the candidate elected on straddles and glittering generalities can with due care survive through reelection, by taking the more popular side as issues separately present themselves. It is this technique of the relations between boss and precinct captain which has largely been imitated by the dicta-

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tors. Hitler has his block leaders—the lowest unit in the party hierarchy. These are primarily organizational and enforcement units, of course; but they are also used as reflectors, designed for information as to the state of opinion. Mussolini allegedly uses wire tapping for the same purpose. He also proclaims that his corporate state, with its appointees from the nation's functional groups, is in fact a formal device permitting a much more genuine and vital representation than the outmoded Italian Chamber of Deputies. In a state whose consciously adopted end is the enrichment of the individual personality, there will be a deliberate maximizing of intelligent participation in devising and adoption of means and in holding officials responsible for their stewardship. If in the new order such accountability shall extend to centers of power in the economic and social field hitherto deemed "private," who shall say that this likewise is not in accord with the imperatives? Power wherever found ought to be held accountable. If thereby the distinction between governmental and nongovernmental shall seem to be blurred, it is but another indication that integration of all significant centers of power is an essential of the new state, if objectives and values are to be fully realized. v Values are ends which create an expectation of psychic income to individuals. Values are implicit in the activity of means as well as in the formulation of ends. Whether in means or ends, the process of adoption of values is a governmental process in an interlocking technological and social

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order. It is an essential part of any truly modern government that the discussion, formulation, acceptance, and implementation of values and the criticism of the results thereof shall be institutionalized. In all these, leadership and popular influence and control are inherent and auxiliary processes.

Planning, Adjustment, and Research G O V E R N M E N T is a combination of ideas and activity. T h e processes in the field of ideas are leadership, popular influence, and value formation and adoption. These we have discussed. The processes in the field of activity are largely but not exclusively comprised in a similar trilogy—planning, adjustment, and research. We shall consider each of these in turn. The first of these, the planning process, arises out of the need for the attainment of objectives or realization of values in an interrelated social order. In the old days, when objectives were simple and unconnected, a law with or without a subsequent special administrator to enforce it sufficed. Today even those objectives dealing with single, specific problems are complex. Whenever a problem is complex, careful study as to prerequisites, strategy, and consequences becomes inevitable. Such study is the matrix of partial planning. Where the objectives are not limited to specific problems, but are over-all—such objectives as military strength, a high standard of living, the enrichment of personality, the Kingdom of God—then over-all planning is essential. Once more let us repeat the underlying reason for this: modern technology has spelled the doom of primary reliance upon individual consumer choice and individual effort as the basis for production. With these has gone the individualistic supply-and-

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demand economy that had been their associate. Technology has spelled this doom, in part because millions of individuals will not put up with the mass unemployment and frustration that are associated with the refusal of business, labor, and agriculture alike to play the game according to the rules by behaving individualistically; and in part because its own interlocking nature has made associative or collective action contemporary society's great and dominating reality. If men behaved according to the theory of individualistic capitalism, there would be free competition, widespread and genuine. In place of this, we find that associations which control and plan price and output are increasing in industry, labor, agriculture, and the professions alike. Consequently, the actual choice lies, not between a free economy and a planned economy, but between uncoordinated controls by unintegrated groups and genuine planning in an integrated society. If the choice were really vouchsafed us between a free economy and a planned economy, most of us would probably choose the former. As between private, arbitrary, irresponsible, uncoordinated, partial planning and an over-all integrated plan, perhaps the scales are tilted otherwise. At this point the relationship between values and planning becomes clearer. If a society is incapable of defining its values and objectives, there will be dispersive politico-economic action, a faltering economy, and a faltering government, for each organized group will be a law unto itself and will express its own narrow values. It may be that a people will prefer even this dispersiveness and faltering to the risks of over-all planning, for

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risks there undoubtedly are. Whether such a people can then survive is another matter. Of the risks involved in planning, by far the most disturbing is the oft-repeated question, "Can this process of over-all planning ever be democratic?" Just what do we mean by this question? If we imply that all and sundry are to participate in the studies and deliberation that lead up to and produce the finished plan, the answer is just the same as it would be if the same question were asked concerning the practice of medicine. If, on the other hand, we ask whether it means the supersession of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, of the press, and the other traditional hall marks of liberty, the answer surely lies in the values or objectives toward which the planning is directed. If these objectives are the ascendancy of a race, class, or group, then the scales are weighted heavily against the survival of liberty. Such objectives hold a view of the nature of the individual that offers no safeguard against his exploitation or coercion. They deny equality and hence betray the inherent dignity of personality. Once the dignity of the individual is thus violated, the way lies open for all kinds of rationalizations whereby the favored groups may maintain themselves in power. From the days of Robespierre to the days of Hitler and Stalin, the path of history is strewn with the corpses and souls of the victims of this point of view. Perhaps the supreme objective is the military strength of a nation. This, too, threatens the survival of liberty, for habits of mind are set up in conjunction with dominant military establishments that derive much from

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the inherent nature of military activity itself. Military activity traditionally rests upon imposed discipline and unquestioned obedience. It glorifies and uses force rather than reason or love. It has been well said that man becomes like the means he uses. The means to the end of military strength are not reassuring as to the future of liberty in the nation adopting this as a permanent goal. If a more vaguely expressed nationalism or superpatriotism be the over-all motivation, such worship of the state is essentially agnostic as to the nature of personality. Almost inevitably the definition of the objectives of state action in such a case becomes identified with the wishes of the group in control. T o the evil of the dominance of a special group thus comes to be added the equally pernicious evil of the convenient obscurantism with which the group cloaks its actions. Thereby Mussolini speaks as Italy, or Mayor Hague arrogates to himself the right to define Americanism in his own image. There is ultimately no safeguard for the rights of man save only the dominance of a philosophy which holds the sacredness of the individual to be an absolute. Here and here only lies the Magna Carta of the individual in a planned order. A voice speaks out of the unplanned past to the planned future, "We hold . . . that all men . . . are endowed, by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." The important words are "by their Creator." As for our forefathers, so for us the doctrine of natural rights, of liberty itself, needs above all else a theological base. In other words, for us in America and perhaps for all nations, this means that the safety of democracy as we here use the word is inextricably associated with reli-

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gion. T o the extent to which religions, such as the Christian and the Jewish, are the dominant factors in value formation, to that extent does liberty of the individual rest upon the bed rock of an absolute. The alternative is to regard liberty merely as a useful culture trait, to be discarded whenever it ceases to be useful. Perhaps the dominant group need only hold out the necessary bait of an alternative catchword. Small safeguard this, if people become convinced that liberty stands in the way of efficiency and security. Moreover, it is a grievous error to suggest that the preservation of liberty is the only contribution which Judaism and Christianity have for planning iri contemporary government. These faiths have another advantage still more vital to a planned society—they impose the stern and absolute duty on individuals and groups that they cooperate in the common good. Expressed in modern terms, the Christian and Jewish faiths hold all individual and group activity to be purposeful or junctional. The purposeful and functional nature of such activity is likewise ipso facto a corollary of any over-all integration. I write, let it be remembered, as a political scientist, and not as a preacher. In our further exploration of the reconciliation of democracy and planning, let us examine another closely related line of thought. The retention of democracy with its precious freedoms and equally precious opportunities will also depend much upon the measure to which individuals are given the opportunity of actual participation in those sectors of the over-all planning for which their experience and function suit them. If the planned state is to become simply a colossal

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bureaucracy, an octopus sucking the vitality from the various occupational and other groups by depriving them more and more of their discretion or initiative, then the fear of planning is all too justified. If, on the other hand (and this I have already suggested), whole areas of planning can be delegated to authorities truly representative of the interests involved, the prospects are considerably brighter. One school of planners believes that the unplanned or free zone in business can be measurably widened by any strategy which looks toward a break-up of as many as possible of the existing price rigidities and monopolies. In this connection, it is entirely possible, perhaps even probable, that democratically motivated plans may contemplate the maintenance or restoration of an enormous free zone; with only certain key points in the economic order administered by and for the community. These points would include such matters as control of the rediscount rate or of the spending-saving ratio, or of exhaustible raw materials. Even if the free zone for competition is not so extended, it is the opinion of many that such planned control of key points might still suffice to accomplish community ends. Thereby the dangers of a top-heavy bureaucracy as well as of the dictatorship of the party in power would be measurably lessened. A final approach to the simultaneous retention of planning and democracy lies in the safeguards that can be thrown around the planning (and, of course, the administering) officials. Equality, certainly equality of opportunity, has been ever regarded as a keynote of our American democracy; and the channels to enter and advance in those branches of the

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civil service where planning is to be done can and should be open competitively. Moreover, there are available many entirely practicable devices designed to maintain a sense of accountability or responsibility on the part of the official planners. Well-informed lay advisory boards, commissions, and investigations by congresses and parliaments, or even power to review the plans vested in these or other agencies, all suggest themselves. These devices have all been tried with a considerable measure of success. Not even in the totalitarian or "one party" states are the planners, as devisers of strategy, allowed to operate unchecked or unsupervised by the selfappointed custodians of the national ideals or objectives. This is all the more reason why any program for preserving our democracy in a planned order must include the accountability of the planner to the electorate, or at least to all interested parties. This devising of strategy to attain values or objectives, the process to which we have applied the term "planning," is no rare or isolated phenomenon. It is a process of government present in all industrialized nations. In our own and in many other nations it is as yet partial. Until the advent of the war, its most striking and intensive American development had been in the Department of Agriculture. In its early stages under the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the objectives of the department were limited largely to securing a higher standard of living for the American farmer. T h e emphasis was laid chiefly upon money income. As is usual with such partial planning, secondary effects were often ignored; and the same price rises which were designed to benefit the farmer

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cut down his export market, particularly in cotton. Moreover, the limitation of output, which was the chief means employed, created additional problems through lessening the numbers of employed share-croppers, tenant farmers, and farm laborers. When the crop limitation program came to be harnessed to a soil conservation program, the orbit of planning was widened and long-range objectives set. The present stage under Wickard is still more significant. The expressed objectives have now been set almost exclusively in junctional terms—food and clothing enough for all Americans to live a healthful life. Under normal conditions, chief reliance for the time being seems to be put on the "food stamp plan" initiated under Wallace, as the means for additional distribution which will permit "parity prices" in one economy and government subsidy for clearing surpluses in another. Reliance for production is to be put upon subsidized diversification of crops, in order to induce large accessions to our meat and dairy products output. Were there time, it would be worth while to explore this further as a case study in planning. Assume the objective to be food enough for all, at least in America. Technology says this is easily realized. Assume—as I believe we can assume—the desire of our people for such food and the willingness, individually and collectively, to work for it. It is for the planner to suggest the means. Will the means prove acceptable; and, if not, why not? I ask the question without answering it. In the area of labor and labor-union activity, this functional stage has not yet been reached as a peace-time attitude. Until the coming of the war, the preoccupation of labor was still defensive and partial, with higher wage rates and closed

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shops the chief objectives. Here and there—notably in connection with the war effort—the functional pattern of behavior, with its recognition of obligations, is beginning to appear, in acts as well as in speeches. I personally believe that the best chance for a new type of labor leader may actually lie in a full and free acceptance of the closed shop. Not only would this remove a major cause for conflict, but it would lay the groundwork for an insistence upon responsible subsequent conduct. Such recognition of functional responsibility should be reflected in the governmental planning agencies concerned. These should be reconstituted so as to promote the over-all approach rather than to "represent" labor. Instead of agencies such as the Labor Relations Board, the Wage and Hour Administration, or even the Department of Labor, commissions for the various regulated industries should have labor divisions. Alternatively, labor should be one of the interests represented, if the aforementioned functional authorities are set up.1 Unfortunately the present generation of labor leadership is itself a product of conflict psychology, and seemingly holds out but limited hope. Probably a new leadership must come to the fore before the ideal can be approached. In addition to the manifestations of planning in agriculture, there are notable examples elsewhere in our government. The Interstate Commerce Commission now regards its function as the planning of transport as a whole and seeks the inclusion of airways and waterways in its span of control with this in mind. The Rural Electrification Administration ' C f . pp. 21, 53.

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has given a notable demonstration of the technique of planning directed toward clearly defined objectives. This particular agency, under the direction of Morris Cooke, Harlow Person, and others, has adapted for the government service many of the principles and devices which private industry has relied upon for efficient operation. 3 The National Resources Planning Board blue-prints many areas of strategy— postwar stabilization, wise land use, water resources—and even concerns itself with "research as a national asset." It is a significant even though perhaps unconscious commentary on the new role assigned to the President as leader that this board is part of the executive offices, rather than the legislative establishment. It may be that our course in the United States for some time to come will be the continued multiplication of specialized partial planning agencies, still for the most part uncoordinated. Even under these circumstances it is possible that these agencies will eventually, as did the Department of Agriculture, widen their horizons and functionalize their objectives. However, I wonder whether we dare rely upon such an eventual unforeseen evolution, even granting that we are willing in the meantime to put up with the terrific lost motion and human tragedy involved. Has not the time come for us consciously, openly, to commence over-all planning for national objectives worthy of our destiny? Under our Constitution, such objectives should be declared b y the 2 Cf. H. S. Person, "Research and Planning as Functions of Administration and Management," Public Administration Review, Vol. I, autumn, 1940, pp. 65-73.

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President, discussed by the people, and ratified (or modified) by Congress. If these declarations are implemented by genuine over-all planning, they would inevitably involve an integration of the partial planning now going on. For the time being, the over-all objectives would necessarily be dominated by war but the techniques devised and the mood created could and should be carried over into postwar reconstruction, toward what we trust may be fuller, more satisfying values. One should beware of the ostrichlike attitude which condemns over-all planning merely because it was first put into operation in the totalitarian countries. It is perfectly true that Russia led the w a y and that other dictator states have followed. So also have many democracies. In Russia the process was firmly institutionalized with the creation of the Gosplan or Central Planning Board. The first five-year plan served to dramatize planning as a governmental process as no other single event before or since has done. We and every other advanced nation sensed this plan as constituting an implicit challenge alike to our intelligence and to our ingenuity. Unfortunately this early, fairly promising start in Russia became infected with the struggle for power on the part of persons and cliques. This debasing or infecting of the planned objectives by such a struggle was enormously aided by the dominant materialist or mechanistic philosophy of communism. N o mechanistic view of the nature of man can possibly safeguard the personality of man. The originally humanistic objectives set for Soviet planning deteriorated still further when military necessity deflected the Russian strategy from

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its earlier aims of higher living standards and a richer cultural life. Yet the fact that this planned state, when the test came, proved the only Continental power able to stand against the planned might of Germany is not without its tribute to planning as a technique or process. Germany has carried planning to its quintessence. There the strategy is designed to install the "master race" in world dominion. Such a strategy has pervaded every nook and cranny, not only of the economic but also of the social and religious life of the people. If the self-same genius and energy which almost succeeded in this Gargantuan nightmare had been directed into channels constructive and Christian, I venture to say that the German nation and people would today have been the happiest as well as the most respected among mankind—instead of the most hated. Many of the same techniques would have served equally well the more holy objectives —techniques such as price control, labor camps, planned investment, physical fitness, wholesome vacations, coordinated transport, abolition of unemployment through short-term credit subsidy. These are devices wholly compatible with man's dignity and the great freedoms derived therefrom. Without going into further detail, the verdict of experience of the totalitarian nations as a whole is clear on at least one point. Through experiment, many devices have been uncovered which we and other democracies cannot afford to overlook, when the time comes for our own economic machine once again to function at full capacity for human betterment.

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It is appropriate to close this part of our discussion with a brief reference to that one of the democracies which seems to have used planning most successfully, Sweden. Here planning has taken widely different forms. It has included matters as diverse as currency control for a stabilized economy and subsidies to arrest the decline in the birth rate. The important thing to note is not the particular instance or the particular device. It is rather that we should realize how, by the rational means open to democratic peoples, the necessary support has in fact been obtained for over-all objectives. Equally important is the fact that techniques have been devised and accepted for attaining such objectives without the abrogation of individual rights. Time will not allow consideration of the various expressions of the planning process in other nations—housing programs and electric power grids in England; emancipation of the peon in Mexico; self-sufficiency in Italy; coordinated transportation in Switzerland. The important fact for our present purpose is that planning should now be recognized as a process inherent in contemporary and future government—a necessity for the attaining of communal objectives and values in the intricate interrelations that mark our social order. Intelligence in government will have its best foundation in such recognition. x Planning, then, is the devising of strategy to attain values or objectives. In what concrete terms will this strategy be couched? Can we find any single characteristic process of

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the resultant activities of governments? It is at this point that one's attempt to discover a complete or all-inclusive process falters. The nearest word to describe contemporary governmental operations is to call such activity "administration," but this is simply a synonym. It has become very nearly a dehydrated catch-all—used by the political scientist much as the term "behavior" is used by the sociologist, an allinclusive explanation which sheds some illumination as a point of view, but is otherwise not particularly informative. Nevertheless, I do think there is emerging one branch of this governmental activity peculiarly associated with the new order, and this we have already called "adjustment." This process of government comprises activity peculiarly inherent in those aspects of society which dominate the cultural scene. The need to integrate organized groups does so dominate, and it is this which makes adjustment implicit in things as they are. If we confine the term to its governmental usage, adjustment is the process of regulating, disciplining, and above all integrating these groups. W h y this particular term and why give the thing it represents the dignity of a basic process? Just because our underlying assumption throughout has been that modern technology has made the group, rather than the individual, the most significant political and economic reality. Each group constitutes a center of political and economic power which (r) comes into relations, often of conflict, with other groups, and which (2) cooperates with or frustrates the attaining of the over-all values and objectives of society. Furthermore, even though there be no such over-all values and objectives explicitly formu-

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lated or adopted, any lack of cooperation or integration at a lower level results in dispersiveness. This frustrates even the limited objectives of the several disparate groups. In other words, "adjustment" between groups is inherent in the emerging order—much as the "law of supply and demand" governed the relationship between individuals in the old order. There is this notable difference. The law of supply and demand constituted the automatic operation of free exchange. Adjustment is rooted in a power situation—rivalry of strengths or the intervention of community strength. That is to say, adjustment in a larger sense may take place outside the formal governmental orbit, the outcome of a pitting of organized strength against strength, as in disputes between capital and labor; or it may result from governmental activity of a regulatory or integrating nature. It is evident that the latter type is in the ascendancy. The reasons are at least twofold. In the first place, there is the harm or even disaster that grows out of allowing such relations to be determined by relative strength alone. Typical of this situation are the strongly organized monopolies which exploit the virtually defenseless consumer; or the clashes between employer and labor which impair the welfare of third parties, whatever the outcome of the strife. In the second place, government itself is at hand as a ready instrument in such struggles, an instrument to be used to strengthen the side of one or both of the groups involved. In our own nation, laws such as the Robinson-Patman Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and the Wagner Labor Relations Act are among the hundreds thus generated.

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Here, then, is certainly a characteristic type of activity of the new government. Is this adjustment the major activity? Will it even become the exclusive activity, with ramifications into the social order as far-reaching as those into the economic? At present we would certainly exclude much if not most of the sphere of criminal law from its orbit. Furthermore, we are not as yet inclined to view most of the educational, health, and recreational activities of government as belonging in this category. True, things like vocational education have implications in adjustments between and of groups. Nevertheless we are not yet quite willing to bracket these governmental activities into the single category of adjustment and call it an inclusive basic process of its kind—a status accorded to the other five processes listed. We do, however, strenuously maintain that adjustment is sufficiently significant, sufficiently peculiar to our emerging culture pattern, to be included in our present discussion. If we wished to make an inclusive classification of the actual activities of government, we might list them as rendering services, securing safety, and adjustment—and at the same time recognize these categories as overlapping and incomplete. Adjustment is far more than is ordinarily implied in the concept "regulation." Regulation assumes that a problem is isolated. Moreover, regulation often operates on the assumption that an industry has indulged in criminal practices. But functional, not "moral" questions are primarily involved in this type of economic situation; unless we are ready to define morality itself in terms of nonfulfillment of responsibility. Nor should intelligent adjustment be confused with arbi-

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tration. T h e latter is an adjustment of sorts, but it falsely assumes that the meaning of a conflict is exhausted by the interests of the two disputants. Adjustment should recognize the implications to "third" and "fourth" parties of interest in a given situation, even though these parties may be unrepresented at the time of the decision. Even this is not the whole story. Ideally, adjustment should operate in the light of the over-all objectives or values. In other words, at its highest and best, adjustment is the heart, the basic method, of that integrating process which we described earlier as the keynote of modern government. Perhaps it is at this point that we should face squarely the issue so frequently posed in political discussion: " D o we want a government of men and not of laws?" T h e censure thus implied has usually been directed against the various commissions that regulate or adjust so much of our business. Usually the argument for these commissions has followed one of two lines: either attention is called to the need for specialized handling "within the l a w " by such a commission, safeguarded by appeals to the regular courts on issues of law; or the tu quoque argument has been used, and attention called to the human foibles, prejudices, and points of view of the ordinary judiciary in general and the Supreme Court in particular. In other words, government by the judiciary is also government by men. Actually both the original questioners and the respondents have largely missed the central point in the discussion. This is the fact that " l a w " in the sense of general rule is of singularly limited appropriateness in a dynamic and constantly

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changing situation. What is far more likely to be needed is continuous intervention in the public interest, that is, the interest in terms of the agreed-upon objectives or values. It is already apparent that, more and more, adjustment tends toward this continuous intervention. Do we then defend such a "government of men"? It is the business of this essay neither to defend nor to oppose, but only to observe. In this fashion we answer, not that such a government is wise or unwise, safe or dangerous, but that it is inevitable; and efforts should be directed toward ensuring the accountability for results of these men who govern. The day may not be far distant when the only significant clauses, perhaps the only clauses, of a so-called law will be its preamble and the enabling clause. The preamble will declare its object, and the enabling clause will give some person or persons the authority to take the necessary steps to attain this object. The present period of national crisis and war has approximated this state of affairs in all the major nations. Moreover, the strategy evolved in the planning process already discussed will certainly consist largely of proposals for adjustment. Else how will the necessary integration take place and the derivative factors or secondary effects be taken into account? B y introducing this concept of "adjustment," one can make short shrift of most of the labored legal verbiage and ritual that has grown up around recent governmental activity. Finespun attempts to distinguish between "quasilegislative" and "quasi-judicial" activity will give way to an emphasis, not upon rigmarole or procedure, but upon sub-

Planning, Adjustment, and Research

75

stantive results and public interest. Most of our existing regulatory activity will fall naturally into this new pattern. It is really surprising to find how many different devices or rituals are used to effect what is essentially this self-same process of adjustment. Congress enacts an elaborate code for minimum-wage regulation. This is adjustment. Congress authorizes the Department of Agriculture to fix quotas for basic crops. T h e quotas so fixed are adjustments. T h e Federal Trade Commission issues "cease and desist orders" for unfair trade practices. T h e results constitute adjustment. T h e Interstate Commerce Commission fixes railroad rates. This is adjustment. T h e Labor Relations Board fines an employer for failure to bargain collectively. This has adjustment implications. T h e Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice institutes prosecutions for collusive price fixing, with resultant adjustments, not only between buyer and seller, but in the functioning of the economy as a whole. A tax is imposed on oleomargarine; a subsidy is given to airways; a protective tariff is granted glassware; a patent is given a business firm for a new invention—all constitute adjustments. T h e President invokes an economic boycott against those not sporting the Blue Eagle. Government contracts are denied those not observing fair labor standards. "Yard stick" power plants are erected to keep down the electric rates of the privately owned plants with which they compete or are compared. These, and many another device, constitute something deeper and more fundamental than mere regulation. Rather are they intervention, more or less continuous, in the political economy of the nation. T h e y all affect or modify rela-

76

Planning, Adjustment, and Research

tions between power groups, in order to attain more or less clearly formulated objectives or values. Is it possible or even desirable further to classify these and other examples of adjustment? We may say at the very outset that it is contradictory to the whole approach of this book to attach much importance to the current classification by legal device invoked. If we are to distinguish between types, it should be in the purposes or effects of the several measures. One division is conceivable—into those designed to enhance the power of a particular group and those aimed at attaining a community objective. Another possible basis lies in the thing affected—income or power or prestige. Actually there is probably not yet a sufficient crystallization of experience or recognition of the nature of this kind of governmental action to do much more than guess at the types which will emerge. Only a great crisis such as the war furnishes the necessary stimulus and insight for the American people to see the implication of this governmental activity in its totality, and not merely in its separate or dispersive parts. Only a war has been a stimulus powerful enough to enable democratic people to assume the functional approach to economic activity generally or effectively. In war time, the spectacle of sacrifice at the front line imposes the dignity of function upon the activities at home. Public censure is bestowed upon profiteer and striker alike. Planning is taken for granted, and all significant groups are adjusted willingly or otherwise to the common objective. But this is war. The tragedy of adjustment in peace time is its partial or

Planning, Adjustment, and Research

77

limited aim. It is a tragedy springing from our national failure to recognize the integral implications of technology. Once we recognize the necessity for integralism, we shall declare our values and objectives, plan our strategy for attaining them, and set up machinery for the necessary integral adjustment between the groups, so that each may perform its full function in the greater whole. This is our destiny. With such an orientation, it becomes much more profitable to study comparative government in terms of adjustment than in terms of the judicial or executive process. These latter two orthodox categories have little or no meaning in a totalitarian culture; but the new concept of adjustment lends itself to unusually fruitful comparisons between democratic and totalitarian practices. For example, price regulation, currency control, export and import control, regulations as to land use, wage and hour policies—these exist in all industrialized nations. They all constitute adjustment, regardless of the precise legal device invoked. Italy and Portugal may prefer the device of the corporate state to ensure or to pretend to ensure representation of interests concerned. Russia may use commissariats, corporations, and trusts, acting under the guidance of planning boards. England and the United States may diversify and disguise their methods. Germany may use price controllers and sub-fiihrers. Ultimately all alike are moving toward, if they have not already arrived at the fundamental assumption that economic activity is functional., and that it is the business of government so to adjust and integrate that activity that it ministers to the prevailing concepts of "public interest." The process of adjustment has

78

Planning, Adjustment, and Research

become the major activity of all mature governments, the hall mark of their maturity. T h e variations noted—and they are considerable—are derived from the variations in national objectives and values, and not from the presence or absence of the process itself. 11 There remains one final process inherent in contemporary government. This is the process of research or fact-finding. It seems almost unnecessary to elaborate upon it, and yet nowhere, as far as I am aware, do we find it included in lists of governmental processes. The reason is that we have customarily described governmental processes in ritualistic rather than in operative terms. However, once the processes are defined in these operative rather than in the aforementioned ritualistic terms, the place of research in the galaxy becomes obvious. It is the necessary underpinning for both planning and adjustment. T h e earlier assumption held that there existed a universal democratic competence to comprehend issues. This assumption has long since foundered upon the rocks of specialization. T h e choice that remains is whether to follow the scientist or the demagogue: a choice between the rule of fact and the rule of prejudice. T h e public in our own country has already come to insist upon scientific experts in health, education, engineering; and increasingly has held its elected officials and representatives accountable for standards of competence in appointments in these functions. So in time we may hope for similar insistences in connection with the infinitely more

Planning, Adjustment, and Research

79

complicated research attendant upon the processes of planning and adjustment in the economic field. Hence the first emphasis must be put upon the merit system in recruiting and promotions. If similar emphasis can also be laid upon demonstrated accomplishments, the likelihood of accurate and thorough research is greatly augmented. Actually, research can be a power weapon in the arsenal of democratic practice, a weapon making for accountability on the part of officials. The more rigid and scientific the standards imposed in the basic fact finding, the more objective and impartial becomes the government. The new type of civil servant must leave his trail behind him, where fellow scientists and research workers in private life or attached to legislative commissions may trace the processes leading to his conclusions. More and more, deviation from truth can be unerringly determined, and punishment can and will follow, whether for betrayal of objectives and values or for sheer incompetence. In this setting, checks and balances are associated, not so much with grants of power as with demonstrations of competence. If, for example, in our American setting, our Congress becomes the custodian of our values, then Congressional inquiries and hearings and the Legislative Reference Service become instruments to check upon the validity of administrative research in realizing these values. It becomes possible to insist that such research be accurate, complete, unbiased, and, above all, directed toward democratically determined values. Wherein is the research process an integral part of the new government? Through research, needs are revealed,

80

Planning, Adjustment, and Research

where governmental and private effort are falling short of the achievement of values. T h r o u g h research, methods are discovered and tried out f o r remedying such deficiencies. Through research, the secondary or derivative effects of given policies can be uncovered, and a more perfect integration planned. Through research, the parties involved in the adjustment process are confronted with the pitiless logic of facts. T h e implications in such a setting are far-reaching. F o r example, if groups are in truth functional, then they also must be accountable. This accountability is in terms of the spotlight of fact finding, turned upon all their relevant activities. It includes the accounts and methods of the trade unions, as well as the trade practices and cost accountings of the industrialists. T h e services of the farmer and physician are measured in the light of their adequacy for demonstrated human needs. If functional authorities with interest representation should be created f o r certain industries, the factfinding secretariat presumably attached to such authorities might well be the most important single factor in the success or failure of the effort. It would be this secretariat, for example, which could ascertain the capacity of the industry to establish low enough prices to operate fully; and could formulate the conditions under which higher profits or wages would be justified or practicable. T h e scope of research is as wide as the orbit of relevant problems. So far as I am aware, no study exists of the extent of governmental research throughout the civilized world. H o w ever, w e do have certain estimates available, especially for

Planning, Adjustment, and Research

81

our own country. The most recent and certainly the most comprehensive survey is the 1938 report of the National Resources Committee, entitled Research—A National Resource. This indicated that during the fiscal year 1936-37 no less than $120,000,000 was spent by the Federal Government alone on research. The figures of recent growth are even more striking. In 1896 (page 7), only 4,089, or 2.3 percent, of the civilian employees in the executive branch dealt with professional, scientific, or technical matters. Of this number, the largest groups were engineers, drafters, teachers (Indian Service), and lawyers. It is doubtful whether there were 1,000 altogether who might be regarded as engaged in research, and of these there was scarcely a smattering of economists. There are no strictly comparable figures of recent date, but about 65,000 persons in 1937 fell into the professional and scientific series, and in 1939, there were more than 13,500 economists, social scientists, and statisticians alone.3 If we turn from these figures to more general evidences of the role of research, we would certainly include the monumental report of the Temporary National Economic Committee, the series of monographs of the National Resources Planning Board, the yearbooks of the Department of Agriculture, the cost-of-living studies of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as among the most significant. These, and others like them, will blue-print governmental planning and adjustment for years to come. 3 A. C. Edwards and B. Wermiel, "Occupations of Federal Employees," Personnel Administration, Vol. I, April, 1940, p. 8.

82

Planning, Adjustment, and Research in

Here, then, are at least six major processes, a list submitted as fundamental to an interpretation of the modern government in action. Under the old dispensation, government was law-making, law-enforcing, law-interpreting. Today, in nation after nation, even in our own, this picture is proving inadequate, if not obscurantist, in any true understanding. Things are no longer so simple that generalizations as to "shall" or "shall not" can meet the needs of a dynamic, interrelated, specialized order. Today, for better or worse, we find ourselves and our activities so inextricably interrelated that we must formulate, adopt, and pursue our values and objectives jointly. In these processes — essentially governmental in the new sense of the term—the twin processes of leadership and popular control and influence interplay. T h e pursuit and attainment of values and objectives will require the planning of strategy, and such strategy will be found to consist largely of adjustment. T o be truly successful the planning and adjustment must rest upon research. Instead of separation of powers, the modern government in action calls for interrelation of processes. I am all too conscious that this interpretation leaves hanging a number of loose threads. It is not complete, especially in the realm of governmental activity. This is to be expected from one who, like myself, holds that human relations are a continuum. Nevertheless, it is submitted as an aid to the understanding of the vast and far-reaching changes which have overtaken democracies and dictatorships alike. Such

Planning, Adjustment, and Research

83

validity as it may have will be in proportion to the skill with which the other portions of the social order —notably its technology and the derivatives thereof—have been interpreted, for no one sector of a social order can long remain culturally incompatible with the other major sectors and survive. Rituals may be retained for a time, but they become mere façades. T h e y disguise the deeper realities and hamper progress toward a fuller, more effective, more satisfying social order. For such a social order we must think steadily and clearly. We may differ as to what values should prevail. We cannot differ as to the fact that some values should so prevail. If integralism must come, some of us hope it may be Christian. At its highest and best, the citizenship that is Christian knows that duty and function are prerequisite to the Kingdom of God among the free.

Index Accountability, of officials f o r results, j i , 52, 55; efforts should be directed toward ensuring, f o r results of men w h o govern, 74; group, 80 A c t i v i t y , processes in governmental, 57 Adjustment, process o f , 70-78; the sociological derivative of specialization of occupational groups, 19; b y arbitration, 20; term confined to governmental usage, 70; between groups inherent in emerging order, 7 1 ; rooted in a p o w e r situation, 7 1 ; keynote of modern government, 73; tends to become continuous intervention, 74; devices used to effect process o f , 75; tragedy o f , in peace time, 76; p r o f itable to study comparative g o v ernment in terms o f , 77; research the underpinning f o r , 78, 82 Administration, term, 8; irrational organization o f , 27; t w o corollaries within reach of science of public, 52; a s y n o n y m of contemporary governmental operations, 70 Administrative assistant to the President, 46 Agricultural Adjustment A c t , 63 Agriculture, manifestations of planning in, 63 ff. Agriculture, Department o f , part in price determination, 9; objectives, 63; yearbooks, 81 Arbitration, 20, 72 f. A r n o l d , T h u r m a n , 31

Associations, control of price and output b y , increasing, 58 Associative action, society's dominating reality, 58 " B a s i c , " use of term, 36 Brooks, R o b e r t C., vi Business, unplanned or f r e e zone in, 62 Cabinet, devices w h i c h have superseded, in advising President, 46 Capitalism, 7; approximation to equality between r e w a r d and productivity, 22; search f o r alternatives to contemporary folklore of, 28 Change, e f f e c t of a major, on culture as a whole, vi, 4 Christianity, advantage to a planned society, 6 1 ; need f o r values o f , 83 Church, claims leadership of ends, 45.49 Churchill, W i n s t o n , 47 Citizenship, at its highest and best, .8? Civic education, 52 Civil servant, new type, 79 Class ascendancy, threatens survival of liberty, 59 Clipping services, 48,53 Closed shop, 65 Collective action, society's dominating reality, 58 Conflict, in the social organism, 37 Congress, part in price determination, 9; resentful of technical ad-

86

Index

vice, 46; ascendancy of executive at expense of, within constitutional framework, 47; press reaction to hearings of, 53 Constitution, Supreme Court the guardian of, 7; adaptability the hall mark of a good, 30; adaptation to new social forces which call f o r new processes, 47 Consumer demands, satisfaction of, should be community objective, "3 Cooke, Morris, 66 Cooperation, integration calls for, 24 Cooper Foundation, vi "Corporate state," 21, 53 Criminal law, exclusion from orbit of new government, 72 Crop limitation program, 64 Crops, subsidized diversification of, 64 Cultural analysis, vi Cultural situation, which exalted rights above duties, 23, 26 Cultural synthesis, emerging today, 10 Culture lag, 26 Democracy, believers in, stress intelligence, 5; accountability, 17; often defined exclusively in terms of freedoms or rights, 23; most serious peril, 24; of the future, 51; safety of, inextricably associated with religion, 60; reconciliation of planning and, 61 Dispersiveness, 19 Dictators, technique of, 54 Dictatorship, is escapist, 5; nonaccountability, the essential element, 17; acceptance the basis of power, 5° Economic field, functional approach to economic activity, 14, 76, 77;

basis of motivations, 18; planning and adjustment in, 79 Education, social role in politics, 49; should be directed toward individual's acceptance of technical competence in government, 52 Eire, values of the new, 40 Elections, 51; confusion of issues, 54 Electorate, group-dominated, 27 Ends, may be popularly determined, 49 England, ascendancy of Prime Minister over Parliament, 47; planning, 69 Equality of opportunity, 62 Executive process, irrational organization of, 27; has no meaning in a totalitarian culture, 77 Experience, partial: implicit social and political results, 19 Fact-finding, see Research Fanner, effort to secure higher standard of living for, 63 Fascist Grand Council, 40 Federal Trade Commission, regulation of trade practices, 8 Five-year plan, dramatized planning as a government process, 67 Food, technology says enough f o r all, 64 "Food stamp plan," 64 Freedom, psychological imperative of, 23 Free zone for competition, 62 Frustration, in the social organism, 38; individuals will not put up with, 58 Functional authorities, 21, 53; labor representation on, 65 Gallup polls, 54 General good, 35; judiciarv lacks definition of, 28; public interest, 21

Index Germany, need for integration and unified values, 39; degenerate constitutional framework, 46; planning designed to install "master race" in world dominion, 68 Government, classification of powers as legislative, executive, and judicial, v, 4, 5, 6, 10, 25; quest for a satisfactory, v, 5; emerging pattern of new and modem, vi; of laws and not of men, 3; need to examine emergent cultural synthesis, 10; and technology, 11; demands technical competence, 16; keys to underlying political processes of today and tomorrow, 21; in our new social order, 25; offices have clientele among group-dominated electorate, 27; search for alternatives to contemporary symbols of, 28; processes in field of ideas, 29 fL, 57 ff.; features which are implicit in the new technology, 31; need for a clear definition of, 32; major processes culturally inherent in modern, 36; leadership as to ends and as to means, 45; institutions of representative, fronts for battle of special groups, 50; decisions should be taken out of hands of national, 52; adjustment as the keynote of modern, 73; of men and not of laws, 73, 74; research or fact-finding as a process of, 78; under old dispensation was law-making, law-enforcing, lawinterpreting, 82 Governments, local: role increasingly circumscribed, 50 Griffith, Margaret D., vi Groups, specialization of, 11; partial and shared experiences the basis for organized action, 19; major cases of judiciary concern the powers of, 28; ascendancy of,

8?

threatens survival of liberty, 59; modern technology has made, the most significant political and economic reality, 70; adjusted to common objective, 76; accountability, 80 Hague, Mayor, 60 Hitler, A d o l f , 38, 55, 59 Human relations, a continuum, 34 Ideas, government processes in field of, 29 ff., 57 Impasse of Democracy, The (Griffith)^ Income, effect of high, 24 Individual, asserting himself, 6; specialization, 11; the unit dynamo of political behavior, jo; price of violation of dignity of, 59; Magna Charta of the, in a planned order, 60; participation in overall planning, 61 Industrialized nations, processes of government present in all, 63 Industry, interlocking demands, 13; scope of research in, 80 Institutionalization of leadership, 46 Institutions, strange new, emerging, 9 Integralism, necessity for, 77; hope that it may be Christian, 83 Integration, need for, 12; technological or engineering problem, 13; objective of, 14; calls for cooperation, 24; imperative for effective functioning of social order, 35; of centers of power an essential of new state, 55; see also Arbitration Intellectual surrender, 44 Interlocking nature of machine age, '3 Interstate Commerce Commission, 65

88

Index

Intervention, need for continuous, in public interest, 74; in political economy of the nation, 75 Italy, integration of purpose, value, and activity, blueprint for, 40; degenerate constitutional framework, 46; Chamber of Deputies, 55; planning, 69 Japan, instruments for value adoption, 40 Judaism, advantage to a planned society, 61 Judicial process has no meaning in a totalitarian culture, 77 Judiciary, functions in a lost world, 28; government by, is also government by men, 73 Labor, preoccupation of, before the war, 64; best chance for a new type of leadership, 65; commissions for regulated industries should have labor divisions, 65 Labor Statistics, Bureau of, 81 Labor union activity, peace-time attitude, 64 Law, in sense of general rule, 73; soon only clauses may be preamble and enabling clause, 74 Laws, government of, and not of men, 3; definition, 8 Leadership, process of, 43-49; leader-politician, 45; foci of, 45; institutionalizing of process, 46; temporary and permanent elements, 49; popular influence and control interwoven with processes of, 53; best chance for new type of labor leader, 65 Legal forms, lack of consistency in use made of, 8 Legislatures, 27 Liberty, doctrine of, needs a theological base, 60 Locke, John, 6,7

Machine production, interlocking nature, 11,13 Man, the chief end of a cosmic purpose, 30 Marshall, L. C „ 36 Mass production, 4 Means, the province of the technician, 4j, 49 Merit system, 79 Mexico, planning, 69 Military strength of a nation threatens survival of liberty, 59 Money, desire for, will be harnessed to productivity in the new order, 29

Money device, as a measure of power, 11, 22; lies back of producer-mindedness, 24 Montesquieu, C. deS., 6, 7 Mussolini, Benito, 38,40, j j , 60 Nationalism, 60 National Recovery Administration, 48 National Resources Committee, 1938 report, 81 National Resources Planning Board, 66,81 Nations, not suited to democratic institutions, 9 Natural rights, doctrine of, needs a theological base, 60 N e w order, familiar landmarks from the old, 29; need for articulating pattern of, in clear and concrete terms, 31; accountability in economic and social field, 55 Objectives, see Values Office of Emergency Management, 46 Office of Facts and Figures, 48 Office of the Coordinator of Information, 46

Index

89

Officials, accountability for results.

Political leadership, role of national,

Old order, disintegration of the, 328 Opinion, public, process of expression of, 49-55 Organization, chief contemporary imperative in field of government, 9; of technology demanded, 12, 24 Output, limitation of, 64 Over-all planning, see Planning, over-all

Political motivations, basis of, 18 Political rights, 11,22 Political scientists, schools of thought 3 2-3 j Politics, wielding of group power in field of, 19; basis for assigning a social role in, to education and religion and to leaders of each, 49 Polls of public opinion, 54 Poverty, insistence that it be ended, 11 Power groups, modification of relations between, 76 Prejudices, power of, 48 President, devices which have superseded cabinet in advising, 46; new concept of office, 47; requisites for, 52; new role assigned to, 66 Press opinion, studies of, 48, 53 Price determination, 9 Price-fixing, rituals of, 8 "Producer-mindedness," of our political behavior, 41 Profit and rewards, 23 Profiteer, public censure bestowed upon, 76 Propaganda, 44; basis for justification of techniques of, 48 Public interest, 21, 77 Public opinion, 49-55; public-opinion polls, 54 Public relations officers, 48 Purchasing power, flow of, 12 Purpose implicit in organization, 37

Pennock, Roland J., vi Person, Harlow, 66 Planned order, Magna Charta of the individual in a, 60 Planning, process of, 57—69; need for, 12, 13; reconciliation of democracy and, 61; accountability on part of official planners, 63; partial, 66,67; five-year plan dramatized, as a governmental process, 67; the devising of strategy to attain objectives, 69; strategy evolved will consist largely of proposals for adjustment, 74; taken for granted, 76; research the underpinning for, 78, 82 Planning, over-all, 57; risks, 58; participation of individuals in, 61; time to commence, for national objectives, 66; should be carried over into postwar reconstruction, 67 Planning agencies, 66 Plebiscite of the dictator state, 50 Plenty, possibility of, 11 Pluralism, 34 "Police state," 33 Political behavior, new channels of constructive, 31 Political economy, features implicit in new technology, 31

Race ascendancy, threatens survival of liberty, 59 Radio, influence upon effectiveness of leadership, 47 Raw materials, control of exhaustible, 62 Rediscount rate, control of, 62

9°

Index

Regulation, 72 Religion, church claims leadership of ends, 45, 49; safety of democracy inextricably associated with religion, 60; unites duty and freedom, 83 Resource Research — A National (National Resources Committee), 81 Research or fact-finding as a process of government, 78-81; scope in industry, 80; promotes accountability of officials, 79; extent of governmental, 80 f. Rewards, individual, 1 1 ; should coincide with social usefulness, 22, 23 Rights, individual, 1 1 , 2 2 ; not debatable if man is accepted as end and not as means, 30; only safeguard f o r , 60 Robespierre, Maximilien de, 59 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 41 "Rugged individualism," 23 Rural Electrification Administration, 65 Russia, prevailing values and objectives determined in Politburo of Communist party, 39; Gosplan or Central Planning Board, 67; only power able to stand against G e r many, 68 Salamanca, L u c y , vi Salazar, Oliveira, 38 Security, 24 Self-realization, 30, 35 Society, dispersive: passing, 25 Soil conservation program, 64 Specialist, activity a function in community pattern, 17 Specialization, technology of machine age implies, 15; two consequences, 16; adjustment the sociological derivative of, 19

Spending-saving ratio, control of, 62 "Stakhanovism," pillar of the new communism, 29 Stalin, Joseph, 39, J9 State, see also Government; root idea of corporate or organic, 21; passing of dispersive, 25; worship of, adds evil of obscurantism to evil of group dominance, 60 Statesmanship, new channels of constructive, 31 Striker, public censure bestowed upon, 76 Superpatriotism, 60 Supply and demand, law of, 12; assumptions of free operation of, no longer true, 14 Supplv-and-demand economy, 57 f., 7' Supreme Court, guardian of Constitution, 7 Swarthmore College, lectures, v ; Department of Political Science, vi Sweden, torch of value formation carried by Social Democratic party and cooperatives, 40; successful use of planning, 69 Switzerland, planning, 69 Technical competence, need f o r acceptance of authority of, 16; requisites for, in officials, 51 Technology, 11 ; organization of, to its full in service of humanity, 12; and its derivatives, 15; derivatives operate in a heritage of liberal capitalistic culture, 21 ; gap between technological reality and political and economic ritual, 29; productive, demands community of purpose, 37; effect upon individual choice and effort as basis f o r production, 57; has made the group the most significant politi-

Index cal and economic reality, 70; failure to recognize implications of, 77 Temporary National Economic Committee, 81 Totalitarians, reserve self-realization for a privileged class, 30; over-all planning, 67; devices uncovered through experiment, 69 T r a d e practices, Federal Trade Commission regulation of, 8 Unemployment, mass: people will not tolerate, 11, 58; psychologically intolerable, 12; causing of, a crime, r j Unintegrated activity, 14 United States, threefold aspect of government, 7; value adoption in, 41; leadership in, 46, 47,48; public opinion, expressions of in, J3 f.; planning in, 63-67; adjustment in, 75 f.; governmental research in, 81

91

Values, adoption of, a governmental process, IJ, 35-43, 55; community objectives or, 14; technically competent should accept community values, 17; effecting integration in light of, 36; process of formation and adoption, 36, 37; precise definition, 38; need for unification, 38; time to commence over-all planning for national, 66; devising of strategy to attain, 69 Veblen, Thorstein, 23 Vested interests, power of, 48 Wallace, Henry A., 64 W a r , furnishes stimulus for American people to see implication of governmental activity in its totality, 76 Wickard, Claud R., 64

OTHER

BOOKS

BY ERNEST

S.

GRIFFITH

The Modern Development of City Government, ford University Press, 1927

Ox-

Current Municipal Problems, Houghton Mifflin, 1933 History of American City Government (Vol. I, The Colonial Period), Oxford University Press, 1938 The Impasse of Democracy, Harrison-Hilton, 1939