This study represents an attempt to apply quantitative methods to the prediction of human events that generally have been regarded as highly uncertain, namely, decisions by the Supreme Court of the United States. The study is designed to demonstrate that, in at least one area of judicial review, it is possible to take some decided cases, to identify factual elements that influenced the decisions, to derive numerical values for these elements by using a formula, and then to predict correctly the decisions of the remaining cases in the area specified. The analysis will be made independently of what the Court said by way of reasoning in these cases; it will rely only on the factual elements which have been emphasized by the justices in their opinions and on their votes to affirm or set aside convictions. Changes in Court personnel made no decisive difference in the pattern of judicial action in this area; so the analysis will not need to take into account the fact that twenty-five different justices have occupied the nine seats on the Court during the period covered, i.e., the past quarter century.

Many writers have attempted to describe the intention of The Prince by using the term “scientific.” This description is defensible, and even helpful, provided it is properly understood. The present article is meant to prepare such an understanding.

I. The Prince combines the characteristics of a treatise and a tract for the times.

Let us begin at the beginning. In the Epistle Dedicatory Machiavelli gives three indications of the subject-matter of the book: he has incorporated into it his knowledge of the actions of great men both modern and ancient; he dares to discuss princely government and to give rules for it; he possesses knowledge of the nature of princes. As appears from the Epistle Dedicatory, from the book itself, and from what the author says elsewhere, knowledge of the actions of great men, i.e., historical knowledge, supplies only materials for knowledge of what princely government is, of the characteristics of the various kinds of principalities, of the rules with which one has to comply in order to acquire and preserve princely power, and of the nature of princes.

The age old contest between the proponents of natural law and their opponents continues unabated, and a solution does not seem in sight. The reason, it seems to me, is simply that representatives of either side often quite literally do not know what they themselves, as well as their opponents, are talking about. Instead of arguing for their respective theories and against those of their antagonists, they knock down straw men. And since there are periodic “revivals” of natural law, and of its denial as well, the game continues endlessly. Yet, I believe it is sufficient to state the issue clearly to realize that the advocates of natural law adhere to an incorrect epistemological view, and that political thought must dispense with natural law because it is a mistaken doctrine.

The core of Oppenheim's attack on what he calls the natural law thesis is the contention that it rests upon an incorrect epistemology:

To subscribe to the natural law thesis is to adhere to the epistemological theory of value-cognitivism. Value-cognitivism claims that there exist intrinsic value-judgments which are cognitively true or false, regardless of the speaker's or listener's intrinsic value-commitments.

In contrast to this view is the epistemological theory of value non-cognitivism, which tells us that

Value-words do not designate objects, and it is misleading to use nouns such as “Justice” and “Goodness.” … A value-expression in an intrinsic value-judgment refers to a relation which holds between an evaluating subject and some object or event or state of affairs which he values intrinsically, whether positively or negatively.

I take the foregoing to mean that, to predicate just or good of a law or of a man does not tell us anything about the law or man, but rather describes an attitude toward the law or man. Justice, as a noun, is misleading, because justice is not a “thing” or a “this”; it is not a substance but an attribute; not a real noun, but an hypostatized adjective, a quality of evaluating subjects, never of the objects of which the subjects themselves always predicate it.

1. “Facts.” Jaffa holds value non-cognitivism (NC) to imply both “complete credulity concerning ‘facts’” and “total skepticism” about facts. One and the same epistemological theory can hardly be akin to naive realism as well as to skepticism. NC implies neither. As an outgrowth of modern empiricism, NC considers concepts such as “man,” “chair,” “atom” as constructs, and statements such as “man is a political animal,” “this is a chair” as hypotheses. Empirical hypotheses are scientifically meaningful if they can be tested, however indirectly, by observational data. Most of Jaffa's comments fail to meet this criterion of meaningfulness because they contain words such as “reality,” “order of the soul,” “man's humanity,” “Justice,” which cannot be operationally defined. “The objectivity of the external world cannot be demonstrated,” Jaffa concedes. Then why talk about it? Physicists never “debate the nature of the universe” and never ask “whether it has objective existence.” Physicists establish empirical laws in order to explain past and predict future events (not “reality”). Political scientists do the same—unless they turn metaphysicians.

Recent forays into administrative theory have impaired the neat dichotomy between politics and administration that was postulated, either as description or as ideal, by fin dė siècle political scientists and reformers. The intertwining of policy formulation and policy execution is a recognized fact of the administrative process. The questioning of this early dogma of public administration has opened up speculation as to what the proper relationship between the two aspects of the governmental process ought to be. Dilemmas have been identified but no systematic and fully acceptable solution has been propounded. Evidently, an answer cannot be given without delineating and understanding the matrix of politics in which administration inevitably is imbedded.

Of all the changes that have occurred in Yugoslavia since 1948, one of the most interesting is the development of a new theory and role for the Communist Party. Now officially called the League of Communists, the Yugoslav Party illustrates both the well-known dominant role of Communist parties in states where they have come to power and at the same time the peculiar nature of Yugoslav Communism that has set it apart from the Soviet variety.

Organized on the Soviet pattern and headed by men steeped in the Soviet tradition, the Yugoslav Communists even in 1945 occupied a position like that of their comrades in the USSR, where, as Stalin said, “not a single important political or organizational question is decided without directions from the Party ….” Even after the Cominform dispute had produced a new ideological pattern, a more liberal approach to Communism, political and economic decentralization and profuse professions of democracy, few could doubt that, as Stalin said about the situation in the Soviet Union, “the Party governs the country.”

Neal's article constitutes a good survey of what the Yugoslav Communists have said in recent years about the role of the Communist Party in their system. From a critical standpoint, however, it stops short of cutting through the Communist jargon. This has led him into taking contradictory positions. In the comments that follow, I will confine myself to examining his major conclusion that Yugoslav Communism has “pioneered in new forms and theories of Marxism,” and the related inference, implied more than once, that Yugoslavia may be evolving toward democracy.

The title of this essay poses not one vexing issue but two, and each of them sharply challenges the student of American political thought. The first might be called the common problem of political theory—the question of its relevance to the institutional facts of life. How, it is asked, can the analysis of political ideas help to illuminate our understanding of political action? Can theory lead us to a surer knowledge of why governments and electorates behave as they do? Can it help us to diagnose and prescribe? Or is the study of theory, on the contrary, justified simply on the ground that the words of Plato and Hobbes and Locke are part of what Matthew Arnold called culture: “the best that has been thought or known in the world”? This is, I take it, a problem universal among students of political thought, whether they choose America, Europe, or China as their realm; and it lends itself to no easy answers.

McCloskey's essay offers a justification for and an approach to the study of American political thought. Justification is needed, as he puts it bluntly and persuasively, because American political thought is second-rate. His proposed approach to its study constitutes a solution to the problem posed by that second-rateness. That is, he offers not just one possible valuable way to consider American political thought but, rather, the way which justifies the study.

The justification for studying second-rate thought, he tells us, cannot be the same as that for first-rate political thought. To use his example, the study of Plato can be defended on the ground that it is somehow “intrinsically self-warranting.” He distinguishes another major justification for the study of first-rate thought, namely, its relevance to the understanding of politics, that is, presumably, to the understanding of politics regardless of time or place. But the study of American political thought, because it is second-rate, cannot be justified on the first ground; the student of American political thought “must stand on the leg of relevance if he is to stand at all.”

The appearance of the second Hoover Commission reports is an invitation to attempt to place them in the context of official and unofficial efforts over the past quarter century to give order and meaning to the study of public administration and of its leading example, our national administration. The object here is more than bibliographical, and if it seems ambitious it can hardly be more so than the Commission's own work. No previous study has been so amply financed, or has employed so many people, or has enjoyed such official and public relations support, in and out of government, as this one. What do the reports have to contribute, to knowledge and to policy about organization?

No changes in the personnel of the Supreme Court occurred during the 1955 Term.

Noteworthy among publications dealing with the Court and with constitutional law which appeared during the period under review were a first biography of James Wilson, a member of the original Court; symposia on the late Justice Roberts, the late Professor Thomas Reed Powell, and Justice Black; several interesting reappraisals of John Marshall; and additional installments of Professor Mason's important work on Justice Stone. A full scale critique of Charles Beard's interpretation of the Constitution was published, as well as a variety of writings on historical aspects of the Court, and on a wide range of problems of judicial practice and public law.