A discipline, at least to the initiated, is known more by the questions it asks than by the answers that it provides. For questions indicate goals or aspirations that answers may not reach. At certain periods, however, a field of knowledge may be more conspicuously characterized by the controversies that occur among those who work in it. When these take the form of debates over the adequacy of particular answers, as determined by agreed, even though sometimes imprecise, criteria of assessment, they are unlikely to be highly prominent, except for the immediate participants. When, on the other hand, such controversies extend to the standing of the questions asked and place in dispute the means of appraising answers, it becomes obvious to all that something is happening that has implications for the entire field. Clearly the discipline is undergoing redefinition or at least an attempt at redefinition that may sharply alter its meaning.

Marx is surely right when he says that the way men earn their living shapes their relations to each other and to the state; but this is, of course, only the beginning. Aside from all the other non-economic factors which also have these effects, there is the matter of the source of income, the level of income, and, especially, the security of income. Moreover, each of these factors has both an individual effect, a set of influences apparent in the study of individual enrichment or immiseration, and a social effect, the influences which appear when whole societies become richer or more secure economically. So I am led to inquire into what is happening to men's political interests, behavior, and attitudes toward politics and government in an Age of Affluence, a period when men's economic security and income have increased and when, for the first time in history, it appears likely that the business cycle can now be controlled. Like Marx's, my interest is in change over time.

Mass immigration ended fifty years ago, but national origins continue to be a salient dimension in many people's perceptions of themselves and of others. Where this salience is widespread, ethnicity plays a major role in politics. Ethnicity is often an important independent variable in voting behavior. “Ethnic voting,” as I shall call it, has two manifestations. (1) Members of an ethnic group show an affinity for one party or the other which cannot be explained solely as a result of other demographic characteristics. Voters of Irish descent, to take a familiar example, are more likely than other voters of similar economic status to be Democrats. (2) Members of an ethnic group will cross party lines to vote for—or against—a candidate belonging to a particular ethnic group.

Roll-call votes are being used increasingly to throw light on various aspects of the legislative process. As long as these votes are neither simply unanimous nor cast purely on party lines, they contain information that can often be rendered more intelligible by the simplification or condensation of many votes into fewer variables or dimensions. The researcher interested in a particular legislative decision can thus profit by seeing whether it exemplifies a more general and repeated type of occurrence. The techniques of analysis used in studying legislative votes are broadly applicable to collegial bodies of many sorts, including municipal, state, and national legislative bodies; party congresses and conventions; the U.S. Supreme Court; and the United Nations General Assembly.

Two major questions have been asked which lead to the search for different kinds of simplifying variables in this analysis. One concerns the issues that divide a given group of legislators at a given time, i.e., what general matters are being argued about? The second concerns the subgroups of legislators within the group selected for study: what are the blocs, factions, cliques, and the like, whose more persistent existence is reflected by the division on a given vote?

The House Committee on Ways and Means, according to its members, is assigned the responsibility of resolving some of the most partisan issues coming before Congress: questions of taxation, social welfare legislation, foreign trade policy, and management of a national debt which exceeds $300 billion. Yet members of the Committee also contend, at the same time, that they handle most of these problems in a “responsible” way. A Republican member of Ways and Means echoed the views of his fellow Committee members when he said “it's the issues that are partisan, not the members.” A Democratic member went so far as to claim that Ways and Means is “as bipartisan a committee as you have in the House.” And a Treasury Department official who has worked closely with Ways and Means for several years believes that it is a partisan committee in the sense that you get a lot of partisan voting. But while you get a lot of party votes the members discuss the bills in a nonpartisan way. It's a very harmonious committee, the members work very well and harmoniously together. Sure there is partisanship but they discuss the issues in a nonpartisan way.

Robert H. Jackson died more than a decade ago, and his departure from the Supreme Court marked the end of an era in American judicial politics, since he left behind as a minority those remaining of the colleagues who had joined with him to compose the so-called Roosevelt Court. He was still very much alive when I interviewed him shortly after the Steel Seizure decision in 1952, and subsequently when the initial stages of the present research were designed and carried out. His unanticipated and fatal heart attack had two incidental consequences that are relevant here: it fixed an unavoidable natural closure for the data—his activities-that I was studying, and at the same time imposed an insurmountable foreclosure upon one of my research ambitions. For the best way to validate generalizations about a man's attitudinal predispositions and belief systems is to check them as predictions against his future behavior; social scientists understandably repose lesser confidence in findings about hypotheses that can be validated only statistically, and then only by retrospective testing. Perhaps it was an error, therefore, not to have switched from Jackson to some other justice as a subject; but even one who chose a younger justice (such as Arthur Goldberg) might have guessed wrongly about his tenure, and Jackson's career did offer several unusual advantages—for reasons that will be explained shortly—which it seemed important to exploit.

I want to try to connect the course of several regimes with what, for want of a better name, I shall call “confining conditions”—the particular social and intellectual conditions present at the births of these regimes. Do I prejudice the case by calling the sum total of the prerevolutionary situation confining conditions rather than calling them more neutrally, as Val Lorwin suggested to me, simply antecedent conditions? Yet every situation which a new regime finds at its inception is an antecedent one. I am concerned specifically—and only—with the conditions that have to be overcome if the new regime is to continue. How the new regime may accomplish this, or may fail to, is the subject of this paper. Therefore I consider the nature of the confining conditions, chiefly those of social structure; the nature of the new regime; and the nature of the methods available to it, as well as those it adopts to overcome the confining conditions.

Marx's century-old socio-political analysis of peasant nations and of India's traditional village and caste society, because it captures so much of contemporary social and political analysis, provides a convenient framework for critical discussion and evaluation of the relationship between traditional society and modern politics in India. Peasant nations such as mid-nineteenth century France, Marx observed in the The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, are formed “by simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sackful of potatoes.” Objectively, peasants form a class; the mode of life, interests and culture which flow from their productive circumstances separate peasants from other classes and place their class in opposition to other classes. But subjectively and practically, peasants form a vast mass, “the members of which live in similar conditions, but without entering into manifold relations with one another.”

One might suppose that if political theorists are by now clear about anything at all, they should be clear about the problem of political obligation and the solution to it most commonly offered, the doctrine of consent. The greatest modern political theorists took up this problem and formulated this answer. The resulting theories are deeply imbedded in our American political tradition; as a consequence we are already taught a sort of rudimentary consent theory in high school. And yet I want to suggest that we are not even now clear on what “the problem of political obligation” is, what sorts of “answers” are appropriate to it, what the consent answer really says, or whether it is a satisfactory answer. This essay is designed to point up the extent of our confusion, to explore some of the ground anew as best it can, and to invite further effort by others. That such effort is worthwhile, that such political theory is still worth considering and that it can be made genuinely relevant to our world, are the assumptions on which this essay rests and the larger message it is meant to convey.