Few movements in the history of American politics and political thought have been of equal immediate or enduring importance with that associated with the name of Thomas Jefferson. And yet Jefferson never published anything other than very brief and inadequate discussions of the principles for which he stood. His only systematic exposition of his political ideas is found in his famous Notes on Virginia. This work, however, was written in 1781-82 and deals but remotely with the issues which were to occupy the stage after 1789. Neither in Jefferson's own writings nor in those of Madison and Monroe, his successors as official head of the Republican party and as president of the United States, do we find any adequate exposition of the theories associated with the era of Jeffersonian democracy. It is only in the extensive works of John Taylor of Caroline, a friend and associate of these men in the political battles of that period, that such an exposition is to be found. Jefferson wrote that “Colonel Taylor and myself have rarely, if ever, differed in any political principle of importance.” John Randolph said that Taylor's “disinterested principles” were “the only bond of union among Republicans.” And Timothy Pickering calls him “the Goliath of the party.” As Henry Adams has said, Taylor was regarded as a political thinker of the first rank by the Virginia school and by many other leaders of his time, but it is equally true that his writings have occupied a position of obscurity since his death. This obscurity, however, does not alter the fact that they were influential in their time and are today the best source of information concerning the principles of both the earlier and later phases of the movement initiated by Jefferson during the first years under the Constitution.

The political groups in the Kizoku-in, or House of Peers, are of more importance than the scant attention paid them by both native and foreign students of Japanese government implies. In fact, one of the six groups habitually controls the House, which, in turn, is one of the strongest national second chambers existing today. As a result, the Kenkyū-kai, or Study Association, commands steady, the other groups intermittent, patronage in the form of appointments to cabinet or sub-cabinet positions and concessions to their legislative wishes. The political groups in the House of Peers became a concern of Japanese statesmen shortly after the organization of the Diet in 1890; they are today debated in relation to the proposals for legislative reform which have been repeatedly urged since 1932. Although but minor wheels in the mechanism, some knowledge of their place and function is essential to an adequate understanding of the operation of the complicated Japanese political machine.

The history, organization, and influence of these groups is not easy to determine; the scarcity of reliable sources, even in Japanese, makes doubly confusing the large number of diverse yet meaningless group titles which have been employed since 1890.

The term “presidential short ballot” is applied to the ballot form in which the names of candidates for presidential electors are omitted and only the names of the candidates for president or for president and vice-president appear. The vote for the party presidential candidates on the ticket is a vote for the party electors whose names are filed with the secretary of state. The voter may feel that he is voting directly for the presidential and vice-presidential candidates; actually, he is voting for the electoral candidates of the party represented by his favored candidate for the presidency.

This shortened ballot form is the result of three developments: (1) provision for a group vote for the electoral candidates of each party; (2) the addition at the head of the ticket of the names of the presidential candidates, whether the electoral candidates are voted on as individuals or as a group; and (3) introduction of the voting machine. Each of these developments started near the turn of the century.

Maintaining high-level production and employment is widely recognized today as a desirable objective of government policy. Those who oppose the government's accepting express responsibility for the achievement of this objective insist that government in a free-enterprise economy is not equipped to live up to such a responsibility. Criticism comes from two sides. Protagonists of a laissez-faire economy fear that a government pledged to assure full employment will be driven into more and more planning and regimentation. Protagonists of a planned economy, on the other hand, insist that any attempt to solve the problem of full employment within the framework of free enterprise will be futile. They fear that such an effort will only delay the transition to a planned economy, which they believe is the only final solution of our economic and social problems. Both kinds of critics maintain that the technical requirements of a policy designed to maintain full employment are incompatible with a free-enterprise economy.

What, then, are the technical requirements of a policy of full employment? Is the government equipped, or can it be equipped, to do the job without paying the price of adopting a regimented economy? Perhaps those who speak of full employment in a free-enterprise economy are driven into the same dilemma in which the oldster found himself when telling his grandchild about the alligator chasing the frog. The frog jumped from the log into the river, swam through the river, hopped on land—the alligator coming closer and closer. When the alligator finally cornered the frog under a tree and opened his mouth to swallow him, things were getting desperate for both frog and story-teller. The old man knew only one solution: “The frog looked up and Baw the tree and just as the ‘gator's jaws were closing down, the frog flew up into the tree.” “But Grandpa,” said the little boy, “frogs can't fly.” “‘Deed they cain't, Son, ‘deed they cain't,” was the answer, “but this frog flew … he had to.”

Theories of the public sphere, as standardly formulated, aim to specify the minimal, necessary conditions for a discursive realm free of coercion or manipulation. In his article in this Review in September 1992, Dana Villa urged us to reconsider this standard account. He argued that when read in light of postmodernist theory, Hannah Arendt provides the basis for a revised conception of the public sphere that privileges plurality and difference over consensus. Jim Johnson suggests that Villa's analysis is a thinly veiled polemic against critical theory. Johnson argues that, as critique, Villa's argument is neither decisive nor encompassing, and that as polemic it blinds Villa to potentially fruitful disagreements with critical theorists. Villa replies that Johnson misses the synthetic thrust of the original article because he identified public realm theory too narrowly with Habermas. Thus, he misconstrues the dialogue Villa sought to facilitate between Arendt and postmodernism.

Recent congressional debates on neutrality legislation have once more focused attention on the problem of control of American foreign policy. On the one hand, the President has demanded that leadership in formulation of foreign policy be concentrated in the hands of the executive; on the other hand, Congress has insisted that its powers be employed to provide for adequate control of that leadership on behalf of the people. This problem of executive leadership and proper control is, perhaps, the central problem of the machinery of democratic government, but in the field of foreign policy it is a particularly difficult one because constitutional construction and usage have failed to draw definite boundaries as to congressional and executive powers. If Congress is the instrument through which popular control of the executive is to be exercised, it is important to study the adequacy or inadequacy of such control.