Abstract
“The civic dissensions of our generation have, by a curious paradox, generated an increasing emphasis upon the necessity of agreement upon fundamentals as an essential condition of a working democracy.”
I am indebted to the national Science Foundation and the City University Research Foundation for financial support, and to Sharon Zukin and Binnaz Sayari for research assistance. All errors of fact and lapses of judgment are mine alone.
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References
Cf. Carl Joachim Friedrich, Man and His Government: An Empirical Theory of Politics, New York: McGraw, 1968.
The most thoughtful wartime statement is by Ernest Barker, Reflections on Government, Oxford: Clarendon, 1942: “Before government by discussion can exist at all, there must be the preliminary basis of a common national tradition and a common social structure; but when it has once come into existence upon this basis it still needs for its working a mental habit of agreement upon a number of axioms which have to be generally accepted” (p. 63). Barker lists three such axioms: The “Agreement to Differ,” the “Majority Principle,” and the “Principle of Compromise” (pp. 63,65,67).
Harold Laski, Parliamentary Government in England, New York: Viking, 1938, second printing, 1947, p. 4; for similar discussions see the same author’s Democracy in Crisis (1933) and The Labour party and the Constitution (1900). Cf. Reginald Bassett, The Essentials of Parliamentary Democracy, London: Macmillan, 1935, chapter V.
Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, 1867; World’s Classics edn., with an introduction by the First Earl of balfour, London: Oxford University Press, 1928, chapter VII: “the Prerequisites of Cabinet Government…,” pp. 225, 227, 228.
My phrase inverts the usage of Arnold Brecht, Political Theory, Princeton: 1959, p. 126, who characterizes arguments such as Jefferson’s on equality as a “shift from Is to Ought” (p. 200). Brecht’s is a searching study in the history of ideas, and his term accurately describes the overt content of the Declaration of Independence, which argues from the fact of equal divine creation to the imperative of unalienable rights. My focus is on the recent discussion, which is willy-nilly imbued with the Scientific Value Relativism which Brecht so eloquently advocates. But I also mean to convey that Jefferson’s premise (“all men are created equal”) in its theological and pseudo-factual language smuggles in the moral judgment that the conclusion (“certain unalienable rights”) extracts. Brecht’s term “fusion between Is and Ought” (p. 199) covers both interpretations. The complaint about the fusion and resulting confusion was first registered in Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739); see Brecht, p. 540.
Just so, early nationalists celebrate the age-old existence of a nation they are hoping to help call to life. See Rustow, A World of Nations, Washington: Brookings, 1967, pp. 26, 40–47.
V. O. Key, Jr., Public Opinion and American Democracy, New York: Knopf, 1967, p. 41.
Edward Shils, “Consensus,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, New York: Macmillan. 1968, III, p. 26of.
John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (1861), chapter IV, cf. chapter I, Everyman’s Library edn., pp. 208,175–184.
Lowell, Government and Parties in Continental Europe, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896, I, p. 102.
Richard Jensen, “History and the Political Scientist,” in Seymour Martin Lipset, ed., Politics and the Social Sciences, New York: Oxford, 1969, p. 5. On the difficulties of deriving significant political generalizations from attitude surveys cf. D. A. Rustow “Relevance in Social Science, or The Proper Study of Mankind,” The American Scholar, Summer 1971, p. 491.
Notably Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957.
“…a concept too vague personal, or too divine ever to do the job of politics for it,” in the striking phrase of Bernard Crick, In Defense of Politics, rev. edn., peguin Books, 1964, p. 24.
New York: Harper, 1937, 2nd edn., 1941; rev. edn. under the title Constitutional Government and Democracy, Boston: Ginn, 1950.
D. A. Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy: Toward A Dynamic Model,” Comparative Politics, vol. 2, no. 3, April 1970, pp. 337–363, esp. 339–347; cf. D. A. Rustow, “Communism and Change,” in Chalmers Johnson, ed., Change in Communist Systems, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970, pp. 343–358, esp. 357.
Horace M. Kallen, “Consensus,” Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, New York: Macmillan, 1931, III, p. 225f.
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© 1971 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Rustow, D.A. (1971). Agreement, Dissent, and Democratic Fundamentals. In: Von Beyme, K. (eds) Theory and Politics/Theorie und Politik. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2750-2_17
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