The Capacity to Govern

Abstract

rT iHE MEN'S souls tried in Thomas Paine's day were not found wanting, but in our day they have found their match. This is time to try men's will to survive. This is time to test their humanity and to contest their sanity. This is time to reflect on whether sages or madmen have produced what Sir Winston Churchill recently called this hideous epoch. The world in which men have so long thrown stones has itself become glass house, in which we stoically await shatter. This is a bad time to be a political scientist. The physicist is alarmed at what he has done, political scientist at what he has been unable to do. Just when humanists have persuaded us to join old lady in taking Carlyle's advice on universe to accept it!the scientists threaten to take it away. To perturbations caused by Spengler and Toynbee and atomic scientists, now comes Walter Lippmann with vigorous charge that we have lost, or are losing, capacity to govern, which means our capacity to shape our own destiny. To this we may add voice of disillusioned citizen whose universal lament is, What can I do-I as one of 160,000,000? And we may also add, on domestic scene, recent and persistently hopeful experiments to dismantle Washington, federal system, executive, treaty-making power, income tax, and even Bill of Rights. Reflecting times more hopefully than these contributions to our inability, or unwillingness, to govern, Arthur Krock was able to report in January, in a delightful phrase, administration is returning to the larger federalism. 1 In other words, if government is a necessary evil, much evil still seems to be necessary. One is no longer engaging in flamboyant rhetoric when he says that man not only cannot control his future except through his capacity to govern but that he otherwise literally has no future. The capacity to govern depends not only on political forms and institutions, as political scientists are prone to overemphasize, but also on that pervasive something which lies between institutions that force which holds institutional spheres in their orbits. Democracy is interstitial as well as institutional. To interstices, as much as to institutional forms and extensible federalism, we must look for answers to questions: how did our national government spread over a vast continent and remain