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Speech before a meeting of Communist party activists, Cleveland, June 13, 1951.

A systematic retracing of Adams' attempt to gain objective knowledge of soc forces by accepting the assumptions of positivists, empirical sci shows him to expose the task as hopeless. He consequently played with self-annihilation & counselled silence regarding all matters of interest or value to man. Yet while despairing of the possibility of possessing conclusive knowledge, of obtaining a genuine 'education', he compromised his counsel, expressing himself by relying on the artistic technique of irony. Much of contemporary soc sci, rightly rejecting the artist's deliberate use of irony & ambiguity for coming to terms with history & society, embraces as exclusively valid the very approach which Adams saw as demanding silence. In failing to perceive & abide by Adams' conclusion, soc sci - as Adams' work reveals - becomes conservative, activist & elitist. AA-IPSA.

Only a tiny minority of the individual members of the Labour Party play an active part, but these activists, who run the affairs of local parties through the general management committees, tend to be to the left of the people they claim to represent. For the most part, active members are rebellious & dissatisfied people in whom the habit of opposition is strong. .Primarily, parties are org'al in every ward, with large memberships holding regular & well attended meetings, constantly making new recruits, & capable of swinging into well-directed action at every election. The present structure could be substantially improved by aiming at smaller but better quality memberships, & by the abolition of the powerful but useless general management committees, leaving org'al matters to smaller executive committees & pol'al matters to open meetings of all party members. IPSA.

After analyzing the function & structure of the British Conservative & Labor Parties from information based on recent res, the author concludes that the mass party is not appropriate to American conditions. Because party activists are zealots, methods are found in both British parties of preventing their deciding party policy, in order not to antagonize the moderate voter. Because the US lacks the aristocratic tradition & respect for the leader, an American mass party would be more difficult to keep in its place. Duverger has argued that American parties are backward in comparison with European because of their lack of class-consciousness. But the reverse is probably true; absence of class-consciousness is a characteristic of an advanced econ. Since America has had universal suffrage longer than any European country, it cannot be argued that absence of mass parties is a sign of pol'al immaturity. (AIPSA).

A matched sample of 138 Arizonans-72 pol'al activists from ward workers to state legislators, & 66 apoliticals were interviewed & their responses to both open-ended & forced choice questions were weighted & scaled. Findings indicate that, as expected, politicals score signif'ly higher on the power scale & that there were no important diff's on our `willingness to compromise' scale or the `willingness to risk' scale. On our 'toughmindedness' scale no diff was found between political' & apoliticals though toughmindedness (the 'T-factor') is said by Eysenck to be the 'soc projections of the extrovert personality'; this is the first quantitative evidence to refute the popular notion of the politician as an extrovert type. Though the diff's were not signif at the 95% confidence level, our author & itarianism scale found the politicals consistently higher than the apoliticals; strength is thereby given to recent views that authoritarianism indices must be analyzed in combination with other personality traits & other soc psychol'al variables. AA- IPSA.

The Unions have traditionally formed the bridge between the (mean - average) worker & his socialism, though the closeness of this association varies greatly between unions. The area of common philosophy that exists between the unions & the pol'al Left has its drawbacks as well as its advantages. The unions have always had an important voice in the higher councils of the Labour Party though this relationship has not always been a particularly easy one & the rather detached attitude of the union leaders towards active politics has been a constant irritant to the activists on the Left. The most criticized aspect of the trade union-Labour Party connection is the block vote, but it is this which, as things stand, ensures the necessary continuity of party policy. Another criticism Ply made is that the trade unions do not sponsor good men as parliamentary candidates, but the most weighty criticism of the trade union link with the Labour Party is that it is closer than the industrial or pol'al facts of today demand. IPSA.