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If a democracy is to function successfully, the great mass of the population need instruments for communicating their views to political leaders. The chief channels for communication are parties and pressure groups. English politics provides much scope for study of these conduits, because both parties and pressure groups are highly organized and well articulated. Although the part played by party activists in policy formulation is only one small aspect of this network, the study of that part throws considerable light upon the interplay of parties and pressure groups, and challenges as well some prevailing notions about the policy demands of party activists.

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

The author's role as an activist in the recent Presidential campaign leads him to suggest some factors which, though they may have little to do with policy, seriously affect party leaders' decisions. Mr. Kessel teaches in the Deparment of Political Science at Amherst College.

Between 1886 and 1891, four Japanese nationalist-activists – Yoko Tosaku, Sugiura Jugo, Suganuma Teifu and Fukumoto Makoto – described their plans for Japanese expansion to the Philippines. These men, writing during the time of ideological ferment in the early Meiji period, represented a significant trend of thought when Japan was greatly concerned with the problem of attaining an international position to assure her national security. This was also a period when the Japanese government, guided by the Meiji oligarchs, adopted a "policy of restraint" from territorial expansion which might involve Japan in foreign conflicts while they were undertaking the modernization as well the industrialization of the country.

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.