BECAUSE I WISH to limit my primary discussion in this book to
a descriptive analysis of the world political crisis and the alternatives
for its solution, I do not intend to take up questions of what Ameri-
cans call "practical politics": candidates, nominations, elections, party
organization, platforms, and so on. I do not want to give the impres-
sion that I minimize the importance of these questions. A policy
cannot make its own way in the world. The best policy conceivable
for the United States would mean nothing unless it were activized
in the will of political leaders and a political party. I have no criti-
cism of the American stress on "practical politics"; I criticize only
the usual American belief that this is all there is to politics; and I
wish, therefore, in counter-emphasis, to keep attention directed to-
ward the problem of the integrating objective, the guiding program,
toward what I have been calling "policy."

Any policy along such lines as we have been tracing would, how-
ever, have to face within the United States two special problems
which would prove so fundamental as to be inseparable from the
general question of the policy itself. In Chapter 13, as part of the
discussion of the implementation of policy through the State Depart-
ment and other government agencies, both of these special problems,
in narrower form, have been provisionally dealt with. We shall
find that both are linked to decisions about the nature of democratic
government.

The first can be posed as follows. Under a democratic form of
government, what ought policy to be, and how ought it to be related
to the opinions of the body of citizens? Should it be a resultant,
average, or compromise of all the various beliefs held, on the ques-

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