Responsibility in government

RESPONSIBILITY IS THE CENTRAL PROBLEM OF GOVERNMENT AND,
indeed, of life today. Men pursue scarce resources, increase their
knowledge of society and nature, and broaden the range of alterna-
tives open to their choice in order to become more responsible for
their fate. Even the most ideological dictator does not seek power
for its own sake, but as a means for expanding his own capacity to
assume responsibility for the fate of his nation or mankind. If he
succeeds, chances are that he has been helped by the despair of
individual responsibility on the part of ordinary people. On the
other hand, most of the revolutionary issues of our time-the control
of nuclear weapons, the anticolonial movement, the rise to political
consciousness of America's Negroes, space exploration, the rebellion
of youth-are driven forward by the universal yearning for greater
responsibility. That is the thesis of this book.
“The Decline of Political Theory” * has been much bemoaned
during the past two decades. There has been a great deal of meth-
odological ferment in political science during this period, and we
may have made some progress in understanding and explaining the
phenomena of politics. But to gain that understanding is only one-
third of the task of political science. This task consists also of de-
fining the goals toward which the community should be moving,
and of building the bridge from the realm of values to the realm of
facts. In that sense, this book is intended as a contribution to
political theory-not, except perhaps incidentally, to the history
of political philosophy, nor to the "critique of political economy,
but to what I am tempted to call “constructive political theory."
I have applied this theory of responsibility to a number of prob-
lems in political science and have always found its synchronized
normative and analytical dimensions very useful.