ABSTRACT
All is not well with our politics. Never before in history, perhaps with the exception of ancient Greece, has civil life been politicized to quite the same extent as today. It might appear that society should be better, more fully served by its government than ever before. Yet few would think that this is the case. The principal products of more intrusive, more caring, and more comprehensive politics seem to be disaffection with, and dysfunction of, government. Where the process has gone furthest, under “real existing socialism,” failure reached staggering dimensions. But whether governments now profess to live by democratic or socialist precepts, or by the near-ubiquitous, ungainly crossbreed of the two, their relations with the governed are sour.
