The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (167 page)

Generally, the use of unscrupulous methods of investigation against supposed security risks and the creation of an atmosphere of fear and suspicion. Specifically, Joseph McCarthy was a US senator for Wisconsin from 1946 until his death in 1957. He is remembered for his demagogic crusade between 1950 and 1954 to root out alleged communists and spies in American public life. As chairman of the Senate Government Operations Committee conducting investigations, he appalled observers by his coarse and brutal behaviour. Witnesses were remorselessly bullied, currency was given to wild and unsubstantiated charges, and evidence falsified. As a result an ugly mood of national hysteria was created, the careers of honourable men and women were damaged, and the reputation of the United States abroad suffered badly. McCarthy operated at the height of the
Cold War
when international communism could be reasonably seen as a serious threat to the American way of life and many others shared McCarthy's fears. Eventually, however, the senator overreached himself in virulently attacking the Army on security grounds. He was subsequently censured by his colleagues in the Senate and ended his life as a broken and discredited figure.
DM 

 
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Medieval political theory in Western Europe arose out of the controversy between Church and State over the question of the investiture of bishops by the secular powers. Since the clergy were virtually the only people who were literate and numerate, emperors, kings, dukes, and other rulers relied on their help in the administration of their domains. It was, therefore, important that, at the highest level, clerics should be not only able administrators but also sympathetic to the sovereign. To ensure this rulers took to refusing to recognize an unfavourable papal choice, and appointing a candidate of their own choice whom they invested with both spiritual and temporal power. The papacy resisted this from the advent of Gregory VII (1073–85).
The papal case had been put in relatively moderate terms by Gregory's predecessors Leo IX and Nicholas II. Gregory went much farther. Before his time the papacy had a tenuous claim on ecclesiastical supremacy even in spiritual matters and was fortunate to control the appointment of archbishops. Gregory claimed the primacy of the Pope, even in temporal matters. These included the deposition of rulers and absolving their subjects of allegiance. These claims were based on some texts of scripture (principally Matthew 16: 19, and Luke 22: 38), but above all on the eighth century forged document.
The Donation of Constantine
, which states that, on his conversion, the emperor, Constantine, handed over to Pope Sylvester I the imperial power in the West, including Rome, Italy, all the provinces and the islands. These papal claims were reiterated throughout the following centuries and found their most extreme expression in the bull
Unam Sanctam
of Boniface VIII in 1302 which so provoked Philip IV of France that he had the Pope imprisoned.
Philosophers who supported the papal claims included Giles of Rome, John of Salisbury, and
Aquinas
. Those on the other side included
Dante
and—most extremely— Marsiglio of Padua. Giles of Rome (1247–1316) wrote two important political works while teaching theology in Paris between 1285 and 1292,
De regimine principum
and
De potestate ecclesiastica
. The first work was written for the future Philip IV. It was basically Aristotelian and Thomist. The second, which was papalist, was ironically the source on which Boniface VIII drew for the bull
Unam Sanctam
. The two can be reconciled only by saying that the first deals with the ruler merely in his temporal role whereas the second goes to the root of temporal and spiritual power. The first adds nothing to Aquinas . The second states the extreme papalist position based on Augustinian arguments. Giles maintained that all power came from God through the Church and in particular the Vicar of Christ, the Pope. He conferred temporal power on secular rulers and could, if necessary, withdraw their power and absolve their subjects of allegiance. Temporal power involved the power over life and this only God had, so it could only be conferred by God's representative, the Church, and, in particular the Vicar of Christ. However, in Giles's phrase the temporal power belonged to the Church
non ad usum sed ad nusum
, that is, it had it but would/could not use it itself.
John of Salisbury (
c.
1115–80), an earlier papalist, who had been secretary to Thomas à Becket , took a less extreme line. In his
Polycraticus
he maintained that temporal power came from the hand of the Church. But he did not give it the power to depose rulers. That he left to the subjects. Like many medieval theorists, he supported tyrannicide. In his view a ruler became a tyrant when he transgressed the laws of natural morality or of natural justice (
aequitas
). He interpreted the Roman lawyer Ulpian's dictum,
Quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem
(What the ruler decides has the force of law) not in an absolutist sense, as if the ruler can legally do what he likes, but in the juristic sense that the ruler's legitimate legislation has force in virtue of the powers invested in him by the people. Thus his object was to restrict the scope of the temporal power rather than to enhance the power of the papacy. However, he was not as thoroughgoing a political theorist as Aquinas .
Thus, out of this medieval controversy between Church and State, emerged political theories that laid the foundations for political thought in the Reformation and even into more recent times.
CB 

 
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The more moderate faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party led by Martov , Dan , and Akselrod , which advocated gradual reform to achieve socialism. Representing ‘the minority’ (in fact a misnomer as it was the larger group in the party at the time), it emerged during the Second Congress in 1903 following a split with Lenin's more radical and revolutionary Bolsheviks (the final schism occurring in 1912).
The quarrel centred around the nature of party organization. Whilst Lenin argued for a professional revolutionary vanguard, Martov called for a mass party. Underpinning this debate were three important questions : Was capitalism the dominant mode of production in Russia? Should the RSDLP ally with bourgeois parties? What was the relationship between the party and the proletariat?
Following the February Revolution of 1917, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries controlled the Petrograd Soviet and offered their conditional support to the Provisional Government. The period of ‘dual power’ developed with neither the Soviet nor the Government being willing to take control of the State. Although some Mensheviks joined the Kerensky coalition Government in May, the party was divided and losing support to the Bolsheviks. By September, the latter had majorities in both the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets. After the October Revolution, the Mensheviks were subjected to increasingly systematic repression and had ceased political activity by 1920.
GS 

 
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The system of relations between state and economy prevailing throughout Western Europe and its dependencies up to the nineteenth century under which those trades and industries were most encouraged that secured the accumulation of bullion, a national fleet and trained mariners, secure sources of strategic materials, and strong armaments production. Mercantilism was opposed by liberals like Adam
Smith
from the eighteenth century onwards, because of its reliance on the granting of exclusive privileges to
corporations
such as the British and Dutch East India Companies to the detriment of
free trade
and a rational division of labour at home. Subsequently used in an exclusively pejorative sense, neomercantilism became in the 1930s and 1970s a convenient brush with which to tar economic nationalists.
CJ