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5 U. Chi. L. Rev. 566 (1937-1938)
The Balance between Legislative and Executive Power: A Study in Comparative Constitutional Law

handle is hein.journals/uclr5 and id is 580 raw text is: THE BALANCE BETWEEN LEGISLATIVE AND EXECUTIVE POWER: A STUDY IN COM- PARATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL LAW* KARL LOEWENSTEINI N REVOLUTIONARY periods, the real political issues are frequent- ly obscured by the persistent application of an obsolete scientific terminology which denotes attitudes and patterns of behavior no longer in conformity with actual conditions. Particularly in political the- ory the use of traditional terms may be misleading and confusing. The postulate of a balance or equilibrium between legislative and executive powers' reveals its ancestry from the customary tri-partite division of state activities into the legislative, executive, and judicial functions tradi- tionally associated with Montesquieu. Any realistic discussion, therefore, of what has become, in these recent years, the crucial issue of government and constitutional law needs clarification of terms. In its original meaning the doctrine of the separation of powers signifies and determines, by con- trast and juxtaposition, the component parts of state power under the as- sumption of a static system which, in the spirit of the age when it was formulated, organizes the activities of the state by way of a division be- * This article is in substance the enlarged and annotated version of an address presented by the author at the Second International Congress of Comparative Law at the Hague on August 5, i937; it covers developments to May 1, 1938. f Professor of Political Science, Amherst College. I The most up-to-date bibliography on contemporary political organization in general and on the problems concerning the relationship between legislative and executive in particular is to be found in tome x of the Encyclop~die Frangaise, l'Etat moderne (i935) (cited here- after, E.F.; the figure quoted indicates the fascicule, not the page, according to the division of the volume; the name added is that of the individual author; literature is contained in the appendix io. B-i ff.); see io64.I-4 (Gordon). Compare Barth~lemy, Le role du pouvoir excutif dans les r~publiques modernes (1907); Dendias, Le renforcement des pouvoirs du chef de 1'6tat dans les d6mocraties parlementaries (1932); Dendias, Le chef de l'6tat r~publicain et le rajustement de l'ex~cutif (au seuil de la dictature) (1937); Gordon, Les nouvelles constitu- tions europ~ennes et le role du chef de l'6tat (1932); Mirkine-Guetz6vich, Les nouvelies ten- dances du droit constitutionnel (2d ed. 1936); Barth6lemy-Duez, Trait6 du droit constitu- tionnel (1933), 252 ff., 6o4 ff.; Esmein-N6zard, Elements du droit constituionnel frangais et compar6 457 ff. (7th ed. 1921); Finer, Theory and Practice of Moder Government 949 ff. (1932). Much valuable material is scattered also in Friedrich, Constitutional Government and Politics (1937); see, however, the reservations made by Loewenstein, 31 Am. Pol. Sc. Rev. 953 ff. (1937).