Word: godkin
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Wilson's attempt to keep the Crossman diaries out of public view raised some of the same constitutional issues that Crossman himself discussed in his Godkin lectures and in his introduction to a re-issue of Walter Bagehot's English Constitution published in 1963, the year before he entered the Cabinet for the first time. Bagehot had named cabinet secrecy as one of the three sine qua nons of cabinet government, along with party loyalty and collective responsibility. Secrecy allows each member of the Cabinet to express his or her views freely and without fear of being contradicted when called...
...Minister of Housing, Lord President of the Council, Majority Leader in the House of Commons and Secretary of State for Social Services--was that the Cabinet had little effective power and that Britain had drifted into a "Prime Ministerial" form of government. Crossman presented these views in his 1970 Godkin lectures at Harvard, which he later claimed had been entirely ignored by the press, with the exception of "The Harvard Crimson, which gave a couple of paragraphs to the third lecture...
This left wing has been giving Wilson more and more trouble lately. In his Godkin lectures, Crossman described the job of any Labour Prime Minister as "driving the two-horse chariot"--maintaining control over both the Parliamentary Labour Party, which tends to be middle-of-the-road, and the National Executive, which represents the party outside Parliament. In the complicated Labour Party Constitution, written in the early years of this century by Beatrice and Sidney Webb and Arthur Henderson, the big unions were supposed to supply the moderate ballast to keep the national party roughly in line with the P.L.P...
Carl Kaysen, former Harvard professor and director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, who withdrew from his appointment as Godkin Lecturer in 1973, is once again scheduled to deliver the Godkin Lectures next March...
Friends of Edwin L. Godkin founded the lecture series in 1903. The lectures are to deal with "the essentials of free government...