In the United States we have been especially prone to accept the alleged need for transition from responsible to authoritarian government in time of emergency, for we have on the one hand accepted an interpretation of the Constitution whereunder the rigid restraints imposed thereby on governmental power are susceptible of contradiction in time of emergency, and on the other hand we have with considerable complacence assigned to the Supreme Court the function of protecting the essentials of constitutionalism and democracy through periods of emergency. These two attitudes combine to enhance the sense of need and lull the fear of supposedly temporary reversions to authoritarian government. In the belief that it is increasingly essential that emergency action be sustained by a workable and empirically-based theory of democratic emergency governance, the authors have undertaken, in the present study, to survey the treatment of emergency by democratic political theorists; to review the work of the Supreme Court in assessing the validity of governmental exercises of emergency powers (placing special emphasis upon the implications of the 1952 “Steel Seizure” cases); and, in conclusion, to submit tentatively an approach to emergency which they consider related to the needs of today and the realities of recent experience. Democratic political theorists traditionally have assumed the need in time of emergency to subvert the governmental processes prescribed for peacetime and to rely upon a generically different method of government, frequently designated “constitutional dictatorship.” Many factors contribute to this tendency. First, it must be recognized that a theory of democratic government so comprehensive as to traverse every vicissitude which might confront it cannot reasonably be demanded of political philosophers. Second, a certain amount of inertia is inevitable in any phase of man’s endeavors. Thus it is not surprising that political theorists to date have picked up the traditional interpretation of emergency in terms of the Roman dictatorship and fitted it to their schemes of constitutional government. It is a safely ambiguous doctrine with the respectability of age. It invests an aspect of the experience of constitutional democracies, about which very little in the way of cumulative knowledge has been attained, with an aura of reassuring and doctrinaire certainty.