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Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- INTRODUCTION -- 1. The Age of Youthful Optimism -- 2. Democracy and the Defects of Public Opinion -- 3. The State as Mediator -- 4. Security through a Compensated Economy -- 5. The Free Market, Civility, and Natural Law -- 6. From Scientific Realism to Romantic Renaissance -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX

But for two decisions, the 1961 term of the Supreme Court could have been characterized as one of the least interesting in recent years. Apart from Baker v. Carr and Engel v. Vitale no decision stands out as a major interpretation either of the Constitution or of national or state legislation. Not that there was any shortage of constitutional cases. In at least thirty such the Court gave decisions and written opinions. In a number of instances, some of which will be examined presently, acts of state legislation were held invalid. Some 63 cases involved the interpretation of acts of Congress; in none was a statute held unconstitutional. There was, in other words, a continuation of the point of view which the Court adopted in the spring of 1937, rather than a hostile disposition toward both state and national legislation dealing positively with the social and economic problems coming in the wake of that new (to the United States) combination of factors, the industrialization of much of the country and the acceptance of most assumptions of nineteenth century humanitarianism.Last year Professor McCloskey, writing in this Review on the 1960 term, quite properly limited himself to the consideration of cases dealing with civil rights. Yet before Charles Evans Hughes became Chief Justice in 1930, so few such cases arose that no one would have devoted even a major portion of an annual survey to them. Indeed, before the Civil War there was only one obscure case in which an act of a territorial legislature was held void as contrary to the guarantees of civil rights in the Constitution, and none involving either Congressional or state legislation. A few emerged in the decade after that War, but it was only with such cases as Strormberg v. California, Near v. Minnesota, Powell v. Alabama, Grosjean v. American Press Co., and DeJonge v. Oregon that the Supreme Court actively began to be the guardian of civil liberties.

"There are at the present time two great nations in the world, which started from different points, but seem to tend towards the same end. I allude to the Russians and the Americans. Both of them have grown up unnoticed; and while the attention of mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly placed themselves in the front rank among the nations, and the world learned their existence and their greatness at almost the same time.All other nations seem to have nearly reached their natural limits, and they have only to maintain their power; but these are still in the act of growth."So concludes the first volume of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Such a statement appearing in 1945 would, except perhaps for the view that the two countries "tend towards the same end," be truistic. Even the journalists would understand and accept it. It appeared in 1835. To most Europeans of that day, the United States was a crude and bumptious little nation on the western fringes of the world, just as Russia was the half-Oriental, half-feudal state which was not so much a power as a vast expanse of inhospitable steppes. At a time when English travelers were frequently aware only of the vulgarity of American manners, and when some European visitors to this country were most impressed with its picturesque qualities, Tocqueville was much more concerned with the basic nature and with the future of the complex combination of laws, customs, and mores which were embraced within his inclusive conception of democracy. He came here, not to give slightly condescending lectures and to bolster his own feeling of superiority, but rather to observe and report on the operation of a principle of political and social organization. Partly because he had an inquiring mind and was willing to work hard at his self-imposed task, but largely because he was gifted with rare insight and was not prevented from seeing the trend of events by the surface happenings of his own time, his book on the nature of American institutions remains, after more than a century, one of the few invaluable books on that subject.