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This section presents the preface of the U.S. edition of the book 'Against the Law' by Peter Wildeblood. Story of Wildeblood's involvement with Eddie McNally; Wildeblood's arrest, trial and prison ordeal; Differences between the treatment of homosexuals in Great Britain and in the U.S.

Profiles the U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Bork. Attempt of Bork to understand the relation of law to society and power; Views of Robert Bork on economy; Association of Bork with scholar Alexander Bickel; Comments on the court decisions of Bork; Efforts of Bork to make constitutional law a grand enterprise without making it an imperialist one.

The article presents information on the book "Social Thought From Lore to Science," by Hatry Elmer Barnes and Howard Becker. This is a huge enterprise carried out with courage and ability. The first volume surveys the history of social thought from its beginning with the preliterate peoples who, the authors point out, must have had social thought even if they could not write, up to the latest cyclical theory of Pitirim Sorokin, who, the authors do not point out, insists on writing even when he hasn't much social thought. The second volume, abandoning the chronological for the national, surveys the present trends in sociology from England to Japan, including the Scandinavian countries and including also so piquant a caption as emigre Ukrainian sociology.

Thomas Mann's little book "The Coming Victory of Democracy," is the sharpest and noblest political utterance that has come out of exiled Germany. The book calls for a democratic renaissance that will end the fascist adventure. Thomas Mann is a traditionalist--he calls himself a conservative--who has in the past thought of his own artistic task as distinct from that of the "political man," introducing in his thought a distinction where life itself admits of none. The awakening has evoked in Mann a wholeness, a moral clarity, a power that he never showed before.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, who has had his taste of Carlylean hero, worship and is now experiencing one of the fiercest lynching bees in our history. In this context the annotating and publishing of five volumes of the President's state papers, one for the years of his governorship and one for each of the years of his first term, with volumes for the later years to follow, is an act of historical consciousness. Mr. Roosevelt is making his appeal from the distortions of the day to the perspective of the generations. His volumes deserve that sort of perspective. They represent a significant event both in the art of history and the history of publishing.

The article discusses American politics. During the past two weeks, the U.S. Administration has managed to survive a crisis in morale. The U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had about made up his mind to move left and was uncertain only about the timing. What determined the timing was a confluence of factors-the unemployment figures, the down-at-the-heel demoralization of the departments, the lull in press and radio, the need for catapulting statesman Robert Jackson into national prominence if he was to be available for the New York governorship race, the reassembling of the U.S. Congress and the need for action before the tories could get to brooding again over the ills that business has suffered.

The article discusses books and authors. We are a perverse lot. Writer Thurman Arnold has written a witty, learned book, "The Folklore of Capitalism," full of principles and examples, to prove for all time that learned books full of principles and examples are feckless and insubstantial things, mere symbols to mediate between our lingering illusions and the advancing world of reality. And having been told that learning and theorizing are so much eyewash, we flock in hordes to buy and devour this particular offering.

This article focuses on strategies of U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt to deal with depressions. The author says that Mr. Roosevelt has been shrewd enough to keep both roads open--that of further conciliation of business and that of drastic governmental action. It is beginning to look as if he might in time take the second. Another factor is the sharp reaction here to the fantastic stupidities of the speeches and resolutions at the convention in New York of the National Association of Manufacturers. The author says that the best opinion here holds that the President is waiting for certain trends to crystallize before taking action. He is waiting for a sense of the Congressional futility to sink in on people. He is waiting also for reactions to his newly acquired austerity about budget-balancing.

The book "The Good Society" by Robert N. Bellah, marks journalist Walter Lippmann's renunciation of the earlier Lippmann and his consolidation of the latter-day Lippmann. It marks also his renunciation of the latter-day liberalism and his plea for a return to the earlier liberalism of the Western world. There are thus a pair of dialectical processes at work in the book simultaneously. The author is fighting the new order and arguing for the Golden Age of the old order, but he is also and at the same time arguing against the premises of the younger Lippmann and making explicit a new set of premises for the older Lippmann.

The typhoon of business fear, after devastating Wall Street, has hit Washington with terrific force. The politicos here give every indication of being as worried about the business recession as are the big-business boys in New York. And the labor officials on the left of both are, if anything, even more worried, because it is their men who bear the brunt of every depression. Washington is operating at double-quick pace and under great tension; economic doctors are consulting all over the place, charts are spread over U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's desk and the desks of administrative chiefs; there are hurried conferences of business leaders, experts and government key men, as in the anxious days of the Great Emergency. Battered by all kinds of advice, in most instances conflicting, Roosevelt is facing the most difficult situation of his administration.

The article presents information about the emergence of the third party in the U.S. Like third-term talk, third-party talk is about one-quarter based on probabilities, one-quarter irresistible speculation and the remaining half propaganda. What has given some plausibility to the talk is the fact-and it is a fad-that there is a widening rift between the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and John L. Lewis, labor leader. Roosevelt and Lewis don't happen to hit it off. They are too much alike in personality and too divergent in background and experience. Each expects to dominate his world, but each brings different premises and purposes to support his mastery. But do not make the mistake of giving too great an emphasis to this personal incompatibility.

The U.S. Congress in the closing days of the session has been a shambles of mangled bills, forgotten mandates and butchered election promises. But behind-the-scene observers of the party battle point out that the revolt of the South is not the whole story. It is one item. A second item is the influence of the "rotten-borough" Senators. And a third item is the committee system in Congress. A "rotten borough" in twentieth-century U.S., as in nineteenth-century England, is a constituency, which keeps the same representation although the tide of population growth has passed it by or never reached it.

The article focuses on the book "Selected Supreme Court Decisions," edited by Myer Cohen. There is a belief current among men who regard themselves as realists that what counts in government is power and power alone. This is a welcome reaction to the goo-goo school of civic virtue but while people have needed some stiffening in the political thinking, one must beware of rigor mortis. As his stint in this educative process, Cohen has compiled a casebook of Supreme Court decisions. It differs from other compilations in three respects.

Whether it is true or not, as a person suggested that the Supreme Court follows the election returns. It is indubitably true that the publishing season follows the Supreme Court returns. Last year was an annus mirabilis in the court's history, with the court handing down a whole series of executioners' decisions any one of which might have served to make an ordinary year notable in judicial annals. The result has been an avalanche of books, which question the court's whole function in a bristling manner.

The U.S. election has swept away various myths that looked as if they would be a permanent part of the American landscape. There was the myth of newspaper prowess, the myth of campaign-fund prowess, and the myth that American voters would swallow whatever was told them with enough iteration. But most important, from the standpoint of progressive action, was the myth that labor must never mass its forces in politics. Back of that myth was, the author thinks that the belief any underlying group has, one finds it among Jews and African Americans as well-that partisan tie-ups are dangerous because they expose one as a group to the vindictiveness of the victor. The progressives have massed their forces behind U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt with an undreamed-of success.

The U.S. Presidential campaign can be dirty without ceasing to be somewhat dull. This is due, no doubt, to the clumsiness with which the Republicans and their fascist allies have handled their propaganda tools. Smearing presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt with communism, atheism, and Spanish atrocities is well enough as a technique, but it requires at least a modicum of intelligence. Second, that prosperity talks can make its voice heard even amid the campaign din. Third, that the prowess of newspapers and campaign funds has been overrated.

This article focuses on the book "The State in Theory and Practice," by Harold Laski. As a study in the history of ideas, the book is superb. It is a historical epistle addressed to the academies but written from the battlefields of Europe. Mr. Laski has for years been reading the tracts of seventeenth-century religious worthies and eighteenth-century mercantilists, he knows the Bullionists as he knows the Monarchomarchs, he has been through the literature of the physiocrats as he has been through the literature of the Levelers and the Fifth Monarchy men and the French imaginary voyages.

John Dos Passos, as is well known, is not an anatomist of the individual but a historian of the collective mentality. What he seeks to build up always is the climate of opinion --the milieu of emotion, aspiration, and shibboleth in which individuals move. This is what gives unity to his books. In "The Big Money" the dominating mood is the feverish desire to be where the sluices of wealth are running free and strong. His talent is expansive rather than concentrated. There is little of the creative frenzy about him. He has played havoc with spelling and his punctuation has given the traditionalists among the critics some acute distress.

This article presents the authors views on the Justice O.W. Holmes The triumph of the U.S. Supreme Court majority is in a real sense a triumph over Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes and the memory of Justice Holmes. In the same sense it is a triumph of legalism and business enterprise over literature and the philosophic mind. The picture that one has of Holmes as he grew into maturity is the picture of a young New England intellectual aristocrat, with literary and philosophical tastes, careening to success in his chosen profession of the law. He had chosen the law deliberately as a pathway to expression and not because some inner need or some cruel urge and pressure of the time dictated that career and that alone.

The author says that one of the best ways to damn a man, if people can not ignore him or vilify him outright, is to build a legend around him. That makes him a hazy and unreal figure and takes the edge off whatever sharp meaning his life might otherwise have. His life traced a pattern which, if it were followed by other middle-class lives, would burst the bounds of our entire present social system. And so those who have feared him, unable to fight his influence in any other way, have welcomed the chance to make him incredible.

This article presents information on author Wesley Mitchell's anthology of social scientist, Thorstein Veblen's writings which reminds one, if one needed to be reminded, that Veblen has already become a classic. In this Norskie farm boy who grew up to be a college professor America has produced its most considerable and most acid intelligence in the realm of social thought. In these lumbering six-syllabled sentences, with their devastating understatement and their poisonous in directions, America has produced a unique literary manner. In this man at once fierce and desperately shy, rooted in the soil like a giant in the earth and yet wandering nomadically from one university to another, turning his "swift wit and slow irony', that one recoils in fear, mumbling his lectures incoherently yet gathering disciples wherever he went in this curious personality America has produced one of its complex and legendary figures.

Presents the response of Max Lerner on comments of Joseph Alsop and Stewart Alsop on his article on the attitude of American liberals towards the Soviet Union. Need for a body of opinion, in the U.S. which rejects the policy of using the Soviet Union's national interests as a yardstick of American action; Statement by Alsops that the American people never would support a policy of social improvement unless it were sold to them as an urgent way to meet Soviet pressure.

Presents the author's views on moral question of European liberation in the face of World War II. Argument pertaining to Anglo-American alliance to fight against Germany; View that the ruin of a nation may uncover long hidden layers of moral resources; Opinion that the Allied powers have not recognized the provisional government of the French people; Observation of the author that people have spilled blood for achieving liberation; Assessment of the U.S. foreign policy towards Germany.

Presents information on problems that are being faced by the U.S. in formulating policies for the postwar world. Importance of settling disputes between Great Britain, Soviet Union and the U.S. for the reorganization of the European life; Future of the U.S. in a peace settlement under the leadership of President Franklin D. Roosevelt; Appreciation of the leadership quality of President Roosevelt; Information on the election machinery existent in the U.S.; Negotiations over problems of divergent national economic interests.

Highlights the relation of the American generals to the broad political and economic decisions in a war state and a war world. Discussion about the personality and outlook of these generals; Absence of the ambitions and the arrogance of a military caste in the U.S.; Criticism of the rule of separation of powers between the civilian and the military; Interrelation among military, economic, political and ideological phases of war; Campaign against turning the conduct of the country over to a military caste.

Presents several letters to the editors on various articles previously issued in the periodical. Comments on cynicism about democracy in Negro citizens; Presents the production of bombers aimed at maximum property damage; Views on possibilities of economic planning and democratic socialism in U.S.

The article examines the book "Rebels and Ancestors: The American Novel," by Maxwell Geismar. Maxwell Geismar belongs to the critical tradition of Edmund Wilson, which relates literature to the history of ideas. His scheduled five-volume sequence on the history of the American novel, of which this is the third moving backward in time, is shaping up as a major critical work of this generation. All the basic qualities of the whole series are in this book. The prime quality is the capacity to convey the immediacy of the reading experience. There is no filigree interlacing of biographical episodes, local color, and literary groups that one finds in Books.