Tony Freyer

Regulating Big Business: Antitrust in Great Britain and America, 1880–1990

Introduction 1. The response to big business: the formative era, 1880-1914 2. The divergence of economic thought 3. The political response 4. The courts respond to big business 5. The impact of World War I, 1914-1921 6. Tentative convergence, 1921-1948 7. A British antimonopoly policy emerges, 1940-1948 8. Uneven convergence since World War II Conclusion.

The Federal Courts, Localism, and the National Economy, 1865–1900

It is a truism of American constitutional history that the federal judiciary was expected to facilitate interstate commerce. The right of individuals to remove cases to a federal court from locally prejudiced state courts was recognized under a wide range of circumstances. But it seemed less and less natural, as more and more of the nations business came to be transacted by the “trusts” on a national basis, for corporations to be accorded the same rights. Professor Freyer shows that a major campaign, which had some success in the 1880s, was mounted to deny corporations the right of escape to federal courts. In the end, however, the nations lawmakers recognized that the problem of the growing concentration of capital would have to be solved by something more sophisticated than frontier justice.

Negotiable Instruments and the Federal Courts in Antebellum American Business

That human needs and social realities are the roots of all systems of jurisprudence is nowhere more demonstrable than in the evolution of the law of business. Professor Freyer shows that neither the English common law of negotiable instruments nor the modifications made in it in the colonial era were adequate in the lusty, far-flung, and rapidly growing young nation that the Constitution of the United States created. Innovation, he reveals, promptly followed.

What Was Warren Court Antitrust

The Warren Court’s antitrust jurisprudence provoked caricature, both as “coonskin cap” frontier law and as sentimental guardianship of mom and pop stores in an age of managerial capitalism. In fact, early Court decisions, exemplified by Brown Shoe in 1962, embraced multiple antitrust goals, which reflected an ongoing dialogue in the legal and business world over exactly what antitrust should do, a dialogue occurring not only in law reviews but mainly in the pages of Fortune magazine. At the outset, multiple goals for multiple reasons were absorbed by the Court, but as time went on, the Court fragmented, and what appeared from the outside to be ambivalence was in fact growing internal consensus on how the activist majority prioritized the goals of antitrust. The internal deliberation over

Review: Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century, Norton: New York, 2005; 576 pp.; 9780393058086,

‘perform’ their masculinity, and so compensate for the metropole’s weaknesses. Yet, despite phalloplethsysmographers establishing racial hierarchies, there were always Frenchmen who gave in to the temptations of concubines, opium, and homosexuality. The racial ‘other’ even threatened manhood in France. Judith Surkis demonstrates how experts used discussions of venereal disease as part of the project of remaking French interwar masculinity. In targeting immigrants, Jews, and African-American jazz, men as sources of contamination, racial and sexual fears were used to shore up the boundaries between men and women, French and foreigners. The Second World War saw yet another necessity for reappraising French manhood. The defeat and occupation, Miranda Pollard argues, precipitated the emergence of competing models of manhood – the patriarchy of Pétain, the chauvinism of de Gaulle, and the youthfulness of communist resistance. Each tried to turn appeals to masculinity to its own purposes. Surprisingly enough, a collection which contains so many warnings against the racist exploitation of masculinity makes no mention of Le Pen or the National Front. Rather, the last chapter uses the ‘veil affair’ to come close to castigating Muslim youth. There is not space here to comment on every essay in this solid collection. Each is packed with information and if one or two fall below the mark it is because the authors have tried to force too much information into their allotted 15 or so pages of text. Michael Sibalis’s contribution is so successful because he limits himself to investigating one fascinating question: why did homosexuals in France come to be associated with effeminacy, and why, in turn, did some homosexuals (beginning with Raffalovich and Gide) exalt macho forms of manhood? In his insightful response, Sibalis, like the best of his fellow contributors, reveals how notions of sex difference played and continue to play a central, tenacious role in French culture.