The institution of antitrust in the United States has long been regarded as
peculiarly a native product, like our popular music. Strangers to our
culture, exposed to the gyrations and massive impact of antitrust, have
generally responded with bewilderment and disbelief. At most, they
have dimly perceived the shape and power of antitrust. They have seen
it as a remarkable compound of law, economic philosophy, cultural
commitment and social religion. But the mechanics and the dynamics
of this peculiar institution have been largely beyond the ken of the
foreigner.

A. D. Neale, a British civil servant, is the exception to this generality.
He has mastered the strange language of this peculiar American insti-
tution, and he has penetrated to the heart of its meaning. His purpose in
studying American antitrust was to write an account of its actual working
for the benefit of British businessmen and lawyers, but his accomplish-
ment surpasses this objective. He has set down a solid analysis and a
highly perceptive evaluation of American antitrust from which
Americans themselves will derive much profit.

I know of no other single volume which covers the entire field of anti-
trust so comprehensively and so well. In about 500 pages, Mr Neale
sharply analyses the case law and the statutes in each area of antitrust.
He has an instinct for the jugular of a case. He senses the difference
between a ripple and a current in the vast stream of the law, and he is
able, with remarkable sensitivity, to trace the particulars of antitrust
development to their abiding source: to America's 'distrust of all sources
of unchecked power'; to our ambivalent attitude towards 'big business',
which he aptly sums up as our 'romantic view of the achievements and
efficiency of large industrial organizations', coupled with our 'suspicious
view of their power'.

Antitrust in the United States is not, in the conventional sense, a set
of laws by which men may guide their conduct. It is rather a general,
sometimes conflicting, statement of articles of faith and economic
philosophy, which takes specific form as the courts and governmental
agencies apply its generalities to the facts of individual cases in the
economic and ideological setting of the time. It is for this reason that
both knowledge of past decisions and a sense of the animating theory of

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