Book Reviews

• Author: Benjamin J. Klebaner
• DOI: 10.1177/0003603X7401900309
• Published date: 01 September 1974
• Date: 01 September 1974
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

BOOK

REVJE"'S

621

A. D. Neale, The

Antitrust

Lauis

of

the United

States

of

.tmerica :A

Stuny

of Competition Enforced by

Law,

Second Edition, Cambridge :Cambridge University

Press

(1970), 527 pp., $13.50 cloth, $4.75 paperback.

This excellent monograph on American

antitrust

policy,

sponsored by the London-based National

Institute

of Eco-

nomic

and

Social Research, is the work of an economist with

the

Board

of Trade. Not only United Kingdom businessmen

interested

in the United

States

market

and

students of

British

policy

under

the 1956 Restrictive

Trade

Practices

Act,

but

American

readers

as well, found the 1960 edition to be the

best available comprehensive non-technical

treatment

of anti-

trust. Nothing published in the subsequent decade

supplants

Neale's study.

This

second edition

updates

(to 1969) each of the topics

covered in the original work. The various substantive provi-

sions of the Sherman

and

Clayton Acts

are

treated

in depth,

with leading cases skillfully summarized. Resale price main-

tenance,

patents

and

international

cartels receive detailed

treatment.

There

is also an assessment of American policy by this

knowledgeable outsider. Neale

understands

the dual

thrust

of

antitrust

which

"is

at

times concerned with awholehearted

pursuit

of the economic advantages

attributed

to competition;

but

at

other

times the emphasis is placed on social objections

to the concentration of power in

private

hands (p. 275)."

He

aptly

describes the rationale of

antitrust

as "essentially a

desire to provide legal checks to

restrain

economic power

and

is

not

a

pursuit

of economic efficiency as such (p. 489)."

The

list

of works cited

for

this second edition omits several

important

volumes such as the American

Bar

Association

Section of

Antitrust

Law,

Antitrust

Developments

1955-1968,

George Stocking, Workable Competition and

Antitrust

Policy,

as well as the

earlier

compilations by

Edward

S. Mason, Eco-

nomic Concentration and the

lJtlonopol!J

Problem,

and

the