{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02227998514667657, 'fraction_numerical': 0.012996658002227999, 'mean_word_length': 5.507246376811594, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 1, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Federal Antitrust Policy During the Kennedy-Johnson Years. By James R. Williamson. Wesport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995. pp. xii, 180. $49.95

Robert Higgs's thesis in Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) that wartime mobilizations and economic downturns proved critical points having ratchet-like effects on the growth of public sector power. Yet in overlooking scholarly works tracing the institutional changes of the Progressive Era, mobilization for the Great War, and what Ellis Hawley has termed "the associative state" created by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover in the 1920s, Campbell conflates the reform, war, and New Era periods, while presenting orthodox interpretations of policy responses to the Great Depression and the centrality of New Deal reform in the emergence of modern government. Revisionist scholars of the wartime mobilizations and the Eisenhower administration have suggested that policy proposals of the 1940s and 1950s may have served as a bridge between New Deal reform and the expansion of economic, social, and civil rights regulation in the 1960s and 1970s. Although Campbell does not address the interpretive implications of these works, his use of a one-hundred-year time span rather than the more traditional decennial focus allows for rediscovery of larger patterns of governmental growth that twentieth-century diatribes completely miss. In dealing with change over time in macroeconomic fiscal policies, industry-specific economic regulatory efforts, social welfare and civil rights legislation, and constraints of the federalist system, this work proves both thought provoking and indicative of the need for close study of the institutional complexities of public policymaking. Scholars will find fault with certain sections, but this account challenges us to rethink what have become discipline-specific orthodoxies. Political scientists will revise their view of the importance of historical perspective and the use of primary sources. Historians will rediscover the necessity of clear definition of terms, the usefulness of theory, and the value of longer time frames. Economists will have to reckon with imperfections of the marketplace, the sometime irrationality of the policy process, and a rediscovery of the political economy of public policy on all levels of government. Campbell has provided a thoughtful, stimulating, and balanced account that engages in true interdisciplinary analysis, corrects ideologically passionate, condemnatory views of an American Leviathan, and challenges readers to rethink one of the central currents of modern American history.