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188 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadienne d'etudes americaines of "slaves"struggling to be free. The procedure demands an autobiographical intervention, and Newfield details his own subjective shift of "consciousness" about Emerson and his work in response to the education of the Jamieson and Adorno-like theories of liberalism. Newfield's shift is not unlike the prototype experience of Paul on the road to Damascus. Consequently, one might fault Newfield for reading Emerson's writings as rhetorical ideology, while valorizing his own argumentation. For example, Newfield's definition of "equality" is imaged in the actions of the Paris Commune which Marxist-orientated theorists often celebrate as the moment in history in which utopian social equality was achieved, but ignores that other spontaneous French action of "liberty, equality, and fraternity"-the Revolution of 1789, which is termed a "bourgeois" revolution because of its early leadership and because it eventually led to tyranny. In short, Hegel's "master/slave" dialectic indicts liberalism, but is negated when required to give a "grass-roots" image of true "community." Despite these reservations, this is an engaging and important study, and readers of this volume will not likely ever again approach the writings and life of Ralph Waldo Emerson in the same way. John Stephen Martin University of Calgary Ronen Shamir. Managing Legal Uncertainty: Elite Lawyers in the New Deal. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Pp. 252. The Age of Roosevelt ushered in a philosophical pragmatism which in turn impacted on the concurrent legal realist movement with its pragmatist premises. Along with other forces they reshaped the face of the law in the United States. For it was in the New Deal that legal realism which up to then had been confined to law schools and academic circles became the accepted underpinning of the administration's legal policy agenda. In his book Ronen Shamir's protagonists are the era's elite corporate lawyers. While as he says they displayed a deep understanding of pragmatism-in its legal realist guise- Book Reviews 189 in this era of change, uncertainty and instability in the law, the members of the organized bar in the 1930s could not and did not anticipate or counteract the dialectical aspects of legal realism along with its pragmatic premises. Lawyers had to contend with a large array of new threats: a process of deprofessionalization was underway as the New Deal-administered state produced a whole new culture of experts and a consolidation of a new managerial class. For the first time in its history the government became one of the major employers of "government lawyers" The Anti-Trust Division alone of the Department of Justice had almost a hundred. And not least of their concerns was a keen self-interest in blocking the expansion of administrative law, which encroached in an unprecedented manner on their traditional preserve. This book treats a discreet group of players in certain aspects of the New Deal-in-the-law, and how elite lawyers attempted to manage legal uncertainty as they confronted a new situation whose consequences could neither be anticipated, intelligently assessed, or controlled. Shamir's original account offers a new look at the New Deal from a different perspective, that of the corporate elite and their dilemma. It challenges conventional views of their response to the New Deal and their clash with academic realists. The author is a sociologist who teaches at Tel Aviv University. He also happens to be interested in history and political theory and here sets for himself the task of exploring this unexplored and restricted aspect of the New Deal. The book originated as an intellectual exercise in sociological theories first incorporated into his doctoral dissertation. It is evident from the introduction and certain chapters of his book that theoretical questions that interested him earlier still do. But, as he claims in his preface (x), the final product is a work in history. The historical dimension is not as apparent in the preface and introduction as it later becomes, particularly in chapters two to four. He has some difficulty in settling on what are the major themes and subthemes of his text. As best they can be summarized, they include the...

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