I have discarded the circumlocutions and suppressions which are usual on such occasions.

LONGTIME READERS OF what I post here will, no doubt, recognize in the next few paragraphs of Louis Boudin's text things which I've pointed out repeatedly on a number of issues, none so much as those he zeroed in on, those parts of human thought and academic scribblage that pretend to be science.

This brings me to another type of objection that will probably be made against the present work—namely, that I am not “disinterested," and my work, therefore, not really scientific. My answer to that kind of criticism has been given long ago by Dr. Johnson, in the admonition quoted by Mr. Coudert. There is no such thing as “disinterested" scientific work in any branch of science, and certainly not in the social sciences. There is, of course, a lot of pseudo-scientific writing—particularly of the “text” type which pretends to be disinterested. But the only time it is really disinterested in the kind of knowledge it purveys is when its interest is limited to the number of shekels it gathers. Whenever any work rises above that level, it acquires a scientific purpose and thereby ceases to be “disinterested."  The distinguishing characteristic of a work of science is not that its author is “disinterested," but that the nature of his interest is such as to lead him to see the truth and tell it without reservations. 

He astutely separates the substance of the "science" produced from the true motives of its production, in all too many cases, how much it will get the "scientist" who writes it.  I would guess that in no other case other than, almost certainly, the pseudo-science of economics, is there a more direct common motive in what the "science" produced claims and the financial rewards expected for producing it than in the legal profession. 

In doing so he distinguishes work which is produced merely for those baser motives and that which is produced for something higher, a desire to know and tell the truth and even higher motives that are the opposite of financial self-interest.   It would be tempting to go through the use of that perverted virtue of economists and the legal profession "enlightened self-interest" and the inevitable distortion of morality or, as they will have it "ethics" come when motives other than the truth and the even higher motive to seek the common good for all are behind it.  It is a pressing issue for the construction and preservation of egalitarian democracy, especially in an age when such outfits as the ACLU and other bastions of secular liberalism have duped People into going for a self-interested libertarianism, mistaking it and its goals and perverted goods for genuine liberalism of provision for the least among us, the common welfare and the provision of an equally distributed good life. 

Unfortunately, many workers in our science, owing to the conditions of their work, often find it convenient, and sometimes absolutely necessary, to clothe their thoughts in seemingly disinterested language. This has had the unfortunate result of creating the impression that if a book calls a spade a spade—instead of using some circumlocution—it has somehow lost scientific standing. Needless to say, the impression is erroneous as well as
harmful. And since I am, fortunately, not compelled by the conditions of my work to make a virtue of the usual academic necessity, I have discarded the circumlocutions and suppressions which are usual on such occasions. This may prevent my book from becoming “required reading” in some colleges and universities, but it will help to bring home some truths which the usual circumlocutions tend to hide, or at least obscure.

This makes me remember nothing so much as that man of such demonstrated good will, Jimmy Carter whose administration sought to put official documents, so much as was in his power, into plain speech which legal lay-people had some hope of understanding without resorting to constant use of specialized dictionaries - which, of course, no one can tolerate doing for long.  An attempt to make documents and the actions behind them comprehensible and, so useful to them instead of weapons to cheat and harm them.  One of the early things that the Reagan administration did was to revert back to the obscure language so beloved by lawyers,  both for its utility in duping and mystifying and cheating most people but, more so, making it necessary for them to hire lawyers at ridiculous numbers of dollars per charging-hour, making that profession a full participant in sleaziness.

Manner aside, the question is one of proof. And here I was confronted with a serious problem of mechanics or form. The major portion of the work is devoted to proving the proposition that our actual Constitution—the Constitution we live under—is not only different from what the Framers intended it to be, but also from what John Marshall said it was. But, as Mr. Coudert has pointed out, we pretend that “the Constitution is as unchangeable as the laws of the Medes and the Persians” and that we are still living under the Constitution of 1787. In order to keep up
that pretense, the courts have developed a technique which makes it extremely difficult for non-specialists to penetrate the veil of mystery with which the actions of the judges as the real governors of the country have been surrounded. The mere mass of words used is such as to make it impossible for an ordinary person to
digest them. The opinions in the recent case of Myers v. United States, which effected a revolution in our governmental machine, consist of about seventy-five thousand words. Who but specialists can be expected to read this mass of words, even if one could tell from a reading of them what it is all about? But in most cases one
can not. In order to be in a position to form a judgment on the matter in controversy, nay, in order to understand the significance of what is being done, one must be in a position to check up the given decision against many previous decisions. In other words, one must be a specialist. 

If you are not already impressed with the unusual honesty and candor of Louis Boudin, this should do it for you.  He gives it away as no lawyer I've read before ever did.   The very structure of the legal profession is created to make it obscure for any but the few who have access to law school and a legal training when there is no reason for that other than those I've mentioned, both of which boil down to cheating the largest percentage of People, especially those without an advanced education. 

Under these circumstances, the task of writing a book for nonspecialists, the sum and substance of which is, when reduced to its lowest terms, that the specialty itself is largely mummery and pretense, becomes rather difficult. When the Minimum Wage law was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, Prof. Thomas Reed Powell of Harvard said in the Harvard Law Review:

“Literary interpretation of the Constitution has nothing whatever to do with it. Neither legal learning nor economic exposition can explain it. Arguments pro and arguments contra have no compelling inherent power. The issue was determined not by the arguments but by the arbiters. . . . The talk in the consultation chamber must often be very different from the talk in the published opinions."

How get behind the published opinions? Or, rather, behind their verbiage, to their real meaning? My solution of the problem was the application of the comparative-historical method. While a judge may, consciously or unconsciously, hide his real meaning as well as his motives behind a barrage of words, both his meaning and his motives become perfectly plain when looked at in the light of similar words uttered by other judges at other times in the course of our judicial history. My task was, therefore, nothing less than that of writing a constitutional history of this country—at least in outline—and of writing it, as far as possible, in the language of the actors who made it, the judges themselves.

I have yet to find extensive biographical documentation of the life of Louis Boudin, what fragmentary information I had about him before I started this and what I've gained since has led me to think he was a very rare and honest man of the political left.  He was a Marxist theorist as well as a scholarly lawyer and an honest man. But he was the kind of Marxist in the years before and after the first Communist revolution, the one in Russia, who immediately saw that Communism in practice instead of in theory went extremely bad, almost immediately.  He was a member of the far left of the old Socialist Party whose most famous appearance in history was when the far left broke up the old Socialist Party over "principles" but at the motivation of Lenin and Trotsky who wanted their agents to have control of it or to destroy it.  He walked out of the emergency convention of Socialists with the John Reed faction but walked out of the alternative meeting saying he hadn't left a party of "crooks" to join one of "lunatics."   He pretty much gave up leftist party politics, though he continued to write articles both theoretical and critical and practical.   He was an anti-Bolshevist Marxist who, it is my impression, seeing communism in real life action became increasingly disillusioned with it and who, by the time he had seen Stalin and, I'd guess, his blood baths and show trials and his compact with Hitler, was totally disillusioned with Communism. If my impression is correct, by the time of this book, in the early 1930s, that process of disillusionment would have been well underway. 

I think his declaration that he believed in democracy was sincere, I think his skepticism of democracy under capitalism and the florid, rampant corruption, inequality, racism, etc. that flourished in the United States he lived in probably accounts for why he was among those who mistakenly believed Marxism, with its pseudo-scientific basis in a Hegelian method of history was the way to a better life for all.  I think this passage proves his disillusionment with that was well underway, having had a similar disillusionment with the secular-leftism I grew up with I think I recognize the thinking and that someone who has gone this far cannot remain what they started out being.  His identification of pseudo-science within social science is something which could only have been known by him to be a relevant and fatal observation in regard to his former ideological faith.

P.S. I am tempted to go, again over James Weinstein's point made in his book The Long Detour in which he notes Louis Boudin's involvement with the Bolshevist's attempt to first take over then to destroy the old Socialist Party, the most successful socialist party in the history of the United States was repeated in his grand-niece Katherine Boudin and the destruction of the SDS by what would become the Weathermen and their allies.  I will admit that the destruction of the old Socialists was a serious blow to the real, practical left, socialists had actually gained elected office under it and, in many places, made real life better for real people, so many of those who did that derided as "sewer socialists" for providing clean water instead of powerless theoretical purity.  If the SDS would have ever developed that far, I tend to doubt, it was mostly a hobby of affluent white college students, though what came after in the Weathermen and the Weather Underground with their thrilling violence and callous stupidity, including the murders that Katherine Boudin was involved with and the town-house explosion that almost killed her and did, in fact, kill others of her comrades, set the real American left back more than anything the secular left managed to actually accomplish.  In the mean time the religious left continued, though, as well, damaged by the secularists.  

I will point out again that you don't have to like or admire Louis Boudin or to agree with his former Marxism to read his evidence, check it for factual honesty and accuracy and to go through his rigorous arguments to agree with him.  I am sure Louis Boudin and I would have gotten into many arguments about many things but his honesty in presenting evidence and his rigor in arguing from it doesn't need that I agree with him on other things to gratefully acknowledge my adoption of his thinking.