What is the American system like? To our dismay we search in vain for one reliable book, or even one set of books, that describes the system within which we are now living, under whose workings we freely write and freely meet in public. (In most systems on earth scholars may not and do not work as we do.) There is no one book to place in the hands of a foreign friend and say: "Here is an accurate description of the way our nation works." There is no one book to place in the hands of a graduate student—a student disaffected, perhaps, from "the system." We have no Manifesto. We have no current Tocqueville. We lack a text that expresses our operative ideals and catches the meaning of our practices.