When speaking of freedom, La Bruyère's word comes to mind—that everything has been said and that we come too late to add anything. Yet an analysis of the concept of freedom may be warranted for the very reason that it is being used by everyone to refer to whatever he considers valuable, from obedience to law (positive or natural) to autonomy and economic abundance. I believe that it is possible to assign to “freedom” in its different aspects meanings which are emotively neutral and operationally testable, and thereby to rescue for the social sciences generally and for political science in particular an important set of concepts, closely related as they are to those of power and control.

One would have to start with disentangling the widely different senses in which “freedom” is being used indiscriminately. I shall deal with freedom in only two of its many meanings, interpersonal freedom and freedom of action. One of the difficulties will be to steer a middle course between the vagueness of conversational language and the awkwardness of a precise terminology; but I hope to demonstrate that such an endeavor is no idle exercise in semantics but a necessary prerequisite for the fruitful investigation of social and political phenomena.

There was one change in the personnel of the Supreme Court during the 1958 Term. Justice Harold H. Burton of Ohio, who had been appointed by President Truman late in 1945, retired on October 13, 1958. For his place President Eisenhower selected 44-year-old Potter Stewart, a Cincinnati Republican whom he had appointed to the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in 1954. A graduate of Yale College and the Yale Law School (1941), Justice Stewart was given a recess appointment on October 14, 1958, but it was not confirmed by the Senate until May 5, 1959. The vote was 70 to 17, all Senators voting against confirmation being Southern Democrats. This experience underscored once more, as in the case of Justice Brennan, the risks involved in recess appointments to the Court, since Justice Stewart sat there for most of the Term before confirmation was had. Whether this affected his votes on cases is a matter of sheer speculation, but the occasion for it is highly regrettable. A new Justice should be as independent as an old one, from the very beginning his service.

Public controversy over the Court's recent decisions, particularly in the security field, continued during the 1958 Term. Pressure for legislation designed to overturn specific Court decisions or to curb the Court's powers continued in the First Session of the 86th Congress, but was less intense than in the previous Congress.