If I may put it this way, from an internalist legal perspective, the traditional Lochner story was way too crude. From a perspective with stronger externalist notes, it captures important features of that time, which our time shares. Today as then, laissez-faire ideas in the larger intellectual and political culture contribute to the development of anti-regulatory lines of jurisprudence.
Alexis de Tocqueville famously believed that the young American republic had a genius for community. "Voluntary associations," he wrote, sprang up everywhere to solve practical problems, agitate for political change, or try to move other Americans by moral suasion. These...