A Discussion of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time By Ira Katznelson

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 704-705
Author(s):  
Sheri Berman

Ira Katznelson’s Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time is a big book, and it addresses a big theme: the historical significance of the New Deal, as a watershed moment in U.S. political history, as a form of “social democracy, American style” that allowed liberal democracy to prevail in competition with Soviet communism and fascism, and as the “origin” of key features of contemporary politics in the United States. The book is a contribution to the study of U.S. politics, but also to the study of comparative politics, international relations, political theory, and comparative history. We have thus invited a range of political science scholars to comment on the book as a work of general political science; as an account of the New Deal and its political legacies in the United States; as a contribution to the comparative analysis of social democracy and the welfare state; and as a way of integrating the study of domestic and foreign policy, and in particular the study of U.S. politics and international relations.

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (02) ◽  
pp. 461-476

APSA is pleased to include here the names of individuals who have completed their doctoral dissertations at political science departments in the United States in 2012. The list is based on data collected in the APSA member database and includes information reported by both individuals and departments. Dissertations are listed by fields of interest as labeled by APSA, American politics, comparative politics, international relations, methodology, public administration, political philosophy and theory, public lawand courts, and public policy. (See also, table 1.)


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Matthew Charles Wilson ◽  
Carl Henrik Knutsen

We describe and analyze patterns in the geographical focus of political science research across more than a century. Using a new database of titles and abstracts from 27,690 publications in eight major political science journals from their inception, we demonstrate that, historically, political scientists concentrated their studies on a limited number of countries situated in North America and Western Europe. While a strong focus on Western countries remains today, we detail how this picture has changed somewhat over recent decades, with political science research becoming increasingly “globalized.” Still, several countries have received almost no attention, and geographical citation patterns differ by subfield. For example, we find indications of a greater focus on the United States and large Western European countries in international relations than in comparative politics publications. We also analyze several correlates of a country being the focus of political science research, including the country’s predominant languages, income, population size, democracy level, and conflict experience, and show systematic variation in the geographical focus of research. This unequal focus, we argue, has important implications regarding the applicability of extant descriptive and causal claims, as well as the development of theories in political science.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-281
Author(s):  
Sylvia Dümmer Scheel

El artículo analiza la diplomacia pública del gobierno de Lázaro Cárdenas centrándose en su opción por publicitar la pobreza nacional en el extranjero, especialmente en Estados Unidos. Se plantea que se trató de una estrategia inédita, que accedió a poner en riesgo el “prestigio nacional” con el fin de justificar ante la opinión pública estadounidense la necesidad de implementar las reformas contenidas en el Plan Sexenal. Aprovechando la inusual empatía hacia los pobres en tiempos del New Deal, se construyó una imagen específica de pobreza que fuera higiénica y redimible. Ésta, sin embargo, no generó consenso entre los mexicanos. This article analyzes the public diplomacy of the government of Lázaro Cárdenas, focusing on the administration’s decision to publicize the nation’s poverty internationally, especially in the United States. This study suggests that this was an unprecedented strategy, putting “national prestige” at risk in order to explain the importance of implementing the reforms contained in the Six Year Plan, in the face of public opinion in the United States. Taking advantage of the increased empathy felt towards the poor during the New Deal, a specific image of hygienic and redeemable poverty was constructed. However, this strategy did not generate agreement among Mexicans.


2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Didier

ArgumentWhen the New Deal administration attained power in the United States, it was confronted with two different problems that could be linked to one another. On the one hand, there was a huge problem of unemployment, affecting everybody including the white-collar workers. And, on the other hand, the administration suffered from a very serious lack of data to illuminate its politics. One idea that came out of this situation was to use the abundant unemployed white-collar workers as enumerators of statistical studies. This paper describes this experiment, shows how it paradoxically affected the professionalization of statistics, and explains why it did not affect expert democracy despite its Deweysian participationist aspect.


2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 401-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONATHAN BELL

ABSTRACTThis article argues that those termed ‘liberals’ in the United States had the opportunity in the late 1940s to use overseas case studies to reshape the ramshackle political agenda of the New Deal along more specifically social democratic lines, but that they found it impossible to match interest in the wider world with a concrete programme to overcome tension between left-wing politics and the emerging anti-totalitarianism of the Cold War. The American right, by contrast, conducted a highly organized publicity drive to provide new meaning for their anti-statist ideology in a post-New Deal, post-isolationist United States by using perceived failures of welfare states overseas as domestic propaganda. The examples of Labour Britain after 1945 and Labour New Zealand both provided important case studies for American liberals and conservatives, but in the Cold War it was the American right who would benefit most from an ideologically driven repackaging of overseas social policy for an American audience.


Social Text ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-38
Author(s):  
Cotten Seiler

This article explores the nineteenth-century conceptualization of racialized whiteness that foregrounded empathy as whites’ signal evolutionary achievement and the font of their potential. Neo-Lamarckian evolutionary science in the United States articulated whiteness as an acquired disposition to care, as both noun and verb. This deep context helps us account for the rise of a statist, ameliorative new liberalism at the turn of the century and the building of a midcentury apparatus of “white care”: a surround of institutions and infrastructure dedicated to the education, health, security, mobility, and comfort of the white citizenry. The care-oriented liberalism emplaced by the New Deal was rooted in a biopolitical imperative to “make live” the valorized white portion of the population.


2012 ◽  
Vol 102 (1) ◽  
pp. 524-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gauti B Eggertsson

Can government policies that increase the monopoly power of firms and the militancy of unions increase output? This paper shows that the answer is yes under certain “emergency” conditions. These emergency conditions—zero interest rates and deflation—were satisfied during the Great Depression in the United States. The New Deal, which facilitated monopolies and union militancy, was therefore expansionary in the model presented. This conclusion is contrary to a large previous literature. The main reason for this divergence is that this paper incorporates rigid prices and the zero bound on the short-term interest rate. JEL: E23, E32, E52, E62, J51, N12, N42


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika E. Berenyi

Since the conclusion of World War II, the ethos of the Roosevelt administration (1933-1945) and the achievements of the New Deal era have been celebrated by official rhetoric.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Bell

In 1944 President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s State of the Union address set out what he termed an “economic Bill of Rights” that would act as a manifesto of liberal policies after World War Two. Politically, however, the United States was a different place than the country that had faced the ravages of the Great Depression of the 1930s and ushered in Roosevelt’s New Deal to transform the relationship between government and the people. Key legacies of the New Deal, such as Social Security, remained and were gradually expanded, but opponents of governmental regulation of the economy launched a bitter campaign after the war to roll back labor union rights and dismantle the New Deal state. Liberal heirs to FDR in the 1950s, represented by figures like two-time presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, struggled to rework liberalism to tackle the realities of a more prosperous age. The long shadow of the U.S. Cold War with the Soviet Union also set up new challenges for liberal politicians trying to juggle domestic and international priorities in an era of superpower rivalry and American global dominance. The election of John F. Kennedy as president in November 1960 seemed to represent a narrow victory for Cold War liberalism, and his election coincided with the intensification of the struggle for racial equality in the United States that would do much to shape liberal politics in the 1960s. After his assassination in 1963, President Lyndon Johnson launched his “Great Society,” a commitment to eradicate poverty and to provide greater economic security for Americans through policies such as Medicare. But his administration’s deepening involvement in the Vietnam War and its mixed record on alleviating poverty did much to taint the positive connotations of “liberalism” that had dominated politics during the New Deal era.


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