The End Of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War - Softcover

Brinkley, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679753141 ISBN 13: 9780679753148

Publisher: Vintage, 1996

Synopsis

At a time when liberalism is in disarray, this vastly illuminating book locates the origins of its crisis. Those origins, says Alan Brinkley, are paradoxically situated during the second term of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose New Deal had made liberalism a fixture of American politics and society. The End of Reform shows how the liberalism of the early New Deal—which set out to repair and, if necessary, restructure America’s economy—gave way to its contemporary counterpart, which is less hostile to corporate capitalism and more solicitous of individual rights. Clearly and dramatically, Brinkley identifies the personalities and events responsible for this transformation while pointing to the broader trends in American society that made the politics of reform increasingly popular. It is both a major reinterpretation of the New Deal and a crucial map of the road to today’s political landscape.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Advance comments on The End Of Reform

"An eloquent book that will transform our understanding of what the New Deal did and did not accomplish -- and how its fate continues to shape our politics. This is a landmark history of liberalism by the most perceptive liberal historian since Richard Hofstadter."

-- Michael Kazin, author of The Populist Persuasion

"We commonly think of today's American liberal as the ideological heir of the New Deal. But Alan Brinkley shows that contemporary liberalism, largely concerned with rights and entitlements, is actually a distant and diminished cousin of New Deal reform. Those who would rejuvenate liberalism in our time have much to learn from this superb reconstruction of our recent political past."

-- Michael J. Sandel, author of Liberalism and the Limits of Justice

"Alan Brinkley's probing, thoughtful, elegantly written analysis of what happened to liberalism in Franklin D. Roosevelt's second term and in World War II challenges readers to recast their thinking not only of the New Deal but also of the entire modern age."

-- William E. Leuchtenburg, author of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal

In praise of Alan Brinkley's Voices Of Protest

"It is not often that we get a book as good as this one about demagogic public figures like Huey Long and Father Coughlin...a sensitive and subtle work moderated by grace and restraint."

-- C. Vann Woodward, The New York Review of Books

"This uncommonly good book helps to mark the maturation of twentieth-century American historiography."

-- David M. Kennedy, The New Republic

From the Inside Flap:

rinkley brings his magnificent skills as a writer, historian, and original thinker to bear on a fascinating story -- the transformation of New Deal liberalism from the late '(3)os to the end of World War II. No one has a finer grasp of the intellectual, social, and political currents of this transforming era than Alan Brinkley. His book is a triumph." -- Doris Kearns Goodwin

When Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Democratic party won a landslide victory in the 1936 elections, the way seemed open for the New Deal to complete the restructuring of American government it had begun in 1933. But, as Alan Brinkley makes clear, no sooner were the votes counted than the New Deal began to encounter a series of crippling political and economic problems that stalled its agenda and forced an agonizing reappraisal of the liberal ideas that had shaped it -- a reappraisal still in progress when the United States entered World War II.

The wartime experience helped complete the transformation

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0679753141
• ISBN 13: 9780679753148
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384