Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time - Hardcover

Katznelson, Ira

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0871404508 ISBN 13: 9780871404503

Publisher: Liveright, 2013

Synopsis

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2013

“Fear Itself deeply reconceptualizes the New Deal and raises countless provocative questions.”―David Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Freedom from Fear

Redefining our traditional understanding of the New Deal, Fear Itself finally examines this pivotal American era through a sweeping international lens that juxtaposes a struggling democracy with enticing ideologies like Fascism and Communism. Ira Katznelson, “a towering figure in the study of American and European history” (Cornel West), boldly asserts that, during the 1930s and 1940s, American democracy was rescued yet distorted by a unified band of southern lawmakers who safeguarded racial segregation as they built a new national state to manage capitalism and assert global power. This original study brings to vivid life the politicians and pundits of the time, including Walter Lippmann, who argued that America needed a dose of dictatorship; Mississippi’s five-foot-two Senator Theodore Bilbo, who advocated the legal separation of races; and Robert Oppenheimer, who built the atomic bomb yet was tragically undone by the nation’s hysteria. Fear Itself is a necessary work, vital to understanding our world―a world the New Deal first made. 24 illustrations

About this title

About the Author:

Ira Katznelson is Columbia University's Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History. Having served as president of the American Political Science Association, he is a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He is also the author of Fear Itself and When Affirmative Action Was White.

Review:

“All of Fear Itself is suffused with the same sense of pure terror during the Roosevelt and Truman years as, say, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. It’s easy to forget not just how dangerous the situation was, at home and abroad, during the New Deal, but how palpable were outcomes far worse than what we got...[Katznelson] has done something remarkable in Fear Itself in creating a large-scale, densely detailed tableau of the New Deal that feels fresh and unfamiliar.”
- Nicholas Lemann, New York Review of Books

“Fear Itself is a monumental history of the New Deal’s greatest paradox, its connections with the Jim Crow South. Combining historical nuance with his clear eye for the big picture, Ira Katznelson contributes one of the most trenchant accounts yet of American liberalism at the height of its power in the 1930s and 1940s―a book of major importance in understanding our own political distempers and opportunities.”
- Sean Wilentz, author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln

“A powerful argument, swept along by Katznelson’s robust prose and the imposing scholarship that lies behind it.”
- Kevin Boyle, New York Times Book Review

“Fear Itself deeply reconceptualizes the New Deal and raises countless provocative questions.”
- David Kennedy, author of Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945

“With Fear Itself, Ira Katznelson accomplishes something almost impossible―making us think in entirely new ways about the New Deal and its complex and contradictory legacy for modern America, and about the long legacy of slavery in our politics and society.”
- Eric Foner, author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

“Ira Katnelson’s Fear Itself is an extraordinary book that will change our understanding of the New Deal. He has shown the ways in which racism has shaped American life in the age of the Great Depression, and among other things he has brought the U.S. Congress to the front of the New Deal. It is a remarkable work of scholarship.”
- Alan Brinkley, author of The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War

“In Fear Itself, Ira Katznelson has taken up an old subject and given it new life. In vivid prose, he reinterprets the causes and consequences of the New Deal and its aftermath, putting new emphasis on the role of Congress and southern legislators in the construction of domestic and foreign policy and the fighting of a world war and a cold war. His arguments are compelling, his documentation thorough. Fear Itself will, from this moment on, be the place to go for an understanding of the making of the New Deal and twentieth-century America.”
- David Nasaw, author of Andrew Carnegie

“A wholly new approach to the New Deal takes history we thought we knew and makes it even richer and more complex. In this deeply erudite, beautifully written history, Katznelson... adopts an expansive view of the New Deal, extending it to the end of the Truman administration.”
- Kirkus Reviews

“Positing that the New Deal preserved liberal democracy, but at the expense of compromises with illiberal forces, Katznelson’s hefty history weighs other historians’ interpretations of the New Deal as it knowledgeably advances its own.”
- Booklist

“Engrossing... It is an exhilarating pleasure to lose yourself in this old-fashioned example of original historical scholarship. Fear Itself is a sprawling, ambitious book that offers illuminating insights on nearly every page. Among Katznelson’s gifts is the one most valuable to readers and most in danger of extinction in the American academy: He writes clear, energetic prose without a whiff of academic jargon or pretension... Entertaining and enlightening.”
- Robert G. Kaiser, Washington Post

About this edition

• Publisher: Liveright
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0871404508
• ISBN 13: 9780871404503
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 720