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

Ira Katznelson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0871404508 ISBN 13: 9780871404503

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co., 2013

Synopsis

Redefining the traditional understanding of the New Deal, Fear Itself examines this pivotal American era through a sweeping international lens that juxtaposes a struggling democracy with enticing ideologies like Fascism and Communism. Ira Katznelson asserts that, during the 1930s and 1940s, American democracy was rescued yet distorted by a unified band of southern legislators who safeguarded racial segregation as they built a new national state to manage capitalism and assert global power. This study brings to 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 undone by the nation's hysteria. Fear Itself is a work vital to understanding America and the world the New Deal made.

About this title

Review:

"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

"...there can be few people outside the academic world who relish the byzantine intricacies of Roosevelt's alphabet agencies or the interminable, miserable descriptions of the Dust Bowl. But Katznelson's Fear Itself is different: more focused, more argumentative, more ambitious." --Literary Review

"Katznelson, a distinguished scholar and professor at Columbia, writes elegantly and his book easily repays the reader's attention" --Prospect Magazine

"[a] powerful and well-paced account" --Financial Times

About the Author:

Ira Katznelson is Columbia University's Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, and has served as the president of the American Political Science Association. He is the author of When Affirmative Action Was White (ISBN 978 0 393 32851 6).

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co.
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0871404508
• ISBN 13: 9780871404503
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 720