The activist state of the New Deal started forming decades before the FDR administration, demonstrating the deep roots of energetic government in America.
In the period between the Civil War and the New Deal, American governance was transformed, with momentous implications for social and economic life. A series of legal reforms gradually brought an end to nineteenth-century traditions of local self-government and associative citizenship, replacing them with positive statecraft: governmental activism intended to change how Americans lived and worked through legislation, regulation, and public administration. The last time American public life had been so thoroughly altered was in the late eighteenth century, at the founding and in the years immediately following.
William J. Novak shows how Americans translated new conceptions of citizenship, social welfare, and economic democracy into demands for law and policy that delivered public services and vindicated people’s rights. Over the course of decades, Americans progressively discarded earlier understandings of the reach and responsibilities of government and embraced the idea that legislators and administrators in Washington could tackle economic regulation and social-welfare problems. As citizens witnessed the successes of an energetic, interventionist state, they demanded more of the same, calling on politicians and civil servants to address unfair competition and labor exploitation, form public utilities, and reform police power.
Arguing against the myth that America was a weak state until the New Deal, New Democracy traces a steadily aggrandizing authority well before the Roosevelt years. The United States was flexing power domestically and intervening on behalf of redistributive goals for far longer than is commonly recognized, putting the lie to libertarian claims that the New Deal was an aberration in American history.
About the Author
William J. Novak is the author of the prizewinning The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America and coeditor of Corporations and American Democracy and The Democratic Experiment. He is Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.
Industry Reviews
“Superb… Bound to become a landmark in constructing the map of governance’s constitutional history… A major contribution to an overall narrative of U.S. constitutional development.”
Mark Tushnet, Balkinization
“An enlightening analysis of the intellectual and theoretical underpinnings of policies enacted in [the Progressive Era]… Antitrust aficionados and general history nerds will also find much to like here… Novak has synthesized a vast amount of material for readers interested in discovering how we arrived at the current state of antitrust law.”
Claude Marx, FTC Watch
“Illuminat[es] the enormous expansion of both state and federal governmental authority well before the New Deal, especially in the laws and agencies regulating public utilities and enacting Progressive social-welfare regulation and benefits.”
Robert Gordon, Stanford Lawyer
“This much anticipated book is a magisterial revision of the history of modern American governance. More powerfully than any work I have read, it shows concretely when and how the modern American state took shape and what made it fundamentally different from what came before. Perhaps even more important, Novak’s account centers democracy in a way other works have simply overlooked. Outstanding, truly field-changing, New Democracy is sure to spark vital conversations for decades to come.”
Karen M. Tani, author of States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935–1972
