New Democracy

New Democracy by William J. Novak reveals that the activist state of the New Deal began forming long 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 significant 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. These were replaced with positive statecraft: governmental activism aimed at changing 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, during the founding and the years immediately following.

William J. Novak illustrates how Americans translated new conceptions of citizenship, social welfare, and economic democracy into demands for laws and policies that delivered public services and vindicated people's rights. Over the decades, Americans progressively discarded earlier understandings of the reach and responsibilities of government, embracing the idea that legislators and administrators in Washington could tackle economic regulation and social welfare issues. As citizens observed the successes of an energetic, interventionist state, they demanded more of the same, urging politicians and civil servants to address unfair competition and labour 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 gradually increasing authority well before the Roosevelt years. The United States was exhibiting its power domestically and intervening on behalf of redistributive goals for far longer than is commonly recognised, countering libertarian claims that the New Deal was an aberration in American history.