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Overview
How did liberalism, the great political tradition that from the New Deal to the 1960s seemed to dominate American politics, fall from favor so far and so fast? In this history of liberalism since the 1930s, a distinguished historian offers an eloquent account of postwar liberalism, where it came from, where it has gone, and why. The book supplies a crucial chapter in the history of twentieth-century American politics as well as a valuable and clear perspective on the state of our nation's politics today.
Liberalism and Its Discontents moves from a penetrating interpretation of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal to an analysis of the profound and frequently corrosive economic, social, and cultural changes that have undermined the liberal tradition. The book moves beyond an examination of the internal weaknesses of liberalism and the broad social and economic forces it faced to consider the role of alternative political traditions in liberalism's downfall. What emerges is a picture of a dominant political tradition far less uniform and stable—and far more complex and contested—than has been argued. The author offers as well a masterly assessment of how some of the leading historians of the postwar era explained (or failed to explain) liberalism and other political ideologies in the last half-century. He also makes clear how historical interpretation was itself a reflection of liberal assumptions that began to collapse more quickly and completely than almost any scholar could have imagined a generation ago. As both political history and a critique of that history, Liberalism and Its Discontents, based on extraordinary essays written over the last decade, leads to a new understanding of the shaping of modern America.
Synopsis
How did liberalism, the great political tradition that from the New Deal to the 1960s seemed to dominate American politics, fall from favor so far and so fast? In this history of liberalism since the 1930s, a distinguished historian offers an eloquent account of postwar liberalism, where it came from, where it has gone, and why. The book supplies a crucial chapter in the history of twentieth-century American politics as well as a valuable and clear perspective on the state of our nation's politics today.
Liberalism and Its Discontents moves from a penetrating interpretation of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal to an analysis of the profound and frequently corrosive economic, social, and cultural changes that have undermined the liberal tradition. The book moves beyond an examination of the internal weaknesses of liberalism and the broad social and economic forces it faced to consider the role of alternative political traditions in liberalism's downfall. What emerges is a picture of a dominant political tradition far less uniform and stable—and far more complex and contested—than has been argued. The author offers as well a masterly assessment of how some of the leading historians of the postwar era explained (or failed to explain) liberalism and other political ideologies in the last half-century. He also makes clear how historical interpretation was itself a reflection of liberal assumptions that began to collapse more quickly and completely than almost any scholar could have imagined a generation ago. As both political history and a critique of that history, Liberalism and Its Discontents, based on extraordinary essays written over the last decade, leads to a new understanding of the shaping of modern America.
Rick Perlstein - In These Times
[Brinkley's] essays over the past fifteen years, collected in Liberalism and its Discontents, are learned, calm and artful. Brinkley betrays real indignation throughout--as any unashamed liberal faced with the task of explaining the last 65 years of American history must--but his is a quiet anger...Brinkley [is] one of the most trenchant, fair-minded and illuminating historical essayists of his generation, and...this book [is] indispensable to anyone seeking to understand one of the signal political questions of our age: What is New Deal liberalism, and where did it go?
Editorials
Booklist
Both learned and readable, these provocative essays will interest all those who still admit to being left of center.
— Joel Neuberg
Boston Globe
Liberalism and its fate provide the unifying theme of Brinkley's newest book. A collection of essays, Liberalism and Its Discontents is a Whitman's Sampler of articles, reviews, and pensees put together by one of America's most innovative and insightful historians...Through it all, Brinkley displays a curious and humane mind at work, respectful of liberalism's legacy, mindful of its challenges, and hopeful for its future.
— David M. Shribman
In These Times
[Brinkley's] essays over the past fifteen years, collected in Liberalism and its Discontents, are learned, calm and artful. Brinkley betrays real indignation throughout—as any unashamed liberal faced with the task of explaining the last 65 years of American history must—but his is a quiet anger...Brinkley [is] one of the most trenchant, fair-minded and illuminating historical essayists of his generation, and...this book [is] indispensable to anyone seeking to understand one of the signal political questions of our age: What is New Deal liberalism, and where did it go?
— Rick Perlstein
Journal of American History
In this collection of essays exploring the tangled history of twentieth-century American liberalism, Alan Brinkley shows his masterly control of historical analysis and prose...Brinkley demonstrates a fine sensitivity to complexity, ambiguity, and illusion in the history of American politics.
— Howard Brick
London Review of Books
In Europe liberals find themselves competing for power and influence with social democrats who have effectively stolen their thunder. In America, the situation is more complex—and Alan Brinkley's book is an excellent guide to these perplexities...Brinkley's key message is that liberals are baffled because they have misread their own history. They never enjoyed the ideological hegemony they supposed...Liberalism won't begin to be credible, even to respect itself again, unless it respects its enemies, unless it sees itself for what it always was, not a bland managerial consensus, but a fighting creed.
— Michael Ignatieff
New York Times Book Review
With brilliant economy, Alan Brinkley uses these collected essays to explore where liberalism failed: why Franklin D. Roosevelt condoned racial segregation, why cold-war internationalists gladly rebuilt Europe while ignoring the third world, why the New Left, Old Left and organized labor shunned one another...In his willingness to hear...different voices, Brinkley admirably carries on the liberal tradition.
— Allen D. Boyer
Times Higher Education Supplement
For many, perhaps most of the more reflective 19th-century liberals—Constant, Tocqueville, Mill and Weber for example—modernity and liberal values were far from being synonymous. Whether they would finally converge had to be considered an open question. Alan Brinkley's Liberalism and Its Discontents is a subtle, penetrating and refreshingly undoctrinaire exploration of that still open question. In 17 highly readable essays full of lightly worn learning and finely balanced judgements, Brinkley does much to correct the historical myth—presently a central element in America's celebratory national self-image—that the public culture of the United States has been hegemonically liberal throughout most of this century.
— John Gray
Washington Post Book World
Read Brinkley well and you will come away with a fuller sense of the world than from any dozen carping culture warriors taken together...Liberalism and its Discontents collects a full complement of Brinkley's essays from the last 16 years, and, unlike many essayists who open their clipping files to discover that they have enough pages to fill a book, Brinkleyopened his to find he had enough to deserve a book—an entire political history of our time, in fact, beginning (the rise of New Deal liberalism), middle (the New Deal laid siege from all sides in the '60s and '70s) and end (the 90s: may our hero rest in peace)...He is perhaps the most thriving practitioner of his own description of the historian's proper aim, 'reminding our personality-obsessed and result-oriented culture that there are forces shaping our world beyond the actions and characters of individuals—and that we will be more successful if we adjust our expectations and our goals to the reality of those forces, and to the difficulty of understanding them.'
— Rick Perlstein