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Ideology and Institutions in The End of Reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Kenneth Finegold
Kenneth Finegold
Affiliation:
Eastern Washington University
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Extract

Alan Brinkley's The End of Reform deserves praise as a book that is well written and has something to say. There are some books about which only one of these is true and many about which neither is true.

I agree with Brinkley's conclusion and disagree with the path by which he arrives at it. Brinkley's conclusion is that the years from the recession of 1937–38 to the end of World War II in 1945 should be seen as a critical period in the development of American liberalism and, therefore, in American political development. It is during this period, Brinkley argues, that rights-based liberalism became dominant over other variants of liberal ideology. Brinkley's focus on the period from 1937 to 1945 represents a departure in New Deal historiography, which has traditionally focused either on the Hundred Days of 1933, which produced the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), among other “alphabet soup” agencies, or on the “Second New Deal” of 1935–36, during which the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) were passed.

Type
Forum: Alan Brinkley's The End of Reform
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , Fall 1996 , pp. 410 - 414
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

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8. Ibid., 96, 99.