Democracy’s Discontent: A New Edition for Our Perilous Times

by Michael J. Sandel

For those postwar liberals who called themselves New Dealers, it was this procedural liberalism of the late 1930s and the 1940s, not the reform ideologies of the early New Deal, that they appropriated and affirmed. “They largely ignored the New Deal’s abortive experiments in economic planning, its failed efforts to create harmonious associational arrangements, its vigorous if short-lived antimonopoly and regulatory crusades, its open skepticism toward capitalism and its captains, its overt celebration of the state.” Instead, “postwar liberals celebrated the New Deal for having discovered solutions to the problems of capitalism that required no alteration in the structure of capitalism; for having defined a role for the state that did not intrude it too far into the economy.”32 The late New Deal sought to avoid rather than embrace controversial conceptions of political and economic reform, and it was this strategy of avoidance that came to define the procedural republic.