Volume 45, Number 14 · September 24, 1998
The L-Word
By Alan Ryan
Liberalism and Its Discontents
by Alan Brinkley
Harvard University Press, 372 pp., $27.95
One of the many ways in which for-eign observers of the American scene irritate their American friends is by mocking the American understanding of liberalism. As Alan Brinkley's book suggests, most Americans identify twentieth-century liberalism with the achievements of the New Deal. 'When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, surrounded by adults who considered themselves liberals and in a political world that appeared dominated by their beliefs,' says Professor Brinkley, it was perfectly clear what liberalism was and what it had achieved. 'Liberalism was the set of political ideas that had descended from the New Deal and that had shaped the steady postwar expansion of federal social and economic responsibilities.' Liberalism had laid the ground for the prosperity of those years, and the new Keynesian economics appeared to offer the promise of continuous high employment and steady economic growth.
Review, 5082 words
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