New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State

William J. Novak

Sep 2022 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by A.W. Miller

About this audiobook

The activist state of the New Deal started forming decades 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 momentous 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, replacing them with positive statecraft: governmental activism intended to change how Americans lived and worked through legislation, regulation, and public administration. William J. Novak shows how Americans translated new conceptions of citizenship, social welfare, and economic democracy into demands for law and policy that delivered public services and vindicated people's rights. Over the course of decades, Americans progressively discarded earlier understandings of the reach and responsibilities of government and embraced the idea that legislators and administrators in Washington could tackle economic regulation and social-welfare problems. As citizens witnessed the successes of an energetic, interventionist state, they demanded more of the same, calling on politicians and civil servants to address unfair competition and labor exploitation, form public utilities, and reform police power.

About the author

William J. Novak is the author of the prizewinning The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America and coeditor of Corporations and American Democracy and The Democratic Experiment. He is Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.

For almost a decade A. W. Miller has been lending his voice to audiobooks, video games, and commercials. A father, husband, homesteader, and published author, Miller lives with his wife on their five-acre homestead in middle Tennessee.