UNIVERSITY OF THESSALY
2nd International Conference on Economic and Social History
"Markets" and Politics
Private interests and public authority (18th-20th centuries)
Volos, 10-12 February 2012
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Abstracts
- Kostis Karpozilos “Α rational experiment”: discussing the New Deal in times of Depression
In November 2008 the front-cover of Time depicted Barack Obama in close resemblance to Franklin D. Roosevelt under the caption “The New New Deal”. At that same month, the International Labor and Working-Class History journal devoted its issue to a “scholarly controversy” on the “place of the New Deal in American History”. The article of Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore, which initiated the debate, made clear connections between the legacy of the New Deal and the quest for a new social contract in the early 21st century. The interrelation between history and politics, the ways that historians address the past in connection with the social challenges of their present, is the main theme of this paper. By presenting the popular conception of historical analogies between the Depression Decade of the 1930s and the first crisis of the 21st century, I discuss the conflicting evaluations of the New Deal and the centrality of the social question in the contemporary historiographical debate. This is a debate interwoven with the shortcomings of the “New New Deal” and the appearance of radical counterweights –such as the “Tea Party” or the Occupy Wall Street movement; in this context, the historians’ desire for “a rational experiment” –that is how John Maynard Keynes characterized the New Deal– illustrates an intellectual retreat to an idealized past and underlines their contribution to theories of the “vital center”.
