Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2022

Abstract

Bill Novak’s New Democracy, like his first book The People’s Welfare, is a characteristically learned, conceptually sophisticated, and expansive history of the American regulatory state. This time, however, instead of defending a “strong” early American state operating largely through the common law, Novak chronicles the emergence of a recognizably modern, national administrative state. His story roughly spans the aftermath of the Civil War to the election of FDR in 1932; this means, Novak tells us, that “much of the heavy lifting in terms of the creation was done before the so-called Hundred Days.” (264). Importantly all of these major transformations — more inclusive citizenship, an expanded police power, the notions of public utility, antimonopoly, and democratic administration — amount to “nothing less than the beginning of a new and modern democracy” (9). New Democracy, as Novak conceives it, was far less formal and spare than Louis Hartz’s “classically liberal state’ (6) and much more experimental and “complete and substantive democracy” (19). During the early twentieth century, theorists of democracy like John Dewey, Herbert Croly, and others moved beyond a purely procedural notion of democracy and its fixation on “voting and officeholding” to a view of democracy “as a way of life” that “implicated due regard for the welfare of each and every member of the community” (20). This thicker notion of democracy envisioned “the state as an important appurtenance of democratic possibility” (21). In other words, the political economy of a new democracy required a powerful, national administrative state.

Disciplines

Administrative Law | Law | Legal History

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