The argument of Fear Itself has been well rehearsed in the many, overwhelmingly positive, reviews it has attracted. The New Deal solved the triple crisis faced by democratic polities during the 1930s and 1940s: first, the challenge of dictatorships (from both left and right); second, changes in the nature of violence, particularly the advent of nuclear weapons; and third, the hold of racialized social structures, particularly in the South. Ironically, it was defenders of this last source of “fear”—congressional Dixiecrats—who were the leading actors in the New Deal, helping to push through legislation, albeit within the “southern cage” that constrained U.S. politics, which saved representative democracy. This process, according to Ira Katznelson, contained “an import almost on a par with that of the French Revolution” (p. 9).

My main disciplinary interest is in international relations rather than sociology or political science, and I am no New Deal specialist. As such, I will leave discussion of the microdetails of Katznelson’s argument to other, more qualified, reviewers. Instead, my aim is to offer a predominantly external critique consisting of three reservations I have about the book and two ways in which revisiting the international aspects of Katznelson’s analysis could challenge and, potentially, extend his argument.

My first reservation lies in the unorthodox periodization employed in the book that extends the New Deal into the early Eisenhower years. Such a move needs further defense lest dynamics that belong primarily to World War II become conflated within the New Deal, not least the emergence of a “crusader state” and national security apparatus (p. 481). Such developments were the result of the war, not the New Deal. World War II devastated European states, both winners and losers alike: By the end of the war, German GDP had returned to its 1890 level, while living standards in Britain had fallen by a third. ^{Footnote 1} The United States, by contrast, saw its economy grow by 50% between 1939 and 1945; by 1945, U.S. GDP was worth half the global total, and its national income was worth twice that of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries combined. ^{Footnote 2} This basic shift in global power had less to do with congressional horse trading than the fact that the United States emerged from World War II as by far the most powerful state in the world. And it was this shift in international politics that lay behind the missionary zeal with which the United States approached the post-1945 world. To collapse this into a broader New Deal era is to overstretch the book’s analytical apparatus.

My second concern runs in the opposite direction; at times, Katznelson overplays the specificity of the New Deal. Many of the fears he cites were not those of the New Deal per se, but the products of modernity in general. Authoritarianism, militarism, racism, and so on did not appear out of nowhere during the interwar years. Rather, they belong to the contradictions, or at least ambivalences, of modernity. ^{Footnote 3} Solving these fears through uneasy marriages of liberalism and illiberalism was not a special fix instituted during the New Deal, but something germane to political orders throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even Katznelson’s conception of a Janus-faced US state that combined representation with antidemocratic pathologies is not a novel feature of the New Deal. Rather, it is a central feature of the order conceived in the Federalist Papers and, arguably, inherent in republicanism as a mode of thought. ^{Footnote 4}

Third, the subtitle of the book, which sees the New Deal as the “origins of our time,” needs unpacking. Who is the “our” in “our time”? If Katznelson means the United States—and if his extended periodization is allowed to stand—then perhaps there is something to this claim. But Fear Itself offers relatively slight support for the more maximalist assertion that the New Deal served as a model for “managing capitalism” (pp. 5–7, 9, 247, 477). What was the impact of the New Deal on postwar welfare states in Western Europe next to, say, Keynesianism in Britain or ordoliberalism in Germany? What was the impact of the New Deal on the Bretton Woods institutions and the broader system of “embedded liberalism” they helped to generate? ^{Footnote 5} And what was the influence of the New Deal on the experience of representative democracies in postcolonial polities, such as India? At the very least, claims of global appeal need greater support; without this, the New Deal appears to be a more parochial “revolution” than Katznelson asserts.

Beyond these three concerns lie two further issues that should be important to the author’s account, but which are either marginal or absent in the book. First, Katznelson neglects the extent to which U.S. debates around political economy were subject to, or at least embedded in, international dynamics. Hence, he provides a lengthy discussion of domestic debates over tariffs, but no mention of Britain’s abandoning of the gold standard in 1931 and the broader pressures this placed on the United States. Similarly, the Great Depression was not just a problem for the United States; it was a global pandemic. A dual, simultaneous collapse in commodity prices and exports saw states raise tariffs and devalue their currencies everywhere. The period also saw a marked tightening of the relationship between states and markets around the world as levels of international trade dropped by around two-thirds. This context is crucial to an understanding of the actions of U.S. policymakers—they were not just responding to domestic interests and party politics but to international trade wars, competitive devaluations, and exchange controls. Yet nowhere in Katzenelson’s argument are issues of international political economy systematically connected to congressional debates. Given that a central aim of the book is to integrate the international and domestic features of the New Deal, this is a surprising omission.

Secondly, and in similar vein, Katznelson overplays the distinctive features of southern segregation. The “anti-liberal white populism” (p. 23) he sees as a distinctive feature of southern order was not exclusive to the United States. Imperial powers constructed racially segregated spaces from Singapore to Cape Town. Transnational epistemic networks imagined a league of democracies that could serve as the “nucleus” of global order, which was to be buttressed by a “stratified geo-racial identity” in which race served as the main point of demarcation. ^{Footnote 6} In many cases, such networks arose from the fear generated by the rise of nonwhite states, Japan most prominently among them. In other words, racism was not restricted to the Mason-Dixon line; it was a central feature of international order. By failing to consider this broader optic, Katznelson overplays the particularity of the United States in general and the South in particular.

Making these points is not meant to detract from the exemplary scholarship that characterizes Fear Itself. I learned a huge amount from reading the book, and the praise it has received is richly deserved. Rather, my critique is intended to tease out a binary that infiltrates even such exemplary work: International dynamics provide the underlaboring; domestic dynamics serve as the primary causal agents. Despite Katznelson’s best efforts, his book reproduces this binary. The New Deal was one of many attempts to reconcile states and markets during the interwar years. And it was one of many schemes bound up with debates about racial hierarchy. Both issues of political economy and racial ordering were globally constituted. And it is within this matrix that work seeking to extend Katznelson’s magisterial study could be fruitfully directed.