The New Deal and Recovery, Part 12: Fear Itself
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"This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. …[T]he only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
—FDR, in his first inaugural address.
"There is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain."
—Thomas Hobbes, on the state of nature, in
Leviathan.
Not the Sum of its Parts
So far, I've tended to look at the New Deal as a set or sequence of distinct government policies and programs, remarking on how each either contributed to or hampered economic recovery. I've also dealt only with those New Deal policies generally understood to have had promoting recovery as their aim.