The New Deal and Recovery, Part 12: Fear Itself SHARE 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.