SOURCE: "'The Nation as an Economic Unit': Keynes, Roosevelt, and the Managerial Ideal," in The Journal of American History, Vol. 78, No. 1, June, 1991, pp. 160-87.

In the following essay, Adelstein studies Roosevelt's economic policy during the Great Depression in view of John Maynard Keynes's economic theory and American managerialism of the twentieth century.

In a penetrating essay written in 1979, Robert Skidelsky directed attention to the political dimension of John Maynard Keynes's achievement and located its historical significance in the fundamental tension between this century's two great paradigms of social organization—"Freedom" and "Planning."¹ The Great Depression, he argued, starkly exposed the vulnerability of the industrial democracies to impersonal market forces, producing unemployment and misery that challenged the legitimacy of democratic political institutions. To many who were drawn to the radical solutions of planners of both the Right and the Left, it seemed that the West's economic agony would yield...