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Book Review
| When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism. By Kevin Mattson. (New York: Routledge, 2004. xii, 231 pp. $26.00, ISBN 0-415-94775-8.)
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| Kevin Mattson forthrightly states that the purpose of his book is "to explain the promise of liberalism" as it developed in the years after World War II, in the hope that "a better understanding of liberalism can improve current political discussion." To explore the meaning of modern American liberalism, Mattson focuses on four men—John Kenneth Galbraith, Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., James Wechsler—who were associated with what became the preeminent liberal organization of the postwar period, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Mattson provides an admiring, though not wholly uncritical, appraisal of the efforts of those men to develop a fighting faith that he believes ought to be revived in our own time. |
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