This book revisits and expands upon Steve Fraser and Gerstle’s influential edited volume, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980 (Princeton, 1989). The “beyond” in the title refers mainly to chronology rather than an attempt to reconceptualize twentieth-century U.S. political history in a manner that complicates or “moves beyond” the concept of a “New Deal Order.” Julian Zelizer’s crisp chapter about the persistence of Democratic liberalism in the 1980s and thereafter is the only chapter that substantially interrogates the New Deal Order’s utility as an organizing idea. The rest of the chapters focus primarily on synthesizing and deepening historians’ understanding of New Deal liberalism and its offshoots from the 1930s through the early 1970s and on exposing forces that helped to create what Gerstle calls in the volume’s coda a “neoliberal order.”
The book’s goals are notably different than those of another recently released edited volume that...