Freedom from Want
Subtitle: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer (New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History)
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: December 19, 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 344
ISBN-13: 9780801874260
Subjects: Consumer issues; Liberalism & centre democratic ideologies; Intellectual life; Consumption (Economics); Business & Economics; History - U.S; Business/Economics; USA; Liberalism; United States - General; History / United States / General; Consumer Behavior - General; History; United States
First sentence: Americans achieved a remarkable consensus in the nineteenth century.
Description: "In 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt identified "four essential human freedoms." Three of these - freedom from fear, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion - had long been understood as defining principles of liberalism. Roosevelt's fourth freedom - freedom from want - was not. Indeed, classic liberals had argued that the only way to guarantee this freedom would be through an illiberal redistribution of wealth. In Freedom from Want, Kathleen G. Donohue describes how, between the 1880s and the 1940s, American intellectuals transformed classical liberalism into its modern American counterpart by emphasizing consumers over producers and consumption over production."--Jacket.