I have greatly enjoyed these comments from a newer generation of New Deal historians. As someone who started work on the New Deal forty years ago, I have a lot of sympathy with Eric's lament about 'writing a book in a very different world than the one in which it was published.' It took me a long time to realise how powerful the right-wing critique of the New Deal had become since 1990. In Britain there remains a largely bi-partisan acceptance of the positive aspects of the New Deal. It is difficult here to realise how successful Amity Shlaes has been in the United States at influencing public discussion of the New Deal. What was once the academic argument of economic historians about the lack of recovery in the 1930s has, in recent years, acquired amongst some historians and commentators a moral outrage at the supposed Leviathan state of the New Deal and the way it sapped individual self-reliance.

I was grateful to Mark Thoma's analysis of how the economists and economic historians shifted tack in the 1970s.

To accept the strictly economic limitations of what the New Deal achieved before 1940 is not to concede the whole argument to right wing critics as Julian, Jason, and Eric have rightly pointed out. Farmers, the unemployed, industrial workers believed they were better off and showed it at the polls. They may have had a better sense of their own well-being, than later economic historians did. Susan Fainer and Eric have it right when they agree that Roosevelt's underlying commitment to better treatment for ordinary Americans ended up as the Economic Bill of Rights. Laughlin Currie noted in March 1940 that FDR was troubled by the tension between the humanitarian and social goals of the New Deal and sound economics. His commitment to massive public spending was almost in spite of himself. . Four years later the Economic Bill of Rights showed how Roosevelt had by that time come to realize that the humanitarian and social goals and the consumer purchasing power they created were a pre-requisite of a full employment economy. The commitment to full employment and to expanded social provision was also a component of what historians such as John W. Jeffries have identified as a Third New Deal after 1936. Much of that Third New Deal agenda was unfinished but it did shape a social democratic, redistributionist element in the Democratic Party through to the 1960s.

Although New Dealers often feared the corruption and conservatism that went alongside localism, FDR and the New Dealers were not engaged in a vast federal power grab in the 1930s. Whether it was farmers, Native Americans or industrial workers, New Dealers aimed to help people, as Julian Zelizer, pointed out, to help themselves. In the 1930s grass-roots movements certainly helped prod the New Deal into action - tenant farmers, the old, industrial workers - and to provide for some countervailing power. I watch with interest the current debate about where those groups are today that will provide similar grass-roots pressure on the Obama administration. In the 1930s there was probably greater class-consciousness than in any other decade in American history. Has the credit crunch engendered similar group or class loyalties that will push Congress into action? I remain sceptical.