Carol Anderson reviews Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights (Harvard University Press, 2005), on H-Net. She begins:
Elizabeth Borgwardt's A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights is an outstanding book. It is elegantly written, deeply researched, and gracefully analytical. Borgwardt argues that the Roosevelt administration, confronted with the chaos and destruction of the Second World War, reached for the familiar. Believing in many ways that the New Deal's idealistic pragmatism could stabilize an international system blown apart by militarism, human rights violations, and economic protectionism and parochialism, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration set out to construct on the international level what it had built in the United States. Although not exactly a TVA for the world, it was close. This internationalist New Deal framework had an unshakeable faith that government could be harnessed for good and that political and economic rights, protected by multilateral institutions, could create a lasting peace.
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