New Deal Archives - Public Seminar

North America

Andrew Yang’s Unexpected Appeal

As we approach the Iowa Caucuses, it’s useful to remember that Democratic politics is about reinventing government — and it always has been

January 31, 2020 • by Claire Potter

Andrew Yang fits nowhere in this framework, but he does point to what all these Democratic candidates have in common: to one degree or another, they all believe that politics is a conversation about how, not whether, democratic government will be renewed. For the limits of this idea, see an essay by Ian Zuckerman ...

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The Invention of Money

April 12, 2015 • by Eli Zaretsky

The invention of money -- discussed last week by Julia Ott -- is one of the greatest of all human inventions, comparable to the invention of the wheel, if not quite up to the discovery of fire. If we situate this invention in the context of the class we can ...

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The Future of Democracy

October 26, 2014 • by Eli Zaretsky

Martin Jacques, a former leader of the British Communist Party, poses an important challenge in Friday’s Financial Times. He questions the widespread “Western” (i.e. European and American) assumption that our democratic system is superior to China’s authoritarian state, and the usual correlate, that the Chinese system is unstable. As Jacques ...

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Starbucks Goes to College

June 23, 2014 • by Bryant Simon

I wrote a book about Starbucks a few years ago, so my email started to buzz with Google alerts when the company announced that it would help to provide free education for its employees. The New York Times, the Huffington Post, and Business Week, among others, jumped ...

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The War on Fascism

April 2, 2014 • by Eli Zaretsky

By my title,“The War on Fascism,” I do not mean the war between the US, the Soviet Union and Great Britain, on the one hand, and Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and imperial Japan on the other, the war that took place between 1939 and 1945. Rather I mean an unspoken ...