摘要：In 1967 Arthur Schlesinger wrote that ‘The fight for equal opportunity for the
Negro, the war against poverty, the struggle to save the cities, the improvement
of our schools - all must be starved for the sake of Vietnam’. Gone were the glory
days of cold war liberalism, when the rise of the national security state and the
welfare state seemed to reinforce each other as they provided legitimacy for the idea
that a limited but assertive federal government was the solution, rather than the
problem, for America. This new edition of Schlesinger’s The Politics of Hope and
The Bitter Heritage is, among other things, a reminder of the potential and the
inner contradictions of American post-war liberalism.
