Little attention has been paid to the political theory that informs the New Deal, despite the impressive amount of research devoted to the period. This is of particular importance since the alleged lack of theory means there is little philosophic justification for the American welfare state on its own terms. This dissertation synthesizes a political theory of the New Deal from the writings of Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, and Thurman Arnold.

The theory highlights the need for the public accountability of private economic power, arguing that when the private economic realm is unable to adequately guarantee the rights of citizens the state must intervene to protect those rights. The New Deal created a new American social contract that accorded our right to the pursuit of happiness a status equal to liberty, and ground both in an expansive idea of security (with physical, material, and psychic components) as the necessary precondition for the exercise of either. This was connected to a theory of the common good that privileged the consumer as the central category while simultaneously working to limit the worst excesses of consumption-oriented individualism. This theory of ends was supplemented by a theory of practice that focused on ways to institutionalize progressive politics in a conservative institutional context. It focuses in particular on Thurman Arnold's theory of symbolic politics. Arnold argues that any progressive change must be grounded in the 'folklore' of the institutions it wishes to supplant.

This project has two further goals. The first is to argue that political theory needs to greater focus on the moment of political engagement. Unless a theory is integrated into a political context that focuses on the restraints upon and possibilities of agency facing the relevant actors the theory is engaged primarily in moral critique. Finally, the dissertation argues that contemporary progressives should appropriate the theory of the New Deal to use as the theoretical framework for arguments seeking to defend and expand the American welfare state.