Pollock likened Roosevelt’s New Deal to European state-capitalist dictatorship in 1933.

Evidence

The Horkheimer circle arrived during a period in which the government was sympathetic towards intellectuals and prepared to entrust them with important tasks. It was a government which, by American standards, was left-wing, but at the same time successful and popular. The group arrived with a great deal of money, and at a moment when the numbers emigrating to the USA to escape the Nazis were still small. In an article in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (ZfS) on The Sociology of the American Party System', Gumperz had declared that the US party system was the most advanced in the world in the practice of politics as the art of producing consent to the political measures of a given system’. The Roosevelt administration had made an impressive attempt, in its very first year, to minimize the effects of the crisis by unconventional methods, under the label `New Deal’; but in 1933 Pollock had mentioned the administration in the same breath as Italy and Germany as an example of state-capitalist intervention and elective dictatorship. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 598

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Pollock saw state capitalist intervention as a promising new stage already by 1933 — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1156; Smith’s circle missed deliberate planning in Roosevelt’s every move as Governor and future rival — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 1282

Broader Connections

• Pollock saw state capitalist intervention as a promising new stage already by 1933 #qualifies (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1156