Ira Katznelson is Loeb Professor of Political Science at the New School for Social Research, New York. His Marxism and the City will be published by Oxford next year.
May 20 is marked each year in Indonesia as the Day of National Awakening. It commemorates the founding in 1908 of Budi Utomo, a nationalist organisation created by Javanese in their late teens and early twenties at the Western-type medical school in Batavia, colonial capital of the Netherlands Indies. These founders were drawn from a tiny protoélite, numbering just over a thousand, who had been educated at Dutch-language primary schools. Budi Utomo’s leader, an East Javanese named Soetomo, soon became a significant nationalist intellectual. Late in life, he wrote Kenang-Kenangan (Memories), the first autobiography of its kind in Indonesia.
The New Deal was fracturing, but the impetus behind it was far from over. One of the distinctive features of Ira Katznelson’s book is that he sees the New Deal period as extending well beyond the 1930s....
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