The Death of Imagination

Any attempt on my part to answer this as a quiz would rapidly run into a series of qualifications and hedging. I barely know anything but the names of the first two in #1, and the latter two are in the "I have a decent idea what their Big Ideas were and think generally well of them, but haven't actually gotten around to reading them." :-) #2 is almost impossible, especially given that any time stuff I was going on that I liked we also had slavery or Jim Crow or a massive interventionist state-- but I'm not as convinced as some that we needed all of the latter to get rid of the former. #3 likewise requires a paragraph or more and some work; I'm moderate enough to grant that state intervention does seem to have put an end to the recurring problem of bank failures (the 80s S&L crisis notwithstanding-- it caused problems, but managed to avoid the spectacle of individuals losing their life savings in the process). I'd have to do research to know if there's a libertarian alternative I'd find plausible. And #4 is going to wind up something like 3/10 depending on whether we're looking at his domestic policy and long-term effects on American government or his role as the indispensible man in the struggle against Fascism. (And then there's the question as to whether a less extreme domestic program would have just left the public clamoring for something worse, examples of which were to be found pretty much everywhere else in the world at thte time.)

If any of this is at all useful to him, feel free to pass it on. :-)