In a 1932 speech in Detroit, where 223,000 people were then unemployed, Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced a new vision of economic life. From 'the days of the cave man to the days of the automobile, the philosophy of "letting things alone" has resulted in the jungle law of the survival of the so-called fittest', the man who would soon be president told the assembled crowd. Far from being a peaceful realm of mutually beneficial, voluntary relations, the market, Roosevelt said, was governed by the 'jungle law' of free competition and individual responsibility. The stock market crash of 1929 had discredited laissez-faire liberalism, which had launched its fight against the feudal order partly as a critique of state paternalism in the name of individual freedom and rights. Against the 'jungle law' of the free market, Roosevelt outlined a corporatist vision of a reconciled human family, in which government would provide worker's compensation, child support, old-age pensions, unemployment insurance and public health programmes. Roosevelt drew on the 1931 papal encyclical Quadragesimo anno, which declared it an 'intolerable abuse' for mothers to be forced to work outside the home 'to the neglect of their proper cares and duties'. Noting that the followers of laissez-faire had decried state welfare measures as 'paternalistic', he responded: 'All right, if they are paternalistic, I am a father.'

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 164