The New Deal, or the Keynesian social welfare and administrative state, was something new under the American capitalist sun. It civilized the laissez-faire regime by regulating finance and industry, by recognizing certain collective rights of the organized working class, by establishing a minimum level of material survival, and by licensing the state to intervene into the marketplace, using the levers of fiscal and monetary policy to even out the wild oscillations of economic boom and bust that threatened to undermine the social order fatally. Although this outcome preserved the basic framework of capitalism, it also required a sea change in the way ruling circles behaved; in the scope and powers of the central government; in the reigning ideology crafted to explain and justify the New Deal order that was so at odds with the social Darwinism of an earlier epoch; in the internal composition of the Democratic Party; and in the degree to which capitalism was obliged to make more room for democracy. Whatever the severe limitations of this new world, these were not inconsiderable changes from what the country was accustomed to and they point to the malleability of capitalism.