The 1960s was a period of political opening for employment policy, when important questions about unemployment and economic insecurity were debated and a number of ambitious policies were enacted. Yet the Great Society’s employment policy agenda was also fundamentally limited in scope; it comprised interventions that reinforced rather than altered existing labor market mechanisms. Previous work suggests that primarily institutional factors were responsible for this constraint. By contrast, I contend that in addition to institutional factors, there was an ideological boundary condition on the era’s employment policy. The Johnson administration’s policymakers conformed to aspects of the liberal tradition in America, which limited policy options as well as the efficiency and efficacy of implemented policy.
