Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security , by Andrew Preston, Belknap Press, 336 pages, $29.95

The idea of "national security" is so ubiquitous that it is hard to imagine an American political culture without it. But as the Cambridge historian Andrew Preston shows in Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security , the concept and its universal usage have not always been with us. They have a history firmly rooted in New Deal liberalism, its anxieties about economic insecurity at home, and its fears of illiberal forces abroad.

Despite the framing suggested by the subtitle, this well-argued and often provocative book stretches from the 19th century through the early Cold War. Preston's purpose, he writes, is "to find the source of the idea, now

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