Becker attempted to balance his history of civil liberties with an analysis of welfare states, the latter endeavor undermining his "post-progressive" disenchantment: “ 'what the common man needs is the opportunity to acquire by his own effort, in an occupation for which he is fitted, the economic security which is essential to decent and independent living.' ” Becker further identified four models of (federal) statist "collectivism," rejecting "Socialism, Communism, [and] Fascism," yet endorsing " 'what for lack of a better term we may call Social Democracy.' " He described the " 'Social' " in his U.S. variant of early twentieth-century social democracy as " 'whatever restrictions of economic enterprise may be necessary for the economic welfare of the people as a whole.' " His role (if any) in the founding of the Liberal Party of New York, a haven for social democrats in its early "left of left" years, remains a subject of scholarly inquiry. Carl Becker's Progressive Era social liberalism and his endorsement of "post-progressive" social democracy, advancing both civil liberties and the welfare state in the absence of Communism as well as myriad degrees of free markets, faced challenges similar to that of Crocean philosophy. His guarded criticism of U.S. engagement in the Second World War, however, stemmed more from regrets over the First Red Scare and his qualified support for the Preparedness Movement than concerns about the exploitation of rational-critical dichotomies in notions of "negative freedom" as well as, in turn, the Progressive Era conceptual bifurcation of "negative freedom" and "effective freedom." In 1944 lectures delivered at the University of Michigan, published posthumously at the end of the following year, Becker proposed what has been described as a positive notion of public responsibility and provided a summation of his years of studying the history of civil liberties in the United States—including the Second Amendment. "Take first the civil liberties," Becker averred, for "all of these (with the possible exception of the right to bear arms, which seems now advantageous chiefly to gangsters) are, in respect to the end contemplated, invaluable and should be preserved." This exception, though, would undoubtedly prove significant because "one may well ask whether they [additional civil liberties] are defined in the bill of rights with sufficient care to attain the end desired in the complex social conditions of the modern world." In a dénouement to another aspect of his historiography, the ailing Becker