In 2009, at 80, he turned his attention to the nation’s aging infrastructure, warning in a book, “Bold Endeavors: How Our Government Built America, and Why It Must Rebuild Now,” that only major investments in public works could avert an even more costly crisis later on.

The next year he published his memoir, “Dealings: A Political and Financial Life.” And in 2012, following Hurricane Sandy, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo named him co-chairman of a commission entrusted with finding ways to improve the resilience of the state’s infrastructure in the face of natural disasters and other emergencies.

In 2016, Mr. Rohatyn and his wife, a former chairwoman of the New York Public Library, announced that they had given the New-York Historical Society a collection of his letters, documents and other papers related to the New York City fiscal crisis and his business career.

A fixture in philanthropic circles — an annual Easter egg hunt on the lawn of his Southampton home on Long Island was a high point on the city’s social calendar — Mr. Rohatyn professed ambivalence about high society, frequently reminding his fellow wealthy that their social obligations meant more than attending gala events.

Mr. Rohatyn often said that the legacy of the fiscal crisis should be “balanced-budget liberalism”; he advocated a modern-day version of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-era lending entity, to help rebuild cities.

He deplored the layoffs and instability set off by some of the very corporate marriages he had arranged, and called for a new partnership between business and labor. As early as 1982, in a commencement address at his alma mater, Middlebury, Mr. Rohatyn warned: “Maybe for the first time in history, the United States is faced with doubts about its destiny. In less than 25 years, we have gone from the American Century to the American crisis.”

In a 2007 history of Lazard, William D. Cohan, the closest Mr. Rohatyn had to a biographer, wrote: “For much of the Reagan era, Felix predicted the decline and fall of American society at the very moment American economic and political power was reaching its zenith worldwide.”