The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution : : Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy

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Call Number: 320.973 Fi
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

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Constitution-making and the political economy of self-rule in the early republic -- Clashing constitutional political economies in antebellum America -- The second founding: a brief union of three precepts -- Constitutional class struggle in the Gilded Age -- Progressive constitutional ferment in the new century -- The New Deal "democracy of opportunity" -- Constitutional counter-revolution and the legacies of a truncated New Deal -- The Great Society and the great forgetting -- Building a democracy of opportunity today.
"Oligarchy is a threat to the American republic. When too much economic and political power is concentrated in too few hands, we risk losing the 'republican form of government' the Constitution requires. Today, courts enforce the Constitution as if it had almost nothing to say about this threat. But as Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath show in this retelling of constitutional history, a commitment to prevent oligarchy once stood at the center of a robust tradition in American political and constitutional thought. The authors demonstrate that reformers, legislators, and even judges working in this 'democracy-of-opportunity' tradition understood that the Constitution imposes a duty on legislatures to thwart oligarchy and promote a broad distribution of wealth and political power. But today, as we enter a new Gilded Age, this tradition in progressive American economic and political thought lies dormant. This book begins the work of recovering it and exploring its profound implications for our deeply unequal society and badly damaged democracy"-- Provided by the publisher.

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