The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution
Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy
- ISBN: 9780674295544
- Editorial: Harvard University Press
- Fecha de la edición: 2024
- Lugar de la edición: Cambridge (MSS). Estados Unidos de Norteamérica
- Encuadernación: Rústica
- Medidas: 24 cm
- Nº Pág.: 640
- Idiomas: Inglés
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 this revolutionary retelling of constitutional history shows, a commitment to prevent oligarchy once stood at the center of a robust tradition in American political and constitutional thought.
Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath 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. These ideas led Jacksonians to fight special economic privileges for the few, Populists to try to break up monopoly power, and Progressives to battle for the constitutional right to form a union.
But today, as we enter a new Gilded Age, this tradition in progressive American economic and political thought lies dormant. The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution begins the work of recovering it and exploring its profound implications for our deeply unequal society and badly damaged democracy.
-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.