The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution

Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy

Joseph Fishkin, William E. Forbath

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780674295544
  9780674980624
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674247406
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Law

A bold call to reclaim an American tradition that argues the Constitution imposes a duty on government to fight oligarchy and ensure broadly shared wealth.

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 has almost nothing to say about this threat. But as Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath show in this revolutionary retelling of constitutional history, a commitment to prevent oligarchy once stood at the center of a robust tradition in American political and constitutional thought.

Fishkin and 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 fight for the constitutional right to form a union. During Reconstruction Radical Republicans argued in this tradition that racial equality required breaking up the oligarchy of the slave power and distributing wealth and opportunity to former slaves and their descendants. President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers built their politics around this tradition, winning the fight against the "economic royalists" and "industrial despots."

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Constitution Making and the Political Economy of Self-Rule in the Early Republic
• 2. Clashing Constitutional Political Economies in Antebellum America
• 3. The Second Founding: A Brief Union of Three Precepts
• 4. Constitutional Class Struggle in the Gilded Age
• 5. Progressive Constitutional Ferment in the New Century
• 6. The New Deal “Democracy of Opportunity”
• 7. Constitutional Counterrevolution and the Legacies of a Truncated New Deal
• 8. The Great Society and the Great Forgetting
• 9. Building a Democracy of Opportunity Today
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index