The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy Hardcover – February 8, 2022 by Joseph Fishkin

Description

Author: Fishkin Joseph

Package Dimensions: 0x0x788

Number Of Pages: 640

Release Date: 08-02-2022

Details: Product Description
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 had 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.
Review
“An important and stirring achievement. In this gold mine of historical discovery and legal insight, Fishkin and Forbath recover and renew the lost Constitution of strong democratic opportunity for all. The authors not only restore a political understanding of economic relationships in American society but return Constitutional values and ideals to their appropriately central place in American politics.”
―
Congressman Jamie Raskin

“From the earliest years of our nation, Americans have understood that too great a concentration of economic power is fatal to democracy. In this important and timely book, Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath tell the story of the democracy-of-opportunity tradition from the Founding to the present. And they show why its revival is crucial to halt democracy’s decay in our Second Gilded Age.
The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution restores political economy to its rightful place in American constitutional theory.”
―
Jack M. Balkin, Yale Law School

“Fishkin and Forbath have made a fundamental contribution to constitutional understanding. They have put America’s current crisis into historical perspective in a way that brilliantly illuminates our current predicament. They have also provided a framework for reconstructing our constitutional tradition to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. Their book deserves serious consideration by thoughtful Americans engaged in the larger effort to reinvigorate the democratic foundations of our Republic.”
―
Bruce Ackerman, Yale University

“After decades during which conservatives have dominated deliberation about the Constitution,
The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution is the book we need. It reminds progressives that constitutional claims were not, in our history, ‘conversation-stoppers,’ but rather the stuff of politics itself. Conservatives talk constantly about what the Constitution requires, and Fishkin and Forbath are right that we need ‘a comparably robust progressive account of what kind of community the Constitution promises to secure for all.’ Their proposal―an emphasis on ‘constitutional restraints against ol