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

Fishkin; Joseph; Forbath; William E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674295544 ISBN 13: 9780674295544

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2024

Synopsis

“Eminently readable, and anybody who cares about the future of American democracy in these perilous times can only hope that it will be widely read and carefully considered.”
―James Pope, Washington Post

“Fishkin and Forbath’s accessible work serves as both history lesson and political playbook, offering the Left an underutilized―and perhaps counterintuitive―tool in the present-day fight against social and economic injustice: the Constitution.”
―Benjamin Morse, Jacobin

“Aims to recover the Constitution’s pivotal role in shaping claims of justice and equality…in engaging, imaginative prose that makes even the present court’s capture by the ideological right a compelling platform for a revived social-democratic constitutional politics.”
―New Republic

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.

About this title

About the Authors

Joseph Fishkin is Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles. He spent a decade at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was the Marrs McLean Professor in Law. He is the author of Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity.

William E. Forbath holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair in Law and is Associate Dean for Research at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674295544
• ISBN 13: 9780674295544
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 640