The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution
eBook - ePub

The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution

Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution

Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy

Book details
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

"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.

Frequently asked questions

Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes, you can access The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution by Joseph Fishkin,William E. Forbath in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Law & Public Law. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Year
2022
ISBN
9780674247406
Topic
Law
Subtopic
Public Law
Index
Law

Table of contents

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