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

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.

Author: Joseph Fishkin, William E. Forbath
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 02/08/2022
Pages: 640
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.30lbs
Size: 9.80h x 6.20w x 2.00d
ISBN: 9780674980624

About the Author
Forbath, William E.: - 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.Fishkin, Joseph: - 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.