Includes bibliographical references and index.

Constitution-making and the political economy of self-rule in the early republic -- Clashing constitutional political economies in antebellum America -- The second founding: a brief union of three precepts -- Constitutional class struggle in the Gilded Age -- Progressive constitutional ferment in the new century -- The New Deal "democracy of opportunity" -- Constitutional counter-revolution and the legacies of a truncated New Deal -- The Great Society and the great forgetting -- Building a democracy of opportunity today.

"Oligarchy is a threat to the republic. Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath show that, for most of US history, Americans saw the Constitution as responding to that threat by imposing on legislators a duty to break up oligarchy, block corporate political power, and ensure a broad distribution of wealth and political power among ordinary Americans"--