The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic

摘要

This is an engaging, but serious and deeply insightful book about the radical Constitution of the U.S., the problems it engenders, and how the country might address these problems. The author is clearly conservative in a traditional sense that he regards history as providing a lens critical to understanding the institutions and policies that shape our contemporary world. He states the theme of the book immediately: 'The number one threat to American constitutional government today is the collapse of the middle class... What does the middle class have to do with preserving a republican form of government? From the ancient Greeks onward, political philosophers were preoccupied with the problem of economic inequality and its relationship to the structure of government. The wealthy elites would clash with everyone else... Statesmen and philosophers went to considerable lengths to design governments that would not fall prey to the tumults that accompanied economic inequality... The great republics throughout history - Rome, Florence, Venice, England -all had what we can think of as class warfare constitutions, governments designed on the assumption that economic inequality was inevitable...' (p. 1).