Ganesh Sitaraman. (2017). The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Ganesh Sitaraman. 2017. The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Ganesh Sitaraman, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2017.

Ganesh Sitaraman. The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2017.

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Sitaraman, Ganesh
   • bioText: GANESH SITARAMAN is Professor of Law at Vanderbilt Law School and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He has been a longtime advisor to Senator Elizabeth Warren, serving as her policy director and senior counsel. Sitaraman has commented on foreign and domestic policy in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Boston Globe, and The Christian Science Monitor and is the author of The Counterinsurgent's Constitution: Law in the Age of Small Wars, which won the 2013 Palmer Civil Liberties Prize. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where he was an editor on the Harvard Law Review.
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2017-03-14T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution

fullDescription

In this original, provocative contribution to the debate over economic inequality, Ganesh Sitaraman argues that a strong and sizable middle class is a prerequisite for America’s constitutional system.
A New York Times Notable Book of 2017
 
For most of Western history, Sitaraman argues, constitutional thinkers assumed economic inequality was inevitable and inescapable—and they designed governments to prevent class divisions from spilling over into class warfare. The American Constitution is different. Compared to Europe and the ancient world, America was a society of almost unprecedented economic equality, and the founding generation saw this equality as essential for the preservation of America’s republic. Over the next two centuries, generations of Americans fought to sustain the economic preconditions for our constitutional system. But today, with economic and political inequality on the rise, Sitaraman says Americans face a choice: Will we accept rising economic inequality and risk oligarchy or will we rebuild the middle class and reclaim our republic?
 
The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution is a tour de force of history, philosophy, law, and politics. It makes a compelling case that inequality is more than just a moral or economic problem; it threatens the very core of our constitutional system.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Senator Elizabeth Warren
   • content: "Ganesh Sitaraman is a bold and visionary thinker whose new book, The Crisis of the Middle Class Constitution, shows that the disappearing American dream is more than a policy problem--it is a constitutional crisis. In our age of growing inequality, the stakes couldn't be higher. Every American needs to read this book."
2. • premium: False
   • source: The Wall Street Journal
   • content: "Mr. Sitaraman is onto an important insight, or at least a pressing question. Evidence
     from around the world strongly suggests that liberal constitutions do not fare well in countries with oligarchic social structures. Today, America's middle class is indeed beleaguered. . . . [This] book provides a much-needed reminder: For all our legendary good luck, nothing ordains that all our constitutional stories will have a happy ending."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Win McCormack, The New Republic
   • content: "Sitaraman provides us with a much-needed reminder of how economic inequality has been adjudicated in the past--and how it can be more effectively alleviated in the future."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Zephyr Teachout, The American Prospect
   • content: "Sitaraman . . . brings a fresh eye and an impressive range of historical thinking to an ageless question: What are the conditions for freedom? He tours the intellectual struggles of the 19th and early 20th centuries, as progressives worked to reconcile industrialization and democracy. He gives us a glimpse of episodes that led to the progressive creation of the income tax, the development of antitrust laws and enforcement, the creation of a welfare state . . . and through the demise of those achievements--a generation in which we've reduced taxes, stopped investing in public infrastructure, and stopped enforcing antitrust. According to Sitaraman, we've lost the policies essential to the preservation of the middle class."
5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     February 1, 2017
     The declining middle class represents not just a lost economic stratum, but the disappeared basis for the quaint idea of representative democracy.Rome, Venice, Great Britain: the first republics had their legal footings in constitutions premised on class warfare. By that outlook, a Hobbesian war of each against all pitted the interests of rich against poor, with not much to buffer the two. The genius of the American Constitution, writes Sitaraman (Law/Vanderbilt Law School; The Counterinsurgent's Constitution: Law in the Age of Small Wars, 2012), is that it "assumes relative economic equality in society [and] assumes that the middle class is and will remain dominant." Thus, he adds, the Constitution does not preclude the poor from entering, say, the Senate, even though practical reality may not encourage them. Yet, as he also notes, particularly in the years since the Great Recession, markers of inequality have become ever more pronounced; the government seems structured to benefit the interests of the wealthy at the expense of the poor, and the middle class is being squeezed. An adviser to Elizabeth Warren, and therefore on the left end of the left wing, Sitaraman is a proponent of government as an engine for economic reform. As he argues, it was government programs such as the GI Bill and modest home loans that built a strong middle class in the first place, a strong bulwark against the temptations of communism. In the new siege of the middle class on the part of the wealthy, he urges, the old fears of too much power in the hands of the government ought to be replaced by old but dormant fears of power in the hands of the very wealthy. Now, with "power increasingly concentrated in the hands of economic elites," the reality is squarely back in that class warfare that the Founders so desperately wanted to transcend. A blend of accessible economic theory and practical reform, of much interest to any reader whose common cause is with the 99 rather than the 1 percent.

     COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     October 1, 2016
     

     Law professor Sitaraman, who's worked with Sen. Elizabeth Warren for nearly a decade, grounds his discussion of economic inequality in the history of constitutional republics. Because the nascent United States boasted fewer class divisions and greater economic equality than previous republics, argues Sitaraman, no provision was made in the Constitution for balancing class interests and blocking a power surge of the wealthy. Yet we've managed to balance those interests before and can do so again. With a six-city tour.

     Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     March 15, 2017
     

     Sitaraman (law, Vanderbilt Law Sch.; The Counterinsurgent's Constitution) has produced an original monograph concerned with rising income inequality in the United States, arguing that a strong middle class is important to the structure of our government. The author indicates that the U.S. Constitution "assumes relative economic equality in society" and the founders made "no provision" preventing the upper class from seizing powers, as found in the constitutions of other countries. However, the author believes that wealthy Americans are currently doing exactly that, and that citizens must decide: "Will we accept oligarchy and the threat of demagogues and tyrants? Or will we work to restore the economic preconditions for our republic?" Economic fairness, according to Sitaraman, is a cardinal principle of the U.S. Constitution, and as Americans, we must not give up on that goal. Readers desiring further readings in the area of inequality might consult Thomas Piketty's widely acclaimed Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, which argues that the mid-20th century was economically exceptional. VERDICT This book belongs in all libraries with holdings in political science, law, and economics. It will interest scholars and, to a lesser extent, general readers. [See Prepub Alert, 9/12/16.]--Claude Ury, San Francisco

     Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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In this original, provocative contribution to the debate over economic inequality, Ganesh Sitaraman argues that a strong and sizable middle class is a prerequisite for America’s constitutional system.
A New York Times Notable Book of 2017
 
For most of Western history, Sitaraman argues, constitutional thinkers assumed economic inequality was inevitable and inescapable—and they designed governments to prevent class divisions from spilling over into class warfare. The American Constitution is different. Compared to Europe and the ancient world, America was a society of almost unprecedented economic equality, and the founding generation saw this equality as essential for the preservation of America’s republic. Over the next two centuries, generations of Americans fought to sustain the economic preconditions for our constitutional system. But today, with economic and political inequality on the rise, Sitaraman says Americans face a...

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