A Republic of the Living: Recovering the Temporality of American Anti-oligarchy

• In Event: Empire, Republic, and Virtue in American Political Thought

Abstract

Recent years have seen a resurgent interest in the history of oligarchy and “anti-oligarchic” practices in response to growing economic inequality and the concentration of political-economic power in our time. The growing scholarship around “class-specific institutions” like the “Plebian Tribunate” and the longer history of the antimonopoly tradition are emblematic; scholars have focused on spatial solutions like “partitioning” “the people” into “the few” vs. “the many” or “breaking up” monopolies as primary responses to inequality and concentration. This paper intervenes in these literatures by instead focusing on the temporality of anti-oligarchy. It foregrounds, traces, and examines how Revolutionary Americans—particularly Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, as contrasted with John Adams—understood, assessed, and addressed the threat of what they called aristocracy as spatio-temporal threats. The commitment to combat inequality, concentration, and thus oligarchy, I argue, also entailed a commitment to ensure a republic of the living; the intergenerational transmission of wealth, property, privileges, and power through legal institutions—what Katharina Pistor has recently framed as the “legal code” behind wealth—accordingly remained a primary point of intervention, with responses ranging from the constitutional prohibition of perpetuities to the affirmation that rights of bequest were at best a civil privilege subject to democratic adjustment every generation. Put otherwise, the anti-oligarchic commitment to anti-monopoly had its temporal analog in anti-perpetuality. As scholars continue exploring ways to combat inequality and concentration in our time—and in line with the conference theme of exploring ways to “renovate” democracy, in the republican sense of rinnovazione—I argue we also should recover this temporal conceptualization and critique of oligarchy.

Author

• Paul M. B. Gutierrez, Boston University