Social historians have spent the last several decades looking beyond traditional figures and major constitutional questions in their ongoing reassessments of American history. A few political theorists have drawn on these sources to examine less well-known thinkers or, as in the book reviewed here, to return to well-known figures with new questions. That the founding generations’ view of economic inequality has until now received little focused attention is telling; our new Gilded Age has been decades in the making and class inequality has reached troubling levels, but only relatively recently have scholars, politicians, and the broader public begun to think seriously about the issue. A long-standing obstacle has been the peculiarly American postwar reluctance to discuss class politics and economic inequality. Yet “if attacking large disparities between rich and poor constitutes a form of class warfare,” as Clement Fatovic’s important new book demonstrates, “then the struggle against economic inequalities is arguably the longest-running war in American history” (p. xvii).

“Looking to the founders for answers to contemporary political problems is always a risky enterprise” (p. 275), as Fatovic well knows, and historians will likely criticize the presentism that animates the current work. But given how often famous Founders are used and misused in contemporary economic debates, this is an important contribution of the book. The author strikes a commendable balance between contemporary issues and historical interests.

Fatovic does an excellent job of showing that economic inequality was a long-standing and significant concern in late eighteenth-century America. Early Americans disagreed about many issues, yet “hardly anyone questioned the pursuit of economic equality as a legitimate political consideration” (p. xix). Indeed, most of the Founders saw significant inequality as a threat to popular government and political freedom. In three separate chapters, we see that major thinkers like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine reflected very seriously about the need for controlling inequality; even Alexander Hamilton saw it as a concern. And as Fatovic shows in a careful parsing of archival records in another chapter, the early Congresses tried to avoid increasing preexisting or market-derived inequality.

Most generally, while we today worry about creating in people a dependence on government largesse, the founding generation was concerned about poverty and inequality leading to “private relations of dependence” that would undermine popular political engagement (pp. 262–63). This principle, however, was most often honored in the breach. Congressional efforts at alleviating poverty and minimizing inequality, Fatovic concedes, “failed more often than [they] succeeded” (p. 161).

With his careful research scouring the congressional records and the papers of Hamilton, Jefferson, and Paine, Fatovic does a valuable and necessary service, bringing to light aspects of these sources that are widely overlooked both by scholars and lay commentators. Yet he is forced to dig so methodically in part because inequality was not as central an issue as he sometimes suggests. To be sure, government action to control economic inequality was more acceptable to early Americans than it is now. Contrary to our blithe acceptance of economic inequality, they generally held that true political freedom requires some rough semblance of economic equality. But because they routinely compared America (very favorably) to aristocratic Europe, elite members of the founding generation, especially Federalists, saw inequality as only a problem for a distant future America. This left them blind to the increasing inequality around them and left their theorizing to the European context. The result is little detailed analysis—by Jefferson and Paine, but also by Fatovic—of the specific mechanisms by which economic inequality can corrupt democratic politics.

Thus, the focus here on prominent Founders and congressional politics should serve to inform—and hopefully reform—the important public debate over economic inequality in twenty-first-century America. This is the book’s main purpose and its great contribution. But the lack of sustained attention to strains of early American republicanism that were more theoretically rich and more focused on economic inequality contributes to a few missed opportunities.

An interesting question that emerges from these pages is why exactly elite American thinkers repeatedly failed to see—or perhaps refused to see—the country’s serious economic inequality, even as it seems to have increased during the 1790s (p. 22). This was true not only of Federalists like Hamilton but also of Jefferson and Paine, both of whom saw economic inequality as a serious concern for contemporary Europe but rarely turned their gaze to America. Another important enduring puzzle is why a people that was so politically radical (at least in certain significant ways) was so timid when it came to rethinking economic matters. As Fatovic helpfully notes, a provision was proposed for the Pennsylvania state constitution that would have empowered the legislature to limit the size of individual estates on the grounds that a concentrated economic elite was “dangerous to the Rights . . . and Happiness of Mankind” (p. 40). Yet this provision was not adopted, even in the state’s famously radical 1776 constitution, which created a weak executive council rather than a governor and vested virtually all power in an annually elected unicameral legislature.

If Fatovic was understandably reluctant to pursue these kinds of speculative analysis, he still might have rounded out his study with a concrete examination of American thinkers in the 1780s and 1790s who—unlike Hamilton, Jefferson, and even Paine—did see the significant economic inequality around them and theorized about the specific threats it posed to popular government. It is certainly revealing to learn that the founding generation occasionally worried about this and sometimes tried to forestall this eventuality (and, as with Jefferson and Paine, condemned it in aristocratic Europe). Nevertheless, what would perhaps be more valuable today than Fatovic's evidence that early congressional debate accepted equality as a legitimate concern is insightful and historically informed theorizing about the political risks of broad and expanding economic inequality.

Exploring Anti-Federalists such as “Centinel” and John Francis Mercer, the members of the Democratic Societies, or thinkers such as George Logan and William Manning would have allowed Fatovic both to provide a more complete understanding of the debates of the early Republic and to give readers more to contemplate at a moment when the founding generation’s dire concerns about rampant inequality have been realized. The sad irony is that those worries about the future problem of significant economic inequality have come to pass: Once the best poor (white) man’s country, the United States is now perhaps the worst poor person’s advanced democracy. Questions about precisely what that means for popular government remain, but American’s Founding and the Struggle over Economic Inequality is an excellent place to start.