The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870

Widening economic inequality has been one of the most striking and significant problems facing the United States during the past half-century. Mandell covers two facets of public and scholarly discussions of this issue in this wide-ranging and insightful book. First, he suggests that most accounts look back no further than the Gilded Age, the late nineteenth-century decades in which American inequality previously achieved unprecedented levels. To correct for this lapse, he traces a long previous history that originated during the earliest period of European settlement. Second, he presents this history as a story of repeated contestation over political and economic values. Because the Founders and the U.S. Constitution did not address the issue of laissez-faire liberalism and the preeminence of property rights, a resolution was left to emerge over time. An understanding of this history can inform contemporary debates at a time when anxieties about inequality and aspirations for economic...