Introduction: The Stakes of Entrenchment
Understanding Entrenchment
Lock-in and the costs of change
Social structure and cultural entrenchment
Enabling constraints, traps, and contradictions
Aristocracy and Inherited Wealth
Wealth, power, and rules of inheritance
The political origins of primogeniture
Patrimonial inheritance and oligarchic entrenchment
Entrenching a republic: The eighteenth-century solution and its limits
Racial Slavery as an Entrenched Contradiction
Constitutional entrenchment and the costs of change
Slaveholders and national power
Overcoming slavery's entrenchment
Entrenching abolition-but not equality
The Conservative Design of Liberal Democracy
Entrenchment of electoral rules
Counter-majoritarian entrenchment: Supreme courts and central banks
Entrenchment through international treaties
Entrenching Progressive Change
Varieties of social protection
The curious case of progressive taxation
Democracy and the Politics of Entrenchment
Democracy's stress tests.
