Country of lords : neo-aristocrats, social Darwinists, tech utopians, and the long fight against equality in America / Kim Phillips-Fein.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The story of American history is often told as a hard-won march toward the promise of equality, derived from Thomas Jefferson's famous proclamation that "all men are created equal."

But this inspiring story obscures a parallel tradition: an enduring and organized argument against equality itself. Again and again, influential Americans have asserted a fundamental inequality among human beings, arguing that the social, economic, and racial hierarchies in which some groups of people rule over others are not only natural but good.

In Country of Lords acclaimed historian Kim Phillips-Fein traces this argument for inequality through six vivid archetypes. She discusses the natural aristocrats, such as John Adams, who feared the tumult of too much democracy; the social Darwinists, led by Yale professor William Graham Sumner, who blamed the poor for their own miseries; those who preached a gospel of production, including Henry Ford, who wanted an industrial hierarchy in which the "best" people ruled over compliant inferiors; utilitarian racists who advocated for eugenics and a racial hierarchy; meritocrats like Harvard psychologist Richard Hernstein who described an economic caste system based on "intelligence" in his co-authored book, The Bell Curve; and most recently, technocrats who seem to see themselves as superior because they are closest to the machines destined to outstrip and supplant fallible flesh-and-blood humanity.

The anti-egalitarian lineage Phillips-Fein traces is both clear and deeply unsettling. It challenges readers to think about the fragility of the ideal of equality and to reckon with the disturbing arguments of those who have campaigned against it over the past two and a half centuries. Country of Lords is essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of the widening gap between the nation we claim to be and the nation we are becoming.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Responses to the rise of Trumpism often focus on "cultural and economic conflicts of recent origin," but this striking study from historian Phillips-Fein (Fear City) points to a different, older "source of strength for the right today"--a tradition stretching back to the nation's founding that "sees working people as essentially inferior" and the rich as a "natural aristocracy." Phillips-Fein argues that, in American politics, those who see "inequality as not only inevitable, but something to celebrate" have long functioned as a counterweight to the Declaration of Independence's claim that "all men are created equal." She begins with John Adams, who argued that "those who were better should have more wealth and more power to rule" and who pushed for "significant restraints on democratic institutions," such as property requirements for suffrage. Over the ensuing centuries, Phillips-Fein tracks this point of view as it evolves in the writings of thinkers like Ayn Rand and Lothrop Stoddard, a bestselling author of fascist books during the interwar period, as well as in the hands of industrialists and technologists who began to see themselves as the intended leaders of that "natural aristocracy"--from social Darwinist Andrew Carnegie to protofascist Henry Ford to anti-equality advocate Peter Thiel. It makes for a rousing and worrisome counter-history of a uniquely American strain of anti-democratic political thought. (July)

Kirkus Book Review

Economic inequality may seem a new thing, but in America, thus it has ever been. Today the U.S. is "the most economically unequal of all developed nations." That results from a long tradition that, as Columbia history scholar Phillips-Fein chronicles, repudiates the Jeffersonian ideal of equality--not that Jefferson was ever fully on board with it himself. Instead, it replaces equality with the elite view that working people are "essentially inferior to the rich" through inborn, biological, hereditary failure, while the poor are poor because they are being punished for something or another and the rich are conversely being rewarded and are thus "qualified for superior stations," as John Adams, the Founding Father, remarked. Add machines to the mix come the Industrial Revolution, and there arose wealthy factory owners and moguls such as Andrew Carnegie, who admittedly had misgivings about his vast fortune. In Carnegie's time, political theorists, such as Yale professor William Graham Sumner, took the machine to its limits, advancing ideas that would blossom into the technocratic movement of the early 20th century, whose proponents argued that scientists and engineers should rule the world--and forget about democracy. "These were not fringe thinkers," writes Phillips-Fein. "For most of the teens and 1920s, they were thoroughly in the mainstream of American political and intellectual life." Their ideas have been reborn several times, courtesy of Ayn Rand and, today, the likes of Curtis Yarvin, who asserts that the presidency should be scrapped for an "all-powerful CEO." The author's history reaches back a bit further than Jill Lepore's contemporaneousRise and Fall of the Artificial State, but each book complements the other in depicting a worldview that sees most humans as either surplus or interchangeable parts in a machine. A searching work of history that speaks ably to how we got where we are today, the 1 percent and the rest. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.