Country Of Lords (neo-aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, And The Long Fight Against Equality In America)

By (author) Phillips-Fein Kim
Short description/annotation:
An Independent Press Bestseller A Pulitzer-finalist historian charts a 250-year-old intellectual and political tradition—the conviction that all Americans are NOT created equal.
Description:
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.
Review quote:
"Excellent… [Phillips-Fein] comes to her subject from a place of genuine curiosity and with a measure of bewilderment… as inequality has surged in the United States, with a minuscule coterie of rich people holding vast amounts of wealth and political power, anti-egalitarian doctrines are surging, too."
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"Concise and hard-hitting…Country of Lords is a primer on modern inequality."
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"Phillips-Fein is a graceful writer and balletic thinker; her opening paragraph tucked me into its palm and held me rapt, right through to its conclusion. Her book is slender… but her argument has vast implications for the future of the nation-state, centering the perils of inequality as global capitalism, boosted by AI, asserts its own independence from the rest of us."
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"Enlightening and shocking. The brilliant historian Kim Phillips-Fein delivers a necessary history of the scandalous but tenacious resistance to the emancipation Americans still need."
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"An audacious argument that the American intellectual tradition is composed of not just egalitarian principles but also of many anti-democratic ones. With care and erudition, Country of Lords shows that the excesses of today’s far right intelligentsia are far from new."
Review quote:
"With an artful pen and a breezy style, Kim Phillips-Fein takes the reader on a revealing tour of the ideas and people inhabiting a dark and under-recognized continuity in American history: those committed to values that are too often seen as “un-American” but whose thought and power we ignore at our peril. An eye-opening read."
Review quote:
"Both timely and necessary, this book describes the evolution