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Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight against Equality in America
by Kim Phillips-Fein
A Pulitzer-finalist historian charts a 250-year-old intellectual and political tradition―the conviction that all Americans are NOT created equal.
We think of the United States as a nation committed, at least on paper, to ideals of human equality, under God and/or under the law. But as robust as the notion of the "American dream" is a longstanding defense of social hierarchies, including vast gulfs between rich and poor.
Drawing on forgotten characters and neglected archives, Kim Phillips–Fein tells the story of the executives, intellectuals, and political leaders who have argued that the words of the Declaration of Independence―that "all men are created equal"―are a myth. John Adams, William Graham Sumner, Andrew Carnegie, journalist Lothrop Stoddard, Henry Ford, Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein, Peter Thiel, and others represent this counter-tradition of hostility to democratic government. Phillips-Fein explores their ideas, and the aspirations they were reacting to, in order to understand our political life today―in hopes we might imagine a more egalitarian way forward.
""Striking...[A] rousing and worrisome counter-history of a uniquely American strain of anti-democratic political thought." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Both timely and necessary, Philips-Fein describes the evolution and persistence of anti-Enlightenment apologias for political and material inequality that today, more than ever, threaten core American values, morals, and democracy itself." ―David Nasaw, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Wounded Generation
"Powerful, expansive, and penetrating, Country of Lords confounds our assumptions about America's political traditions and sensibilities. Reaching back to the world of the founders and far ahead to that of the tech titans, it demands a new type of reckoning." ―Steven Hahn, author of Illiberal America
This information about Country of Lords was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kim Phillips-Fein is Robert Gardiner-Kenneth T. Jackson Professor of History at Columbia University. She is the author of Fear City, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Invisible Hands. She lives in New York City.
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