Arabic version: «بلد اللوردات» يتفحّص صراع أميركا الطويل ضد المساواة
According to The Guardian, historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s new book, Country of Lords, traces a long US history of resistance to egalitarianism, moving from founder John Adams to technology figures Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Its subtitle describes a history of “Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America”.
Phillips-Fein studies conservatism and questions surrounding capitalism and democracy. Her earlier books include Invisible Hands, about businessmen who opposed the New Deal, and Fear City, on New York’s 1970s economic crisis. She said questions about economic equality, extreme hierarchy and concentration, democracy, and alternatives to a deeply unequal world are present.
The book distinguishes Adams from later advocates of inequality, including Social Darwinists and pro-slavery thinkers. Phillips-Fein said Adams was ambivalent and sceptical about egalitarian claims during and after the French Revolution, expressing a conservative temperament and wariness of political efforts to pursue greater equality. Other subjects include Confederate slavery theorist George Fitzhugh, journalist Theodore Lothrop Stoddard and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie.
Phillips-Fein describes Carnegie as conscious that wealth concentration could create an unstable society and hostility toward the wealthy. His response, she said, was philanthropy and paternalism rather than higher wages. The book also examines Henry Ford, William Shockley and the development of racist pseudoscience and IQ testing alongside arguments about merit and the distribution of resources.
In Phillips-Fein’s account, these ideas help explain contemporary technology titans’ rejection of liberal ideals. She links Thiel’s thinking to economist Joseph Schumpeter’s account of disruptive innovation, describing Thiel’s belief that people who create something new can dominate a market and deserve to command society’s resources. Country of Lords, published by WW Norton & Company, is out now.
