Historian Kim Phillips-Fein's new book, Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America, is published amid celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and its truth "self-evident, that all men are created equal." The book arrives at a time of glaring social and economic inequality, with Phillips-Fein noting Elon Musk "emerging as a trillionaire very much on people's minds, with a deep level of discomfort, both fear and anger about what this portends."
A History of Anti-Egalitarianism
Phillips-Fein, who studies conservatism and "questions about capitalism and democracy," traces the roots of anti-egalitarian thought from founder John Adams to Peter Thiel of Palantir. She acknowledges that Adams is "very different from Andrew Carnegie and William Graham Sumner and the late 19th-century social Darwinists, and the pro-slavery advocates," but notes his ambivalence toward egalitarian claims during and after the French Revolution. "In his writing, he does also give a strong kind of conservative temperament and foundational sense of the problems of arguing for greater equality," she said.
Other subjects include Confederate theorist George Fitzhugh, who argued slavery was a natural good, and Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, whose 1920 bestseller The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy was part of a larger intellectual subculture of "scientific" racism after World War I.
Carnegie's Ambivalence and Paternalism
Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-born steel magnate of the Gilded Age, is a complex figure in the book. According to Phillips-Fein, Carnegie "allows himself to have some sense of ambivalence." He believed concentration of wealth was necessary and inevitable, but recognized it created political instability. Carnegie's answer was philanthropy, such as building libraries for working people, rather than raising wages. "He had a very deep sense of paternalism," Phillips-Fein said. "He was very invested in the idea of business as a romance and kind of a space of adventure and conquest and feudal benevolence." The 1892 Carnegie Steel strike and its violent suppression left Carnegie disillusioned.
From Shockley to Tech Titans
The book also examines William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, who later became drawn to racist pseudoscience and IQ testing. Phillips-Fein describes him as "a uniquely horrible person, and probably quite unhappy as well." Shockley's ideas were part of a broader meritocratic movement responding to the civil rights movement's claims about resource distribution. "The reasons for Black poverty are not innate, they reflect centuries of legal and political structures that have upheld white wealth," Phillips-Fein said.
This soil, she argues, gave rise to today's tech titans like Peter Thiel, who embraces ideas of competition drawn from economist Joseph Schumpeter. Thiel writes about creating a "monopoly of one"—disrupting everything to deserve command of society's resources. "The people who are kind of blessed with this genius to recognize how to create something completely new in the world, those are the people who will deserve to win in this race," Phillips-Fein explained.
Country of Lords, published by WW Norton & Company, is out now.
