Books: "Country of Lords" By Kim Phillips-Fein

 

Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America

By Kim Phillips-Fein

W.W.Norton & Company; hardcover, 256 pages; $35.00

Kim Phillips-Fein is Robert Gardiner-Kenneth T. Jackson Professor of History at Columbia University. She is the author of Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal. 

In the new book Country of Lords, Phillips-Fein has created a history of the United States through the lens of the 250-year-old intellectual and political tradition that all Americans are not created equal.

The starting-off point for the book is the Declaration of Independence's promise that "all men are created equal," written by Thomas Jefferson. While it might have held true in the century after it was written, as property ownership was more widespread than in the British Empire and local political institutions had some autonomy, there has been a parallel tradition of an enduring and organized argument against equality itself, as influential Americans asserted that there were hierarchies among human beings, and it was not only natural, but good, if some groups of people rule over the others.

"For alongside the bold claims of the Declaration there has always been another strain of thinking, one that has held than in fact people are not created equal - and that the social and economic order should mirror their innate inequalities," Phillips-Fein writes. "According to this line of thinking, the division between rich and poor - no matter how extreme it might be, no matter how profound - is legitimate, necessary, and essential for society to function at all. Some of those who have advanced this view are scholars, writers, and political activist; others have been businessmen and entrepreneurs who styled themselves as public intellectuals."

Phillips-Fein traces this argument for inequality through six vivid archetypes, starting with the natural aristocrats like John Adams, who feared the tumult that too much democracy would bring. There were social Darwinists, with Yale professor William Graham Sumner leading the way, who blamed the poor for their own miseries; people who preached a gospel of production, like Henry Ford, who wanted an industrial hierarchy; meritocrats such as Harvard psychologist Richard Hernstein, who described an economic caste system based on "intelligence" in his co-authored book The Bell Curve; and the most recent one being technocrats who see themselves as superior because they are closest to the machines that are set to outstrip and supplant fallible humanity.

Phillips-Fein writes, "This belief in the basic need for hierarchy and in the inferiority of the working class appears, with variations, around the world. But it is especially notable in American history.

"These anti-egalitarians speak to an abiding tension within American society between capitalism and democracy itself. That there is a conflict between the formal, legal claims of modern democracy and the economic hierarchy demanded by capitalism is hardly a new insight. There is an old argument that people are nominally equal before the law, but that behind the factory door, there is no freedom of association, no Bill of Rights, no right of association or of speech that can be exercised without the threat of being fired. The actual capacity to exercise our legal and political rights - to speak freely, publicize views, run for office, influence legislation - is intertwined with access to material resources. Many on the left have argued that the promises of freedom and equality are betrayed by the reality of material inequality."

Phillips-Fein reframed the American Revolution through this lens, as both the loyalists to Britain and the rebels viewed it as a challenge to patterns of authority. One voice she highlights is Thomas Paine, known most for Common Sense, a pamphlet he published anonymously to generate public support for the Revolution.

Paine also had views on equality, how we are all born equally, but "some subsequent circumstance" creates the inequality." A transplant from England, Paine viewed "the cause of America," mostly its ideal of equality and liberty, "is in great measure the cause of mankind."

Country of Lords is a comprehensive look at American history done through a unique lens that is very accessible, by taking into account all sides of the debate, making it an enlightening read.