Country of Lords

Know about the book -

Country of Lords is written by Kim Phillips-Fein and published by W. W. Norton & Company. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1324074450 (ISBN 10) and 9781324074458 (ISBN 13).

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.