Historian traces anti-egalitarianism from Adams to Musk
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- Kim Phillips-Fein publishes 'Country of Lords' (WW Norton), tracing anti-egalitarianism in America from John Adams to Peter Thiel, arriving during 250th anniversary celebrations of the Declaration of Independence.
- Elon Musk's trillionaire status reflects 'a deep level of discomfort, both fear and anger' about extreme wealth concentration and whether democracy can still survive it, Phillips-Fein says.
- William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, turned to racist pseudoscience and IQ testing in the mid-1960s at Stanford, linked by Phillips-Fein to a meritocratic movement that arose in response to civil rights-era claims about structural inequality.
- Peter Thiel draws on economist Joseph Schumpeter's ideas about disruption and monopoly, writing that winners must create 'a monopoly of one: nobody else can ever be you' and thereby deserve to command society's resources.
- Andrew Carnegie believed concentration of wealth was necessary but politically dangerous, advocating massive philanthropy over raising wages; the violent 1892 Homestead strike devastated the Pennsylvania steel town and disillusioned him.
- Phillips-Fein, a Columbia historian, previously wrote 'Invisible Hands' about businessmen who fought the New Deal and 'Fear City,' a Pulitzer finalist on New York's 1970s fiscal crisis.
- The book's subjects also include Confederate slavery theorist George Fitzhugh and Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, whose 1920 bestseller 'The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy' drew on 'scientific' racism after World War One.
Why it matters: A Pulitzer-finalist historian draws a direct line from Adams's post-revolutionary skepticism of egalitarianism, through Carnegie's Gilded Age paternalism and Shockley's mid-century eugenics, to Thiel's Schumpeter-inspired 'monopoly of one' — recasting today's tech oligarchy not as a novel disruption but as the latest chapter in a 250-year American anti-egalitarian tradition that actively shaped who was excluded from 'created equal.'
