Country of Lords
Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight against Equality in America
21 July 2026
Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, Singapore and Malaysia, but excluding the British Commonwealth.
Description
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.
Reviews
"An audacious argument that the American intellectual tradition is composed of not just egalitarian principles but also of many anti-democratic ones. With care and erudition, Country of Lords shows that the excesses of today’s far Right intelligentsia are far from new." — Alissa Quart, author of Bootstrapped
"With an artful pen and a breezy style, Phillips-Fein takes the reader on a revealing tour of the ideas and people inhabiting a dark and under-recognized continuity in American history: those committed to values that are too often seen as “unAmerican” but whose thought and power we ignore at our peril. An eye-opening read." — Jefferson Cowie, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power
"Both timely and necessary, Philips-Fein describes the evolution and persistence of anti-Enlightenment apologias for political and material inequality that today, more than ever, threaten core American values, morals, and democracy itself." — David Nasaw, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Wounded Generation
"Powerful, expansive, and penetrating, Country of Lords confounds our assumptions about America's political traditions and sensibilities. Reaching back to the world of the founders and far ahead to that of the tech titans, it demands a new type of reckoning." — Steven Hahn, author of Illiberal America
"Enlightening and shocking, the brilliant historian Kim Phillips-Fein delivers a necessary history of the scandalous?but tenacious resistance to the emancipation Americans still need." — Samuel Moyn, Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University and author of The Last Utopia
"Kim Philips-Fein has dug deep into US history and excavated a rogues gallery of men with bad, mad and even dangerous ideas. If you want to understand where we are today, this lively—and sobering—intellectual history will help." — Dr. Anya Schiffrin, editor of Media Capture in the Digital Age
"The Pulitzer finalist charts the long history of the American political conviction that all people are not created equal." — Publishers Weekly, "Spring 2026 Preview: History Top Ten"
Also By: Kim Phillips-Fein 
Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal
E Book, 2010
“A compelling and readable story of resistance to the new economic order.” —Boston Globe
Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal
Paperback, 2010
“A compelling and readable story of resistance to the new economic order.” —Boston Globe
Ebook
9781324074458
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