Kim Phillips-Fein, historian teaching 20^th century American history at the Gallatin School of individualized Study at New York University, in Country of Lords, chronicles a “Shadow Tradition” who fought against America’s founding ideals, offers a critical re-examination of American history by focusing on inequality.  She challenges the belief that America has always moved greater equality, a persistent “Shadow tradition of anti-egalitarian thought published amid sharp anxiety over extreme wealth concentration. 250 years after the Declaration of Independence, the book argues that doubts about equality run from John Adams through social Darwinists, slavery theorists and scientific racist to today’s tech elite

Elon Musk’s upgraded trillionaire status helps explain the book’s timing. Phillips-Fein claims because it sharpens fears that extreme hierarchy can erode democracy and narrow alternatives.

Case studies include Peter Thiel, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford and William Shockley, which shows how elite power, paternalism, racism and monopoly thinking repeatedly reshaped American argument over who deserves resources. 

Modern inequality linking older defences of concentrated wealth and inherited hierarchy to the ideology of contemporary tech titans. Influential Americans have asserted a fundamental inequality among human beings, arguing that the social, economic, and racial hierarchies in which some groups of people rule over other are not only natural but good. She discusses the natural aristocrats, such as John Adams, who feared the turnult of too much democrat, the social Darwinist, led by Yale Professor William Graham Sumner, who blamed the poor for their own miseries, those who preached a gospel of production .Meritocrats like Harvard psychologist Richard Hernstein who described an economic caste system based on “intelligence” in his co-authors book, The Bell Curve, and most recently, technocrats who seem to see themselves as superior because they are closest to the machines destined to outstrip and supplant fallible flesh-and-blood humanity.

Country of Lords is essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of the widening gap between the nation we claim to be and the nation we are becoming, and the fragility of the ideal of equality and to reckon with the disturbing arguments of those who have campaigned against it over the past two and a half centuries.

 Country of the Lords by Kim Phillips-Fein, W W Norton, £14.99, 256 pages