Historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s book Country of Lords looks back at the many men who have tried to fight against egalitarianism, from John Adams to Peter Thiel The historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s new book is published amid celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence and its truth “self-evident, that all men are created equal”. Country of Lords, however, is a history of Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America. Concise and hard-hitting, the book arrives at a time of glaring social and economic inequality , Phillips-Fein seeing Elon Musk “ emerging as a trillionaire very much on people’s minds, with a deep level of discomfort, both fear and anger about what this portends”.

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