Kim Phillips-Fein's 'Country of Lords'
Kim Phillips-Fein joins the podcast to talk about the anti-egalitarian strain in American culture and politics
By LARB Radio HourJuly 24, 2026
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Kim Phillips-Fein's 'Country of Lords'
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Host Eric Newman and LARB Editor-in-Chief Medaya Ocher speak with Columbia history professor Kim Phillips-Fein about her new book Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America.
Phillips-Fein examines a powerful countertradition that has challenged our well-mythologized national ideal of equality from the United States's founding to today. Moving from accounts about John Adams and William Graham Sumner to Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Peter Thiel, she traces how these and other influential figures defended hierarchy and sought to normalize inequality as a defining and even necessary feature of the American experiment.
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LARB Contributor
The LARB Radio Hour is hosted by Eric Newman, Medaya Ocher, and Kate Wolf.