读过 Country of Lords
历史梳理有用但分析还是“未达一间”。它似乎需要一部对观的、平等观念的历史。实际上，我觉得无论是“本于自然”的不平等辩护，还是“不证自明”的平等辩护，在它最抽象、最简单的形式上，都是很容易打的靶子，但这不是问题所在。真正有意思的大概是在每个具体的历史情境中，秉持不同观念的人们想要的到底是什么。盛放这些愿望的观念容器的形状和历史当然也是重要的，但它也只有在推到了“可能与不可能”的边界上时，才真正显示出它的作用来。
Country of Lords [Book] Douban
author:
Kim Phillips-Fein
publishing house:
W. W. Norton & Company
2026
- 7
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.
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.