Return of the Robber Barons

Thomas Jefferson took pride in the egalitarianism of the fledgling American Republic he helped create, as opposed to the class stratification of English society. “The great mass of our population is of laborers; our rich, who can live without labor, either manual or professional, being few, and of moderate wealth … Can any condition of society be more desirable than this?” By the end of the 19th century, with the industrialization of the United States and the rise of the so-called robber barons, that romantic egalitarianism, if it ever truly existed, was long gone.

In Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, Chrystia Freeland offers a detailed account of the contemporary rise of plutocrats (defined as the super-rich or 1 percent of the 1 percent) and the dangerous prospect of their emerging power in the United States and elsewhere: among the Russian oligarchs, of course, and, just as notably, among the powerful...