Class Consciousness for Billionaires

That game—the competition among the ultra-wealthy for influence, legacy, and fortune—came to seem somewhat more sinister after the Great Recession steepened social inequality. Following the lead of Thomas Piketty, whose “Capital in the Twenty-first Century” was published in 2013, some like-minded scholars probed the distant past, seeking to learn how deeply ingrained inequality had been in societies dissimilar to our own. “As Gods Among Men: A History of the Rich in the West” (Princeton), a new book by the Italian historian Guido Alfani, shares these scholars’ political perspective and their emphasis on the extremely long arc. But Alfani is interested less in the patterns of inequality than in the assemblage, use, and justification of great fortunes. The anxieties about extreme wealth which have recently shaped public debate—regarding its influence on politics, the way it tests the reach of states, and the ethics of philanthropy and private investment—turn out to be extraordinarily old. The rich have confused the rest of us from the beginning. When, in northern Italy on the cusp of the Renaissance, something like the modern mogul emerged (urban, financial, ostensibly meritocratic), many members of society were “troubled by the very existence of the rich,” Alfani writes. “Indeed, it would not be too far-fetched to state they did not know precisely what to do with them.”