On Inheritance
It is worth remembering that when “inheritance” was applied to biology, it was a metaphor borrowed from the realm of property and right. The great bulk of European genealogical vocabulary derives from Roman law’s complex rules of inheritance and the various systems of determining an heir to rule. Since the family was legally defined through the descent of wealth rather than acquired characteristics, it should be no surprise that, as one headline from 2016 reported, “the richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest families in Florence.” The preservation of inherited wealth and status might even be said to be the raison d’être of genealogy proper.
Yet the distance between biological and fiscal inheritance is perhaps not so great. In The Descent of Man, Darwin wrote that “[m]an accumulates property and bequeaths it to his children, so that the children of the rich have an advantage over the poor in the race for success, independently of bodily or mental superiority.” He believed that wealth had an outsize effect on both natural and sexual selection. For instance, the “men who are rich through primogeniture are able to select generation after generation the more beautiful and charming women; and these must generally be healthy in body and active in mind.” We might say of human natural selection what Voltaire once quipped about Buffon’s Natural History: it’s not so natural as all that.
One mark of modernity is the dual disruption of the inheritance of labor and wealth. Traditionally, one’s lot in life was more or less inherited. The trade, craft, or crop of one’s parents became one’s own. As agricultural lands were enclosed, urbanization rose, and new forms of labor emerged through industrialization, labor was torn by an ever-widening generational divide. In a less dramatic manner, this was also true of the elites.
One of the central themes of French economist Thomas Piketty’s tome, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is the dynamic between population decrease and the measurement of wealth inequality in history. He notes that after the French Revolution, the code civile banned primogeniture and replaced it with equipartition of wealth among all siblings. This coincided with the abolition of entailed property, allowing “the free circulation of goods and the possibility of reallocating property to the best possible use in the judgment of the living generation, despite what dead ancestors may have thought.” This change in inheritance decreased by the concentration of wealth simply by distributing it throughout the family. Yet this did not close the gap between the rate of return on capital and the overall growth in the economy. Though there were more inheritors, wealth still grew more through inheritance than through work.
Detail from The Official Preppy Handbook, a tongue-in-cheek “guide” to growing up rich
While it would take significantly more than what could be argued in a blog post to establish this, we might hypothesize a trend here. Laborers produce family primarily by the inheritance of genes, while the elite preserve family through the inheritance of wealth. But who has access to this inherited wealth—that is, who is “in the family”—is not simply a matter of income or assets. Rather, it is a question of status. Unlike the Medicis and Hapsburgs, the American elite cannot have a pedigree that stretches back to the Renaissance. The national history simply isn’t long enough. C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite is a classic of American sociology that has a trenchant view of the anxieties of this class. The “American upper class is merely an enriched bourgeoisie, and . . . , no matter how powerful its members may be, they cannot invent an aristocratic past where one did not exist.” As Bruce Willis’s character, Butch Coolidge, famously quips in Pulp Fiction, “I’m American, honey, our names don’t mean shit.”
Mills argues that because of their genealogical anxiety, the postbellum wealthy created societies that performed the same exclusionary functions as Old World pedigrees. One of the first attempts at formalizing this was carried out by one Ward McAllister, who in “the winter of 1872-3 . . . organized the Patriarchs, ‘a committee of twenty-five men “who had the right to create and lead Society.”’” Though this attempt failed to keep the parvenus at bay, it was the precursor to a strange and little-known phenomenon of the American upper crust—The Social Register. The Social Register is a still-extant twice-yearly publication that lists the “‘socially elect’ together with addresses, children, schools, telephone numbers, and clubs.” It has various editions in the major American cities of the northeast and southern United States. The Social Register announces when a new birth arrives or a new enrollment in Yale or Harvard is won. In this way, it is the American analogue to Burke’s Peerage, the genealogical publication of all the nobility in the United Kingdom. (It also has a website, but don’t be thrown off by its Web 2.0 look. It is a cultivated contempt for design one also sees in the superyacht listings on the Bloomberg Terminal.) What makes it so American is that here there is no nobility but only the exclusivity of a club. The elite fraternity, and later the sorority, become quasi-familial structures that support the elite maintenance of a monopoly on access to state and corporate power. One point speaks for many: Donald Trump was not listed until he ascended to the Presidency, the most exclusive club of all.
Wealth inequality in the United States cannot be explained by patterns of inheritance alone. United for a Fair Economy’s Born on Third Base report gives a breakdown of where the Forbes 400 came from in terms of family wealth. Although 21.25% were born on “home plate” (that is, they inherited enough wealth to be included on the list), 35% were born “in the batter’s box,” coming from a lower or middle-class background. Yet there are some indications that this may be the beginning of a new era of inherited wealth inequity, if there is no political intervention. Thomas Piketty argued that “a stagnant or, worse, decreasing population increases the influence of capital accumulated in previous generations.” He hypothesizes that in a “low-growth regime” the dynamics of capital accumulation will be more strongly in favor of a class of people whose wealth was inherited. The nouveaux riches become the old guard three generations on.
Beyond wealth, the creation of “families” of status shows the formation of a “power elite” who, while not always in the highest echelon of accumulated wealth, are nevertheless linked by bonds that are exclusive and in many cases heritable. Though Mills’s book begins with the “Metropolitan 400,” those blue-blooded elites who wished to keep their names out of the press, he also included in this class of people celebrities, the “very rich,” chief executives, the corporate rich, warlords, the military ascendancy, and the political directorate. Rather than imagining power as a special charisma possessed by individuals, we may do better to look to the way that these various branches of the elite are linked by formal and informal networks. Mills was highlighting that the old networks of power that were bound in a “local elite” were no longer applicable to 1956. While his work now approaches eligibility for social security, its fundamental premise should inspire us to rethink power as a genealogy. The contingencies and changes of what is heritable in wealth, status, and power are the tactical and strategic points of the coming struggles in our grossly unequal present. But to trace these bonds carefully, we need to be armed with a genealogist’s sensitivity to the fragility of the individual bonds that link the powerful. The pedigree of the elites may be both their entrance into the halls of power and a map for those genealogists who wish to usher in new relations.
