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The new nepotism.

Article Excerpt
AMERICANS cherish the idea of the meritorious self-made man. "A man who makes boast of his ancestors doth but advertise his own insignificance," Benjamin Franklin, the original self-made man, once wrote. The sentiment has stuck. Merit makes sense to us intuitively, and is almost demanded by our political principles. Jefferson's "natural aristocracy," the rule of the worthy, is what we strive for. In spite of this, as Adam Bellow shows in his provocatively titled In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History, [dagger] Americans' meritocratic instincts are not absolute. Bellow contends that Americans are more comfortable with nepotism than our republican and egalitarian principles commonly have us presume, and he devotes the better part of his book to explaining how and why.

In Praise of Nepotism is a sweeping 500-page survey of a cultural phenomenon; it is also a sociological tract and political commentary. In the tradition of amateur historians like Sir Henry Maine, Bellow has studied his subject widely: He traces nepotism in early human history, across ancient China, India, and Africa, parses its evolution over time in classical Judaea, Greece, and Rome, through the Middle Ages, discusses the era of the Enlightenment, and offers a prolonged meditation on nepotism in America. The section on America, in which Bellow calls for a reconsideration of what we think nepotism is and whether we should continue despising it, gives a novel reading of American history which places generational imperatives at the very heart of our political, social, and economic life. To top it all off, the author concludes with a how-to manual advising would-be American nepotists and nepotees on the do's and don'ts of advancing kinfolk and bolstering the family name.

Is Bellow serious? A nepotism that comports with our egalitarian principles--is this even possible? Yes, but it is a different kind of nepotism than the one that occupies such an odious place in our minds. Bellow departs from conventional thinking...

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