GMW: The Athenaeum Comelianum de Litteris et Artibus is an international research centre devoted to the studia humanitatis – the arts and letters. As the author of fourteen books, including Money and Class in America, Theater of War, and Age of Folly, could you please share with us which factors chiefly contributed to bringing these works into being?

LHL: My observation of what I was seeing. In a way, it was like writing a diary. I was a writer, I was a reporter and I was a journalist. When I became editor of a magazine, I felt it was obligatory to write a column in order to tell the reader where I was coming from. In other words, to be fair and open with the reader so he or she would know what I was thinking, and I could therefore allow and encourage other writers for their magazine to write whatever they wanted to write because I was having my own say. I didn’t have to try to put words in their mouths as some editors would do with other magazines because I was free to write a kind of a diary, to write an essay.

The good thing about an essay is that you never know where it’s going to go. People who write articles or reports know how and where and why; they are going to claim the privilege of the last word. But when you write an essay you don’t know what the last word is going to be: it’s an adventure, it’s the most adventurous kind of writing because it takes you by surprise.

I taught myself to do this first becoming the editor of a magazine in 1975, so for thirty years I was teaching myself to write something new every month, which of course made me look and pay attention to what I was seeing. I guess there is one theme that holds the various books together and it’s the story of rich and poor. America was not founded as a democracy. America was founded as a plutocracy. It was founded on the dream of richness: the same glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, the same dream of the Rockefeller Standards oil, and Zuckerberg’s later. Let’s get to the argument, from the beginning of the story with the Puritans in 1630 in Salem harbor.

John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony arrived in 1630 on the ship Arabella, and before the ship dropped anchor in Salem harbor the governor preached the sermon to the Puritan faithful on board the ship and told them there was no such thing as democracy; that in God’s will some will be high in dignity, some low and in submission. That was the way the world worked, and always will. The great argument that is going on and has been going on in America for four hundred years is the story of rich and poor, in one way or another, just as [Louis D.] Brandeis, the famous supreme court justice, claimed in 1941. He was an advisor to Franklin Roosevelt, and in talking to Roosevelt about the New Deal in 1941, he says: ‘We must make our choice: we can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.’

That is not true. We must have both. We cannot not have both. Plutocracy and democracy are both prominent members of the human assembly, neither of them can be impeached. Sometimes democracy is not a form of government; democracy is an emotion. It is short-lived. Roosevelt says this; there are all kinds of people who say this: the story has been told and retold for four hundred years. It is the American story. In the American mind one is the supreme good from which all blessing conspicuously flows. This argument is going on now. This is in the newspapers: this is the essence of the election campaign of both parties. So, the columns and the books touch in one way or another on that ongoing debate.