Individualists Are Antiegalitarian, Believing in Human Differences and “Natural” (Not “Artificial”) Inequalities

In one sense, the “conservative” label for Nock and Mencken was, and had been, correct, as it is for all individualists, in the sense that the individualist believes in human differences and therefore in inequalities. These are, to be sure, “natural” inequalities, which, in the Jeffersonian sense, would arise out of a free society as “natural aristocracies”; and these contrast sharply with the “artificial” inequalities that statist policies of caste and special privilege impose on society. But the individualist must always be antiegalitarian. Mencken had always been a frank and joyous “elitist” in this sense, and at least as strongly opposed to democratic egalitarian government as to all other forms of government. But Mencken emphasized that, as in the free market, “an aristocracy must constantly justify its existence. In other words, there must be no artificial conversion of its present strength into perpetual rights.” Nock came by this elitism gradually over the years, and it reached its full flowering by the late 1920s. Out of this developed position came Nock’s brilliant and prophetic, though completely forgotten, Theory of Education in the United States, which had grown out of 1931 lectures at the University of Virginia.

—Murray N. Rothbard, The Betrayal of the American Right, ed. Thomas E. Woods Jr. (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007), 28.