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1. Betrayal of the Old Right,
Lecture 1
The Old Right

2. The Old Right
• Rothbard is using “old right” in a very
distinctive sense. It does not mean the same
as conservative in the European sense.
• In the European sense, the right or
conservatives were supporters of monarchy
and aristocracy. The term “right” came in
from the seating in the French National
Assembly in the French Revolution

3. Old Right Continued
• Those who sat on the right supported the
king. The term “right” designates opponents
of the French Revolution.
• Rothbard was not an opponent of the
French Revolution. He supported the
French Revolution as a movement for
freedom against monarchical absolutism.

4. More Old Right
• This raises a problem for Rothbard. He
supports the Old Right; the Old Right aren’t
rightists in the European sense, and
Rothbard isn’t a rightist in that sense either.
• Why then does he call the group the Old
Right? To answer this, we have to examine
some of the people in the Old Right.

5. Albert Jay Nock
• Rothbard meant by the Old Right libertarians or
individualists.
• One of the most important of the people he had in
mind was Albert Jay Nock.During the 1920s, he
edited the Freeman, an individualist magazine.
• Nock was a literary figure and was noted for his
fine style. He published famous authors of the
time, such as Bertrand Russell and Lewis
Mumford.

6. More Nock
• Nock was a follower of the German sociologist
Franz Oppenheimer. Nock discussed
Oppenheimer’s theory of the state in Our Enemy
the State.
• Both Oppenheimer and Nock were Georgists, i.e.,
followers of Henry George. They thought that
society owns land in common. Nock’s leading
disciple, Frank Chodorov, was also a Georgist. He
influenced Rothbard.

7. Nock on the State
• Oppenheimer and Nock argued that the
state was predatory. People could get what
they wanted by production and peaceful
exchange with others. This was the
economic means. Alternatively, they could
use force to seize it from others. If done in
an organized way by a monopoly group,
this was the political means.

8. Nock on American Government
• Nock was a strong supporter of Thomas Jefferson.
He wrote a biography of Jefferson.
• Nock applied his theory of the state to the U.S.
Constitution. Like Charles Beard, he viewed the
Constitution as designed to help certain economic
groups.
• Nock was a libertarian but opposed to big
business, which he viewed as allied with the
government predators.

9. Nock and the Right
• So far, we haven’t been able to connect
Nock to anything on the right.
• One way he was conservative in a
conventional sense is that he believed in a
natural aristocracy.
• Higher education wasn’t for everybody. A
“Remnant” would bring about political
change.

10. H.L. Mencken
• Another key figure of the Old Right was H.
L. Mencken. He was the leading literary
critic in America in the 1920s and 1930s.
• Like Nock, he was a strong opponent of
state interference with individual liberty.
Prohibition was an especial target of his.

11. Mencken’s Style
• Mencken had a very humorous style and could be
a devastating critic. He said lawyers
• “are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless
and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-
books, and for all the evils that go with the
vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal
judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen.
Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizen
has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were
hanged tomorrow . . . we’d all be freer and
safer, and our taxes would be reduced by
almost a half.”

12. Mencken on Democracy
• Mencken was unsympathetic to democracy.
He thought that most people were stupid.
The masses could easily be manipulated.
• He derived his philosophical views from
Nietzsche, whom he translated.
• Like Nock, he was an opponent of Big
Business. He made fun of Harding and
Coolidge.

13. Opposition to War
• We now turn to the single issue most important to
this course. It separates the Old Right from both
the National Review conservatives and the
neoconservatives.
• This is opposition to war. There was an opposition
movement to the Spanish-American War. This
was the Anti-Imperialist League. It was largely
composed of conservative, laissez-faire
Democrats.

14. Opposition to War Continued
• The anti-war movement really took off after
America entered WWI in 1917.
• Wilson had campaigned in 1916 on the
slogan “he kept us out of war”. His pro-
English interpretation of American neutral
rights made US entry into the war virtually
inevitable.

15. The American Left and the War
• Many people in the American left supported
Wilson’s entry into the war. Many Progressives
favored government control of the economy. They
realized that the war would give them an
opportunity to put new government programs into
operation.
• In doing this, they cooperated with certain
elements in Big Business. Some of the measures
established in WWI were revived in FDR’s New
Deal. Herbert Hoover was a leading business
Progressive.

16. American Left Continued
• Among the most important leftists who supported
the war was the philosopher John Dewey. He
thought war was an opportunity for planning.
• This led to a break with his former follower,
Randolph Bourne. He called war “the health of the
state.”
• Another supporter of the war was Herbert Croly.
He favored the ‘new nationalism” and favored
Hamilton over Jefferson. He founded The New
Republic.

17. Anti-War Leftists
• Not all of the left supported Wilson’s war
policies. Some progressives, such as
“Fighting Bob” La Follette of Wisconsin,
opposed Wilson’s unneutral conduct.
• Another Progressive, Senator George Norris
attacked America’s entry into the conflict as
“war upon the command of gold.”

18. The Old Right and WWI
• The Old Right allied with these
Progressives. Nock wrote The Myth of a
Guilty Nation, opposing the view that
Germany was exclusively responsible for
WWI.
• Francis Neilson, an associate of Nock,
wrote How Diplomats Make War. He had
been a member of the British Parliament.

19. The Revisionist Movement
• After WWI, the Treaty of Versailles, which
Germany was pressured to sign by a
blockade, said that Germany bore sole
responsibility for the war. This was Article
231 of the treaty.
• Historians who questioned this were called
revisionists.

20. Revisionists Continued
• The relevance of the revisionist movement
to the Old Right is that as a result of their
activities, it became popular to see
American entry into the war as a mistake.
• This led to a popular movement to return to
the traditional American policy of non-
involvement in European power politics.

21. More Revisionists
• The revisionists challenged the war guilt thesis on
two grounds. First, it was false that Germany bore
exclusive responsibility for the onset of war in
1914.
• Sidney Fay was probably the most important
historian who argued this thesis. Harry Elmer
Barnes also wrote a popular book on war origins.
He allied with the Old Right and was a friend of
Mencken. He later became friends with Rothbard

22. Revisionists on American Entry
into WWI
• The revisionists also criticized Wilson’s policies.
Here the most important figure was Charles C.
Tansill, who wrote America Goes to War (1938).
• He emphasized that Wilson allowed Britain to
violate America’s rights as a neutral power, while
being severe with Germany. His interpretation
became the dominant one in the 1930s.

23. Making the Revisionists Popular
• Barnes played the most important part in making
the revisionist movement popular.
• He was a very prominent newspaper columnist.
• Mencken’s American Mercury made the
revisionist position popular among American
intellectuals.
• Senator Gerald Nye held hearing in the 1930s that
brought out the role of financial interests and
munitions makers in leading to American entry
into the war. This differed somewhat from Tansill.