Betrayal of the American Right - Ludwig von Mises Institute

20 The Betrayal of the American Right
face value. Any shipowner or foreign trader would be quick
to see that his bread was buttered on the side of a national
State which, if properly approached, might lend him the use
of the political means by way of a subsidy, or would be able to
back up some profitable but dubious freebooting enterprise
with “diplomatic representations” or with reprisals.
Nock concluded that those economic interests, in opposition to
the mass of the nation’s farmers, “planned and executed a coup d’etat,
simply tossing the Articles of Confederation into the wastebasket.”
16
While the Nock-Oppenheimer class analysis superficially
resembles that of Marx, and a Nockian would, like Lenin, look at
all State action whatever in terms of “Who? Whom?” (Who is
benefiting at the expense of Whom?), it is important to recognize
the crucial differences. For while Nock and Marx would agree on
the Oriental Despotic and feudal periods’ ruling classes in privilege
over the ruled, they would differ on the analysis of businessmen
on the free market. For to Nock, antagonistic classes, the
rulers and the ruled, can only be created by accession to State privilege;
it is the use of the State instrument that brings these antagonistic
classes into being. While Marx would agree on pre-capitalistic
eras, he of course also concluded that businessmen and workers
were in class antagonism to each other even in a free-market
economy, with employers exploiting workers. To the Nockian,
businessmen and workers are in harmony—as are everyone else—
in the free market and free society, and it is only through State
intervention that antagonistic classes are created. 17
16 Ibid.
17 This idea of classes as being created by States was the pre-Marxian
idea of classes; two of its earliest theorists were the French individualist
and libertarian thinkers of the post-Napoleonic Restoration period,
Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer. For several years after the
Restoration, Comte and Dunoyer were the mentors of Count Saint-
Simon, who adopted their class analysis; the later Saint-Simonians then
modified it to include businessmen as being class-exploiters of workers,