Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature

This file is a single political-philosophical essay/polemic by Murray N. Rothbard. Although headers name the larger collection, the supplied body is one sustained argument. Its thesis is that egalitarianism is not a humane ideal impeded by implementation, but an ethical, anthropological, and metaphysical error: it mistakes inequality for injustice, suppresses natural difference, and finally rebels against reality itself.

Rothbard begins by criticizing conservatives for conceding “morality” and “idealism” to the Left while objecting only that egalitarian programs are impractical. Since the status quo can be moved by ideals, he argues, a merely practical defense is doomed. He therefore attacks the ideal itself, especially as it appears in economists’ defenses of progressive taxation as an unexamined value judgment. His first conceptual move is to collapse the distinction between a good theory and a failed practice.

If a theory is correct, then it does work in practice; if it does not work in practice, then it is a bad theory.

A goal that cannot be realized because it contradicts human nature is therefore not beautiful but difficult; it is a bad goal. Rothbard’s absurd example of a society committed to human flight by arm-flapping is designed to show that the critic must challenge impossible ideals at their ethical core, not merely tally their costs.

The next move is definitional. Equality, Rothbard says, is intelligible only with respect to a specific attribute. People may be equal in height or before the law, but complete equality would require complete identity. Radical egalitarianism thus becomes, in his account, a logic of uniformity rather than justice.

There is one and only one way, then, in which any two people can really be “equal” in the fullest sense: they must be identical in all of their attributes.

This logic explains his turn to anti-utopian fiction. Hartley’s Facial Justice and Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” make visible what Rothbard sees as the coercive endpoint of egalitarianism: beauty, intelligence, strength, speed, and distinction must be leveled. Equality taken literally destroys individuality.

The egalitarian world would necessarily be a world of horror fiction—a world of faceless and identical creatures, devoid of all individuality, variety, or special creativity.

Rothbard then grounds inequality in human variability. Biological difference, the division of labor, and recurrent leadership patterns all show, for him, that unequal roles and outcomes follow from differing aptitudes and interests. Egalitarians evade this, he claims, by attributing disparities to culture, oppression, stereotyping, or “brainwashing.”

Biology must be read out of court quickly and totally.

The middle sections pursue that charge through examples such as youth quotas, feminism, sex roles, bisexuality, biochemical individuality, and intelligence research. These are among the essay’s most polemical and historically dated passages, but their function is clear: Rothbard is attacking the interpretive rule by which unequal group outcomes are treated as proof of injustice. Quota politics, in his account, replaces individual judgment with proportional group claims; women’s liberation becomes not only a protest against discrimination but a revolt against biological sexual difference.

In the final third, the argument widens from biology to ontology. Utopian socialism and communism are presented as fantasies of will overriding limits: Fourier imagines transformed animals and lemonade seas, while Marxian and Leninist communism dreams of overcoming specialization and producing all-around human beings. For Rothbard, civilized production depends on choice, specialization, and division of labor; the dream of developing every person in every direction denies finitude.

The egalitarian revolt against biological reality, as significant as it is, is only a subset of a deeper revolt: against the ontological structure of reality itself, against the “very organization of nature”; against the universe as such.

He crystallizes this anti-utopian anthropology through Alexander Gray’s line:

For life is a series of acts of choice, and each choice is at the same time a renunciation.

The essay’s relevance lies in its attempt to deprive equality of self-evident moral prestige. Its structure is a sequence of reversals: value judgments must be judged; impractical ideals may be false ideals; equality means identity when taken literally; identity requires coercive leveling; and leveling rests on a fantasy that human beings and nature are infinitely malleable. Rothbard’s conclusion is uncompromising: inequality is not a defect to be abolished but a condition of individuality, cooperation, and civilization, while egalitarianism is anti-human because it denies the structure of human nature and reality.