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"Whence shall come the new barbarians? Go through the squalid quarters of great cities, and you may see, even now, their gathering hordes! How shall learning perish? Men will cease to read, and books will kindle fires and be turned into cartridges!" - Henry George, Progress and Poverty

"Whence will the barbarians . . . come?... Have we, within the confines of our cities, populations quite as little affected by modern thought as the Goths were affected by Greek philosophy, and hence quite capable either of carrying peaceably on as the aristocracy dies quietly off at the top or of arising sometime to overwhelm us?" - Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper

A select number of great minds influenced Albert Jay Nock in the formulation of his philosophy of elitism. Three of them have been chosen for this study: Isaiah, Matthew Arnold, and Henry George.

Seven centuries before the birth of Jesus, the prophet Isaiah had a vision. God appeared before him, and, bitterly complaining about the iniquity of Judah, a "sinful nation" that continued to "grind the faces" of its poor, ordered Isaiah to speak to the people and exhort them to repent. "Go!" commanded the Lord. And Isaiah went.

He delivered an impassioned address to a hostile multitude. "Let us reason together," he urged. "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow." The crowd howled with derision. He warned them: "If ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword." The mob jeered and hissed. He was through with them.

Wrathfully, ominously, he made a terrifying prediction. The Lord, he told them, would come to "render his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire." As in the days of Noah, God would destroy the sinners and save the righteous. He would, as once before, "recover the Remnant" and create a highway for them to return.

Only the Remnant would survive. All the rest would perish.

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In 1869, the poet Matthew Arnold wrote a noted critique, Culture and Anarchy. Three social classes existed in England, he declared: the aristocrats, the middle class, and the working class. Officially, these classes differed greatly from each other, but, in actuality, they were very much alike. The majority of the members of all three classes lacked curiosity, reason, and purpose. They merely existed.

However, Arnold proclaimed, there were "born in each class a certain number of natures with a curiosity about their best self, with a bent for seeing things" as they were, and this bent took them "out of their class," and made their humanity "their distinguishing characteristic."

To these "natures," governed by reason, and ever in "pursuit of perfection," Arnold gave the name aliens. Separate and apart from the rest, seeing things others could not, they alone deserved to be idealized and remembered. All the others were destined for oblivion.

In 1879, the economic philosopher Henry George, in his famous Progress and Poverty, graphically depicted the shocking contrast between luxury and want. "Upon streets lighted with gas and patrolled by uniformed policemen, beggars wait for the passers-by, and in the shadow of college, and library, and museum, are gathering the more hideous Huns and fiercer Vandals of whom Macaulay prophesied."

If the terrible social dichotomy, caused by the crushing monopoly of privilege, were not bridged by justice, George warned, a world catastrophe would occur. "The sword," he predicted, would "again be mightier than the pen, and in carnivals of destruction, brute force and a wild frenzy" would "alternate with the lethargy of a declining civilization."

The majority of the people, "the great masses," were not capable of heeding the warning or of listening to reason. The thinking minority, however - they who saw man not merely as an animal, but as "the only animal that is never satisfied" - they could see the danger; they could stave off the impending disaster. It was to them that the prophet had to present his program of economic salvation.

Unless reason and justice prevailed, George emphasized, the barbarians would appear once again, and civilization would come to an end. It was up to the thinking minority to save the world.

From Isaiah, Nock took the idea of the Remnant; from Arnold, the name aliens (which he changed to elite)', and from George, the axiom that man's desires were never satisfied. From all three men, Nock accepted the view that a deep chasm existed between the masses and the Remnant, between the barbarians and the elite.

In 1937, in his Free Speech and Plain Language, Nock presented the story of Isaiah to illustrate the elitist viewpoint. In ancient Judah, as anywhere else, he wrote, there were but two kinds of people, the masses and the Remnant. The masses (another name for the majority) were those who had "neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles" of "human life, nor the force of character to adhere to" them. The Remnant, by contrast, were "those who by force of intellect" were able to apprehend such principles and "to cleave to them."

It was Isaiah's "job," divinely ordained, to make certain that the Remnant were "encouraged" and "braced up," because, when everything had gone "completely to the dogs," they were the ones who would "come back and build a new society." They were, as Nock defined five years earlier, the "educable elite."

In 1932, in his The Theory of Education in the United States, Nock remarked that the "average man," innately suspicious of superiority, resented "the thought of an elite." Therefore, public schooling (misnamed "education") inevitably catered to "the lowest common denominator." The "vast majority of mankind" had "neither the force of intellect to apprehend the processes of education, nor the force of character to make an educational discipline prevail in their lives."

The educable elite, on the other hand, unlike the "vast majority," gave "promise of some day being able to think." It was the task of each and every Isaiah of the world to put these educable elite "in the way of right thinking, clear thinking, mature and profound thinking." They alone were worth saving. They were the Remnant.

After all, who should inherit the world of civilization and culture: the masses or the Remnant, the barbarians or the elite?