Albert Jay Nock: Alternative History

Albert Jay Nock and Alternative History

By Joseph R. Stromberg
Joseph Stromberg is a historian and freelance writer.

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) was a leading ideologist of the Old Right, a loose collection of individualist intellectuals, journalists, and a few politicians who opposed the growth of government in the first half of the twentieth century. Nock’s writing appeared in the Nation, the original Freeman (1920–1924), which he founded with Francis Neilson, the American Mercury, Harper’s, and elsewhere.

His books include On Doing the Right Thing and Other Essays (1928), Jefferson (1926), The Theory of Education in the United States (1931), Our Enemy, the State (1935), Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943), and Cogitations (Nockian Society, 1985).

Nock believed that education, properly understood, was not the same as vocational training, and he famously took a dim view of politics. Conservative political scientist George W. Carey has lately (2004) named him as one of “the great conservative thinkers of the twentieth century.”

Perhaps so; but Nock was also profoundly radical. Jefferson and Our Enemy, the State are the keys to understanding Nock’s system, and inquiry into them sheds light on the relationship between Nock and the Old Right to Progressives and Progressivism and other strains of non-Marxist radicalism.

Nock’s Jefferson

Few would doubt that Nock is a pleasure to read. Jefferson packs interesting detail and observation into an admittedly off-center account of its subject. Thomas Jefferson is skillfully etched, foibles and all, and Nock notes favorably that he never speculated in land. Of his many inventions, Jefferson “never patented one” (being what we would now call a “freeware” inventor).

As ambassador to France, Jefferson supposed that country held 19 million paupers. He commented, “[W]herever there is in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural rights. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on.” Adding in royal monopolies, Jefferson ascribed to France’s productive classes “all the oppressions which result from the nature of the general government . . . their particular tenures, and . . . the seigneurial [feudal] government to which they are subject.”

In England, Nock writes, Jefferson “saw a population expropriated from the land, and existing at the mercy of industrial employers, with the enormous exactions of monopoly standing as a fixed charge upon the producer.” The English state was essentially the agent of privileged orders. Jefferson commented that while Englishmen were honest, their constitution (see Paine, Shelley), “from its nature, must render their government forever dishonest”; as politically organized, England comprised “a nation of buccaneers . . . seizing to itself the maritime resources and rights of all other nations.”

Republicanism Is Superior, But Not Ideal

Europe’s monarchies bred such evils naturally. Nock writes that Jefferson saw American republicanism as obviously superior. But ours was “not the ideal system”—Native American anarchism was (Nock’s summary). Leaning that direction, Jefferson sometimes theorized a radical decentralization of the states themselves into ward-republics. In decentralized wards the people could, in Jefferson’s words, “crush regularly and peaceably the usurpations of their unfaithful agents.” Here, Nock writes, Virginia might have “set a good example, most of all to New England, which had the system, but was aborting its fruit.” Jefferson attributed Shays’ Rebellion to (in Nock’s words) “an unfair pressure of debt and taxation, applied by collusion. . . .”

Nock observes that the leading Federalist ideologist, Alexander Hamilton, united “certain broad classes of the ‘rich and well-born’ with the interests of the government,” starting with public creditors. As for “the natural-resource monopolist,” his position, Nock says, “was as impregnable under the Constitution as his opportunities were limitless.. . . Hence the association of capital and monopoly would come about automatically. . . .” The Revolution’s ideals had masked concrete economic interests; what really divided the country was the Federalists’ political means to wealth. As for the Alien and Sedition Acts, Nock writes, “Americans were never sticklers for theory; they have been always more concerned with the inconveniences of despotism than with its iniquities.”

Jefferson thought Hamilton’s national debt could be paid in 15 years, but commented: “[W]e can never get rid of his financial system.” He complained to Samuel Adams of “an artificial paper phalanx overruling the agricultural mass. . . .” Nock wryly notes “unaccountable fires among the Treasury records” just before Jefferson’s appointees came in.

Nock is no unreserved admirer of Jefferson. He finds Jefferson’s assessment of the Federalists inexact: “[W]hat really animated and held these people together was a predatory economic interest.” Jefferson suspected English influence but saw only its “external and superficial aspects.” The Federalists, Nock writes, devised their fiscal system “by no means because it was British, but because there was money in it” as “the most effective engine of exploitation by the ‘rich and well-born’ ” (italics added).

Jefferson was slow to see the Constitution “as an economic document of the first order. . . .” “The four great general powers” it granted were over taxes, war, commerce, and control of western lands. Mercer of Maryland, John Taylor of Caroline, and Jackson of Georgia were quicker “to assess the economic implications of Hamilton’s fiscal system.” They were correct, and Hamilton’s funding scheme created new assets amounting to an eighth of the national “wealth” out of nothing and gave them to “a single vested interest.”

In Nock’s opinion, Jefferson’s “legalistic” opposition to Hamilton made him seem “a doctrinaire advocate of State rights and of strict construction; whereas he was really neither.” Nor was he opposed to commerce in general; he understood the difference between everyday banking and public credit. For reasons of trade, Jefferson had supported the new Constitution, provided that “the United States should be a nation abroad, and a confederacy at home.”

Taylor had a superior grasp of free-trade principles and of how taxes are shifted back to productive factors. When Jefferson complains to Taylor about political patronage, Nock writes laconically, “[T]he Constitution was meant to work that way, and it did.” Jefferson’s plan of paying off the public debt by selling western lands served to create “unlimited private land-monopoly.” As for his Louisiana Purchase, “if it was a boon to the agrarian producer, it was a godsend to the speculator.” Jefferson’s unconcern about land monopoly aided the interests created by the Federalists.

Worse, Jefferson had an unfortunate faith in economic warfare—retaliatory tariffs and embargoes.

“He never anticipated,” Nock writes, “the appalling economic consequences brought indirectly upon the country in 1807.” Discussing the background of the War of 1812 (and with 1914–1917 fresh in mind), Nock writes that instead of informing American shippers that they took their own risks in sailing into the Anglo–French naval war zone, Jefferson backed an embargo “wholly subversive of the principle of liberty”—“the most arbitrary, inquisitorial and confiscatory measure formulated in American legislation up to the period of the Civil War. . . .” It made three states solidly Federalist and raised threats of New England secession.

Jefferson also failed to foresee the Federalists’ permanent lock on the Federal courts. In 1800 he predicted that “a single consolidated government would become the most corrupt government on earth,” exclaiming: “What an augmentation of the field for jobbing, speculating, plundering, office-building and office-hunting would be produced by the assumption of all the State powers into the hands of the General Government.” Yet Jefferson was not “a doctrinaire enemy of centralization.” He did not see his own constitutionally doubtful actions, as president, as comparable to things his enemies did (in Nock’s words) “for the final purpose of putting the legality of economic exploitation forever beyond the reach” of electoral politics and “official responsibility.”

In a “land of unprecedented monopolist opportunity,” Nock writes, men strove “to get out of the producing class and into the exploiting class as quickly as possible.” Jefferson “never seemed aware that the prospect of getting an unearned dollar is as attractive to an agrarian as it is to a banker. . . .” His Republicans kept their name while resisting “any tendency within the party to impair the system” that made extra-economic profits possible; hence, over time, “the essential identity of the parties.”

Our Enemy, the State

Nock deployed and criticized Jefferson in aid of reinterpreting American history. He made his theoretical ground explicit in Our Enemy, the State. Nock wrote that work in the shadow of the New Deal, which he treated as part of a two-century process of American state-building.

In Nock’s terminology, government serves society. But the state intervenes positively to divide society “into an owning and exploiting class, and a propertyless dependent class.” Only “incompetent observation” from Aristotle to Paine, had obscured this distinction. Franz Oppenheimer found the state’s origin in conquest, making every historical instance “a class-state”; but the state game only paid where economic exploitation could arise. For Nock, access to land was the key to preventing exploitation. Nock cites Turgot, Benjamin Franklin, John Taylor, Theodr Hertzka, and Henry George on the point.

The burden of Nock’s “theorem” is simply that few people with alternative economic means would beat down factory doors for mere “employment”—and at abysmally low wages, under miserable, dangerous conditions and quasi-military “discipline,” and with long, arbitrarily set working hours. The best alternative means was a plot of land and, short of that, access to traditional commons, “wastes,” and so on. These access rights were not especially tragic-because-common, but were in fact collective private rights held by specific persons in well-defined, once-feudal jurisdictions. All England could not show up one day and dissipate these resources. These little rights, however, gave people an edge, a minimal independence useful for avoiding abject dependence on would-be employers. The latter hated these arrangements and duly enrolled the state to destroy them. Nock’s insight is that conquest, land engrossment, and destruction of economic options are not a one-shot deal, done in 1066, but can be repeated as needed, in an ongoing process favoring those with the best access to the state. This is why Nock uses the inflammatory word “exploitation.”

In actual (non-Whig) history, commercial interests gradually refit the state “to their own special interests, and strengthened it immeasurably.” Later, republican forms allowed the individual to imagine “that State action is his action. . . .” Following Oppenheimer, Nock contrasts the economic and political means to wealth. Feudal and merchant states were “higher integrations of the primitive State”; while states as such, “primitive, feudal or merchant [were] the organization of the political means.”

America’s colonial period unfolded in the period in England when merchants and financiers “saw the attractive possibilities of production for profit, with the incidence of exploitation gradually shifting to an industrial proletariat.” This, Nock says, was “the actual inwardness of . . . the Puritan movement. . . .” Growing individualism and social power coexisted with a “weak” state, but one strong enough to oversee “a thorough-going economic exploitation with relatively little apparatus of legislation or of personnel.”

The “Merchant-State”

John Locke justified this new state and sought “to copper-rivet . . . a doctrine of the sacredness of property” blocking state confiscations of the private property of important persons. Under Locke’s Whiggism-with-a-vengeance, the rights of property “took precedence even over those of life and liberty.” Even war powers, Nock writes, were to intrude on men’s lives and liberties “but not on their property” (italics added). Popular sovereignty provided additional leverage “for ousting . . . status to make way for the regime of contract . . . displacing the feudal State and bringing in the merchant-State.” Like everyone else, merchants felt the disutility of labor and wanted a better “access to the political means.” Parliament was their chosen instrument.

In America, colonial states developed from the chartered trading company as “an autonomous State.” Indeed, “the merchant-State was set up complete in New England long before it was set up in Old England.” As a result, “the merchant-State is the only form of State that ever existed in America”—“a purely class State,” benefiting particular commercial interests. (This was also true in Virginia, despite a feudal-patriarchal overlay.)

The merchant-State’s exploits were limited by the above-mentioned theorem that successful exploitation requires prior expropriation of surplus lands. In America, Nock says, the state-system of land tenure—“monopoly of the use-value of land” and “monopoly of the economic rent of land”—provided the expropriation needed. Nock seems to be saying, first, that states tend to grant more land than the title holder can actually use; second, that in such cases, the title holder realizes illegitimate profits from selling or renting the land to those who do use it. His third point would be that by encouraging the existence of large landed estates, the state and its beneficiaries take away from other potential users a livelihood they could otherwise have had. The bourgeois state let “men of all sorts . . . climb into the exploiting class,” and with “a practically limitless field for speculation in rental-values,” Nock writes, “land speculation may be put down as the first major industry established in colonial America.” If land use rather than speculation had determined American settlement, “our western frontier would not yet be anywhere near the Mississippi River.” Hence all theses on “over-population,” beginning with Malthus, were “utterly incompetent” because deduced from “legal occupancy instead of actual occupancy.”

Pro-English commercial legislation cramped American would-be wielders of the political means to wealth, as did the King’s attempt in 1763 to curb colonial land grabs. Such interference irritated American elites no end. Political independence would provide them with full access to (and control of) state power.

Feudal elites “bequeathed” the idea of the political means to the bourgeoisie. “No other view of the State was ever held in colonial America,” Nock writes. He observes that since English policy limited colonial use of “both the political and economic means” (italics added), the language of natural rights and popular sovereignty had great appeal. The Declaration of Independence spoke to those who wished to combine “unlimited economic pseudo-individualism on the part of the State’s beneficiaries, and a judiciously managed exercise of political self-expression by the electorate.”

After American independence in 1783, Nock writes, “administration of the political means was not centralized in the federation, but in the several units. . . .” The federal level “had no taxing power, and no coercive power,” while each state had its own “bounties, concessions, subsidies,” and more. All 13 states continued the monopolistic state-system of land tenure defined above.

The struggle over a new constitution pitted “speculating, industrial, commercial and creditor interests” against “farmers and artisans and the debtor class generally.” The new plan widened the field of the political means, or of a specific mix of economic and political means. The outcome was free trade inside a bigger tariff zone: “the closer the centralization, the larger the exploitable area.” (This is Nock’s reading, in effect, of Federalist 10.) The classes behind the Constitution wanted “the British system . . . on a nation-wide scale”; they prevailed because mercantile interests were compact and agrarians dispersed—an early Public Choice insight. The Constitution provided republican forms with little democratic content. Under it, “the rights of life and liberty were recognized by a mere constitutional formality left open to eviscerating interpretations,” and sometimes “to simple executive disregard.” The point was to serve large property, however gotten, indiscriminately.

The 1789 Judiciary Act tied up the bundle, and with John Marshall’s able help the Supreme Court became “the highest law-making body.” Nock comments on the later “fetiches” of the party system and such “constitutional principles” as “strict construction,” always abandoned in practice. Jefferson’s dubiously constitutional Louisiana Purchase aimed at strengthening “agrarian control of the political means”—an achievement reversed after 1861. Nock scorns the embedded dishonesty of the system, even when defended with slogans involving “states rights” and “rugged individualism.” Over the long haul, business had “most eagerly urged on the State to take . . . the successive single steps that lead directly to collectivism.” Similarly, he says, modern farmers were not family farmers, but manufacturers and speculators typically clamoring for state intervention.

Nock was not optimistic about the future. Characterless “mass-men” were helping the state absorb society. Alongside ideological factors, he remarks on the state’s “overweening physical strength.” In any case, “reforming and revolutionary movements” showed an “incorrigible superficiality,” especially when “the only modification . . . necessary is that the smallest unit should reserve the taxing power strictly to itself.” History’s usual logic went as follows: “Conquest, confiscation, the erection of the State,” and ending, after a regular series of internal developments, with the victory of state power over social power. Social dissolution came last. A few “alien spirits” would record the tale.

Three Strands of Nockian Thought

It will be useful here to note key elements of Nock’s thought. (Unless noted, quotations are from Our Enemy, the State.)

Jeffersonianism. In 1787–1788, Americans chose between 13 predatory organizations and a large one at the center. Nock sided with the defeated parties. Echoing John Taylor, he writes that Federalists “aimed at bringing in the British system of economics, politics and judicial control, on a nation-wide scale.”

Progressive History. Nock dedicated Jefferson to Justice Louis Brandeis and wrote, too, that as “an old friend” of historian Charles Beard, he followed Beard’s interpretation of the politics of the early Republic. To this “economic interpretation,” Nock brought a breadth and resilience sometimes under- or unemployed by his successors (if any). When Nock says that ideological lags sustain institutions, or that the American Whigs of 1776 did not care deeply about popular sovereignty and natural rights, he adopts Progressive views containing considerable truth.

Georgism. Nock did not take Progressive history uncritically, but creatively modified it. His grounding in Henry George gave systematic character to his work. This should not astonish us. Edmund Opitz, long-time FEE staffer and member of the Nockian Society, thought George’s followers were “among the best libertarians we have,” and Murray Rothbard commended Georgists for seeing there is a land question. Georgism gave Nock somewhere to stand outside the existing order. The central claim about primal state allocation of resources gave Nock great theoretical leverage (but does not require belief in George’s single tax).

In Nock’s hands, these three strands afford the basis for startlingly radical historical conclusions. Thus individualism and laissez faire had not produced the “horrors” of English industrialization, “for no such regime ever existed in England.” The horrors arose instead from “the State’s primary intervention,” which expropriated peasant producers and kept land from competing “with industry for labour,” while Adam Smith preached the gospel of “landowners and mill-owners.”

Like Oppenheimer, Nock posits “an original allotment of the political means,” or “original intervention,” in place of Marx’s “primitive accumulation.” So armed, he calls American railroads “speculative enterprises enabled by State intervention.” Transportation was “purely incidental”; the railroads were really about “land-jobbing and subsidy-hunting.” Nock follows the trail of plunder. The French aristocracy, he notes, was “a closed corporation”; but a republic, “by an indefinite expansion of the cohesive power of public plunder, admits a steady accession of outsiders.” This made Britain a predatory republic rather than traditional monarchy (Jefferson).

Seeing the “cohesive power of public plunder” as a near-law of history, Nock anticipates the “mode of predation” analysis pursued by Pierre Bourdieu, Sir Ernest Gellner, Joan Dyste Lind, Rothbard, and others. Here the state becomes “an anti-social institution,” establishing injustice through law, “which the State itself manufactures for the service of its own primary ends.”

Nock also attended to ideology, noting that “certain arrangements of words” kept Americans (“the most unphilosophical of beings”) from seeing “how far the conversion of social power into State power has actually gone.” Americans cared nothing for “the theory of things.”

“State” and “Government”

To bare such mysteries, Nock distinguished “state” from “government.” This language probably owes something to late nineteenth-century Hegelian–American political science, but Nock repositions the absolute, totalizing state as a great evil, and takes government as a mere, limited mechanism of local self-rule. The state-concept becomes a critical tool, whose Hegelian content withers under Nock’s surgery. From within Nock’s radicalism, we see the need to understand the system as a whole, where the test of any public measure is, “What effect has this upon the sum-total of State power?” This sets a critical standard of sorts, to say the least.

In the end, our interest lies not merely in the task Nock undertook, but in what we could learn by following his lead.

Additional Bibliography

• Charles A. Beard, The Economic Basis of Politics and Related Essays (1957 [1922]), 192–193.
• George W. Carey, “America’s Founding and Limited Government,” Intercollegiate Review, Fall 2003/Spring 2004.
• William T. Cavanaugh, “Killing for the Phone Company: Why the Nation-State Is Not the Keeper of the Common Good,” Modern Theology, April 2004.
• Edward S. Corwin, Total War and the Constitution (1947), 78–84.
• Raymond Crotty, When Histories Collide: The Development and Impact of Individualist Capitalism (2001).
• Frank van Dun, “Political Liberalism and the Formal Rechtsstaat,” http://tinyurl.com/66vytd.
• Bruce P. Frohnen, “Individual and Group, Natural and Acquired Rights: On the Need for Unclear Distinctions,” Ave Maria Law Review (2005).
• George Gale, “John Locke on Territoriality,” Political Theory, November 1973.
• David Gross, “Temporality and the Modern State,” Theory and Society (1985).
• Jonathan R. T. Hughes, The Governmental Habit: Economic Controls from Colonial Times to the Present (1977), and American Economic History (1983).
• Walter Karp, Indispensable Enemies: The Politics of Misrule in America (1974).
• Karl Marx, Capital, I (1967 [1887]), Ch. 33.
• José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1957 [1932]).
• Thomas Paine, Selected Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. R. E. Roberts, (1945), 10–12 (English constitution).
• Michael Perelman, Classical Political Economy (1984); Railroading Economics: The Creation of the Free Market Mythology (2006).
• Murray N. Rothbard, Power and Market (1970).
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, Political Writings, ed. R. A. Duerksen (1970), 43–45 (English constitution).
• Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988).

http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=8368

We Have Yet to Learn

We Have Yet to Learn

By Gregg MacDonald

Mr. MacDonald, a trustee of The Foundation for Economic Education, resides in Issaquah, Washington.

The ideas of man, expressed in one way or another, have come down to us over and over again for the past 50 centuries. As we approach the twenty-first century, it is almost impossible to come up with an original thought. What a great thing Adam had, quipped Mark Twain. When he said something good, he knew nobody else had said it before. One would think we would have learned something after 5,000 years, but it just hasn’t happened. As the nineteenth-century philosopher Georg Hegel observed, What experience and history teach us is that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

Hegel was right. People and governments never learn from history, and go on repeating the same mistakes.

If we had learned anything at all from the past, we would know that every economy must sooner or later rely upon some sort of profit-and-loss system to spur groups or individuals to productivity. Slavery, police supervision, or ideological enthusiasm have always turned out to be too unproductive, or too expensive—not to mention too immoral.

Prosperity depends on the incentive of profit, but more than that, it depends on freedom. Those who failed to learn this from the past should certainly learn it from the present by looking at the collapse of communism in Russia, the failure of communism 90 miles off our coast in Cuba, or the tragic legacy of communism in China.

What We Can Learn from Rome

When we think of the Roman Empire (and it seems that everybody today tries to draw an analogy between the decline of America and the fall of the Roman Empire), we think of Roman citizens as being free, even though there were a great many slaves in the Empire. Roman politicians lusted after citizens’ votes and support just as politicians do today. Commerce and business thrived in this free economy. Farmers, shoemakers, estate agents, bakers, manufacturers, builders, innkeepers, and a host of other tradesmen and professionals flourished. In the early centuries of the Empire, just as in the early days of the United States, the farmers were the backbone of the nation, providing stability and food as well as strong, free men to defend Rome and fight its battles.

Under the Emperor Diocletian, however, Rome succumbed to outright socialism. Government spending led to inflation and increasing poverty. In A.D. 301, Diocletian issued an Edictum de pretiis, which set maximum prices and wages for all important goods and services. (In today’s world such measures are simply called wage and price controls.) The results were disastrous and set the stage for the fall of the Empire and the beginning of serfdom in the Middle Ages.

Diocletian put extensive public works into operation to boost employment, and food was given to the poor at little or no cost. The government brought nearly all major industries and guilds—unions—under explicit control. Paul-Louis, in his Ancient Rome at Work, tells us that in every large city, the state became a powerful employer . . . standing head and shoulders above the private industrialists, who were in any case crushed by taxation. Will Durant noted that businessmen predicted ruin, but Diocletian explained that the barbarians were at the gate, and that individual liberty had to be shelved until collective liberty could be made secure.

Diocletian’s expanding, expensive, and corrupt bureaucracy proved to be too much to handle. To support all this government—the army, courts, public works, and welfare—taxes rose so high that men lost the incentive to work or earn. Lawyers kept finding ways to evade taxes, but other lawyers formulated laws to prevent evasion. To escape the tax men, thousands of Romans fled over the frontiers to find refuge with the barbarians Diocletian said were at the walls of Rome. (It makes one wonder why the barbarians wanted to get in.)

In an effort to stem the tide of fleeing citizens, and to facilitate regulations and taxation, the government issued decrees binding the farmers to their fields and the workers to their shops until all their debts and taxes had been paid in full. And, as mentioned, serfdom entered its initial stage.

The Modern Welfare State

Technologically, the modern world, and the Western world especially, are no more like ancient Rome than the moon is like the sun. But, technology and science aside, the civilization of Rome in the time of Diocletian vividly reminds us how much our own government parallels the Roman government that existed then. The welfare state, the huge bureaucracy to run it, stifling government regulations, and exorbitant taxes to pay for it all—is there that much difference between our present-day American government and the regime that prevailed in Diocletian’s Rome? And, again, technology and science aside, ideas and thoughts seem to have changed little.

There can be no lasting, healthy economy without freedom. When we are told by government bureaucrats just what we are allowed to do on our property, told whom we must employ, and where we must send our children for an education—can we honestly say we are free?

The average American worker pays government forty-seven percent out of each dollar he or she earns. This money is taken by the IRS, FICA, local and state taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and on and on. Many people don’t realize this. How can you say you are free if half of everything you earn is taken away from you by government?

A healthy economy, in order to grow and spread and benefit the most people without taking away from others, needs freedom to expand. What we have in the United States today is an economy that has evolved through government control to satisfy self-indulgence and greed. Nor is it an economy embedded in freedom. Somerset Maugham warned us that If any nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

The people of the United States at the end of the twentieth century have certainly placed a high value on comfort and money. Entitlements, golden parachutes, and rich government pensions are just a few of the programs and schemes that are relentlessly driving our economy onto dangerously thin ice. If enormous bureaucracies on the local, state, and federal levels are the price we are willing to pay for government contracts, welfare, and entitlements in order to retain comfort, then can a sick economy be far behind? And is the loss of freedom even closer? []

http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=3525

The Role of Government

Perspective: The Role of Government in Society

By Perspective: The Role of Government in Society

Some time ago the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), now headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, ran a series of student seminars around the country on the Role of Business in Society (ROBIS). I know, for I ran one at Campbell University in 1978 that featured free-market stalwarts like Walter Williams and the late Arthur Shenfield.

Surely the role of business deserves depiction and discussion. But so does, and I think more so, ROGIS—standing for Role of Government in Society, an acronym coined by Edward A. Prentice of the Mount Hood Society of Portland, Oregon, and Professor Fred Decker of Oregon State University. There are at least three key questions relating to that role:

Precisely what role should the state play in society, including the economy? How should that role tie into America’s concern over individual rights so magnificently framed in 1787 and ratified in 1791 as the Bill of Rights? And what of the principle of federalism embodied in the Tenth Amendment as:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people?

Overarching these questions is, I think, the nature of man and the admonishment of an angry Lord Jehovah who, on banishing sinful Adam and Eve, thundered down on them: By the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread. For suddenly the Garden of Eden and its boundless plenty were no more. Instead, productive resources, including time, were limited, sharply. The law of scarcity was in, starkly. Adam and Eve and their issue down to this hour faced—face—a life that Thomas Hobbes baldly said in his Leviathan (1651) was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

So man, then and now, is in a fix, caught in a law of trade-offs. He can’t have his bread and eat it too. He must weigh unlimited ends against limited means. So Nature forces him to make hard choices on the correct construct of the state—as society’s protector or provider or both.

Life is about choices. In making economic decisions, individuals must choose among scarce resources that have alternative uses. They must try to conquer or, more accurately, lessen scarcity. But how?

How, indeed, when everyone is choosing from among the same scarce resources? Is this not a recipe for chaos if not bloodshed, the law of the jungle? Particularly in light of the condition of man, which Hobbes, for his part, saw as a condition of war of everyone against everyone?

But man’s lot is not war but peace—if with a proviso of a proper role for government: a system of private property rights, limited government, a state not as a coercive provider of goods and services but as a peaceful protector of life, liberty, and property.

From this construct, based on the original U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, emerged a system of free markets: a price system, capital investment, international trade, positive entrepreneurship. So the Founders unleashed Adam Smith’s mighty Invisible Hand—personal incentives under the rule of law driving this remarkable system of freedom and free enterprise, of social cooperation and international harmony, called capitalism.

Despite capitalism’s success, people often ask: Why is poverty so widespread within the nation and across the world? That’s the wrong question. For, as noted, man is born into scarcity; poverty is his natural condition. Adam Smith raised the right inquiry: Why wealth? Thus, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

This inquiry—Smith’s much-overlooked title word—needs economic education, a widespread understanding of ROGIS, of how capitalism and the world work—an understanding, by the way, sought by Leonard E. Read, in a stroke of brilliant entrepreneurship, when he began The Foundation for Economic Education in 1946.

Ludwig von Mises, FEE’s academic adviser for more than 25 years, warned of boomeranging state intervention in Human Action:

All varieties of [state] interference with the market phenomena not only fail to achieve the ends aimed at by their authors and supporters, but bring about a state of affairs which—from the view of their authors’ and advocates’ valuations—is less desirable than the previous state of affairs which they were designed to alter.

The idea of ROGIS then is pivotal. Government is necessary, yes. But, as noted by George Washington: While government can be a helpful servant when limited, it becomes a fearsome master when unlimited.

Overextended government that reaches beyond the rule of law—fostering interventionism and the Welfare State—is an idea whose time never should have come. This issue of The Freeman explores, retrospectively and more so prospectively, government’s proper role.

http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=3587

Albert Jay Nock: A Gifted Pen for Radical Individualism

Albert Jay Nock: A Gifted Pen for Radical Individualism

By Jim Powell

Mr. Powell is editor of Laissez Faire Books and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, American Heritage, and more than three dozen other publications. Copyright 1997 by Jim Powell.

Thanks to Edmund A. Opitz, Jack Schwartzman, and Robert M. Thornton for helping to secure scarce materials on Nock.

American individualism had virtually died out by the time Mark Twain was buried in 1910. Progressive intellectuals promoted collectivism. Progressive jurists like Oliver Wendell Holmes hammered constitutional restraints as an inconvenient obstacle to expanding government power, supposedly the cure for every social problem. Progressive education theorist John Dewey belittled mere learning and claimed that social reconstruction was the mission of schooling. Progressive hero Theodore Roosevelt glorified imperial conquest. Progressive President Woodrow Wilson maneuvered America into a European war, jailed dissidents, and pushed through the income tax which persists to this day. Great individualists such as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson were ridiculed, if they were remembered at all.

Yet author Albert Jay Nock dared declare that collectivism was evil. He denounced the use of force to impose one’s will on others. He opposed military intervention in the affairs of other nations. He believed America should stay out of foreign wars that inevitably subvert liberty. He insisted individuals have the unalienable right to pursue happiness as long as they don’t hurt anybody. Murray N. Rothbard called Nock an authentic American radical.

Even though Nock didn’t contribute to mass-circulation magazines and his books had a limited sale, he quietly affirmed individualism as a living creed. He became a name to reckon with as editor and writer for The Freeman (1920-1924). The great antiwar journalist Oswald Garrison Villard called it the best-written weekly yet to appear in the United States, a publication which thoroughly merited a permanent place in American journalism. The influential editor and author H. L. Mencken declared: What publicist among us, indeed, writes better than Nock? His [Freeman] editorials . . . set a mark that no other man of his trade has ever quite managed to reach. They were well informed and sometimes even learned, but there was never the slightest trace of pedantry in them. In even the least of them there were sound writing and solid structure. Nock has an excellent ear . . . he thinks in charming rhythms.

Nock won respect, too, because he was a highly cultured man. As literary critic Van Wyck Brooks explained: He was a formidable scholar and an amateur of music who remembered all the great singers of his day and could trace them through this part or that from Naples to St. Petersburg, London, Brussels, and Vienna. He had known all the great orchestras from Turin to Chicago . . . and he had visited half the universities of Europe from Bonn to Bordeaux, Montpelier, Liege and Ghent. He could pick up at random, with a casual air, almost any point and trace it from Plato through Scaliger to Montaigne or Erasmus, and I can cite chapter and verse for saying that whether in Latin or Greek he could quote any author in reply to any question. I believe he knew as well the Old Testament in Hebrew. American historian Merrill D. Peterson added: He was a finished scholar, a brilliant editor, and a connoisseur of taste and intellect.

Nock’s friend Ruth Robinson recalled, He was a finely constructed man, with small bones, hands, and feet. He was five feet ten inches tall, slight and quick in movement; he kept his excellent figure and carriage throughout life. The salient expressions of his strong face were conveyed through his brilliant blue eyes, which could change instantly, be impenetrable, mischievous, or express great kindliness and sympathy. He had fair skin and high color and during all the years I knew him wore a mustache. . . . Long before his hair turned white, an iron-grey band at the edge of his brown hair was an outstanding characteristic of his appearance.

Nock was an intensely private man. People who worked with him for years had no idea that he had been a clergyman. No one knew even where he lived, noted Van Wyck Brooks, and a pleasantry in the office was that one could reach him by placing a letter under a certain rock in Central Park. Frank Chodorov, a friend during Nock’s last decade, said, It was only after I was appointed administrator of his estate that I learned of the existence of two full-grown and well-educated sons.

Social philosopher Lewis Mumford, who knew Nock early in his career, remembered that: He was the very model of the old-fashioned gentleman, American style: quiet spoken, fond of good food, punctilious in little matters of courtesy, with a fund of good stories, many of them western; never speaking about himself, never revealing anything directly about himself. Added Chodorov, Nock was an individualist.

Beginnings

Albert Jay Nock was born October 13, 1870, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He was the only child of Emma Sheldon Jay, who descended from French Protestants. His father, Joseph Albert Nock, was a hot-tempered steelworker and Episcopal clergyman.

Nock grew up in a semirural Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood, and the family had a large garden and fruit trees. According to his account, he learned the alphabet by puzzling over a newspaper and asking questions. He didn’t attend school until he was a teenager, but at home he was surrounded by books, which he explored randomly. He recalled that the first book he focused on was Webster’s Dictionary, probably because it was a fat book on a lower shelf. The dictionary became quite literally my bosom friend, for I lugged it about, clasped it to my breast with both hands, from one place to another where I should not be underfoot, and there I would lay it open on the floor and read it.

When Nock was ten, his father got a job on the upper shore of Lake Huron. There he observed independence, self-respect, self-reliance, dignity, diligence . . . the virtues that once spoke out in the Declaration of Independence. . . . Our life was singularly free; we were so little conscious of arbitrary restraint that we hardly knew government existed. . . . On the whole our society might have served pretty well as a standing advertisement for Mr. Jefferson’s notion that the virtues which he regarded as distinctively American thrive best in the absence of government.

After attending a private preparatory school, Nock entered St. Stephen’s College (later to become Bard College) in 1887. It had fewer than one hundred students. Both institutions stressed a classical curriculum, and Nock relished Greek and Latin literature. He graduated third in his ten-student class. Nock reportedly went on to attend Berkeley Divinity School, Middletown, Connecticut, and although he left after about a year, he was ordained in the Episcopal Church in 1897. The following year, he began serving as assistant rector at St. James Church, Titusville, Pennsylvania. He succeeded the rector, who died on New Year’s Day 1899.

It was in Titusville that Nock met Agnes Grumbine, and they were married April 25, 1900. They had two sons: Samuel, born in 1901, and Francis, born in 1905. Nock left his wife soon thereafter, and never remarried. His sons grew up to become college teachers. Meanwhile, Nock was called to Christ Episcopal Church, Blacksburg, Virginia, and then to St. Joseph’s Church in Detroit. In 1909, he seems to have experienced a crisis of faith. My life was detached, untouched and colorless, he later told Ruth Robinson.

Nock embraced ideas of crusading economic reformer Henry George. As a social philosopher, George interested me profoundly, Nock recalled, as a reformer and publicist, he did not interest me. . . . George’s philosophy was the philosophy of human freedom . . . he believed that all mankind are indefinitely improvable, and that the freer they are, the more they will improve. He saw also that they can never become politically or socially free until they have become economically free.

Nock quit the clergy to become an editor of American Magazine, launched by editors and writers who had a falling out with S.S. McClure, the pioneering muckraking publisher. Nock worked at American Magazine for four years. He wrote articles advocating a single tax on land and—it must be confessed—he approved Canada’s policy of having government own vast acreage. He befriended the former Toledo mayor and aspiring scholar Brand Whitlock, who later wrote a biography of the Marquis de Lafayette. He spent time with the likes of muckraking journalists Lincoln Steffens and John Reed. He honed his writing. My stuff is good enough, perhaps, he wrote Ruth Robinson, and surely better than five or six years ago, but it still sounds as though it was written from a seat in the grand stand.

The Players Club

Nock frequented the Players Club, fabled gathering place for people in the arts since it was established by actor Edwin Booth and author Mark Twain. Located at 16 Gramercy Park South, Manhattan, it is a Gothic Revival style five-story house that architect Stanford White transformed into the club in 1888. Out front are a wrought-iron balcony and Renaissance-style gaslights. The Players Club has one of America’s largest libraries on the theatre and portrait paintings by Gilbert Stuart, John Singer Sargent, and Norman Rockwell. Besides Nock, illustrious members have included caricaturist Thomas Nast, theatrical actors John Barrymore and Helen Hayes, screen actors James Cagney and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Nock liked to take mail, eat, and play pool at the Players Club—a portrait of Mark Twain hangs over a fireplace, and one of Twain’s pool cues is on display. Nock’s business card simply said: Albert Jay Nock, Players Club, New York.

Nock absorbed the ideas of German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, whose radical book Der Staat was published in 1908. An English translation, The State, appeared in 1915. Oppenheimer had noted that there were only two fundamental ways of acquiring wealth—work and robbery. He declared that government was based on robbery.

In 1914, cash-short American Magazine was about to be acquired by a publisher intent on avoiding controversy. Nock joined the staff of The Nation, which was owned and edited by Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of antislavery crusader William Lloyd Garrison. Nock came to admire Villard, who courageously opposed President Woodrow Wilson’s scheming to get America into the First World War. One of Nock’s articles, on labor union agitator Samuel Gompers, provoked Wilson’s censors to suppress The Nation.

The Freeman

Nock, however, decided he couldn’t abide Villard’s approval of nationalizing railroads. He resigned from The Nation and, backed by Helen Swift Neilson, daughter of Gustavus Swift and heir to a meatpacking fortune, he became editor of a new magazine of opinion: The Freeman. The first weekly issue appeared March 17, 1920. The magazine measured 8 inches by 12 inches and contained 24 pages of articles and letters about politics, literature, music, and other topics.

Nock’s principal collaborator was Neilson’s English husband, Francis, a former stage director at the London Royal Opera and radical Liberal Member of Parliament who became a leading pacifist. Disgusted by England’s entry in the First World War, Neilson came to the United States and became an American citizen. He provoked controversy with his book How Diplomats Make War, published in 1915 by Benjamin W. Huebsch, who subsequently served as president of The Freeman.

Practically from the beginning, there was rivalry between the collaborators. Will Lissner, a former New York Times writer who knew both Nock and Neilson, recalled that Nock rewrote many of Neilson’s articles in Nock’s own distinctive style, causing the readers to assume that ‘Nock was The Freeman.’ Neilson bitterly resented this assumption. Lewis Mumford reported that Nock couldn’t bear Neilson’s somewhat inflated parliamentary style; and he would quietly put Neilson’s contributions in the drawer of his desk, letting them gather dust. . . . In his memoirs, published after Nock’s death, Neilson claimed Nock had stolen his stuff. Nock was more graceful. I had far less to do with forming or maintaining [The Freeman] than people think I had. My chief associate was . . . one of the ablest men I ever knew, far abler than I, and more experienced.

The editorial staff included Suzanne La Follette. In her mid-twenties, she was the daughter of progressive U.S. Senator Robert M. La Follette and a rigorous opponent of government intervention. She was a very beautiful woman, with a hilarious sense of humor, a grammatical stickler . . . a feminist . . . generous and warm-hearted, recalled William F. Buckley Jr., who knew her in later years.

There was an eclectic assortment of contributors, including economic historian Charles Beard, book reviewer Van Wyck Brooks, Soviet critic William Henry Chamberlin, technology critic Lewis Mumford, philosopher Bertrand Russell, muckraker Lincoln Steffens, poet Louis Untermeyer, and economist Thorstein Veblen—The Freeman decidedly wasn’t a hard-core libertarian magazine.

Oswald Garrison Villard hailed The Freeman for, he assumed, joining the ranks of liberal journalism, but Nock replied in the March 31 issue: The Freeman is a radical paper; its place is in the virgin field, or better, the long-neglected and fallow field, of American radicalism.

The liberal believes that the State is essentially social and is all for improving it by political methods so that it may function accordingly to what he believes to be its original intention. Hence, he is interested in politics, takes them seriously, goes at them hopefully, and believes in them as an instrument of social welfare and progress. . . . The radical, on the other hand, believes that the State is fundamentally anti-social and is all for improving it off the face of the earth; not by blowing up office-holders . . . but by the historical process of strengthening, consolidating and enlightening economic organization.

To better understand the roots of freedom, Nock urged Americans to resolutely close their eyes to diplomatic exchanges and official pronouncements, and read Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Thoreau, Wendell Phillips, Henry George. Nock added that without economic freedom no other freedom is significant or lasting, and that if economic freedom can be attained, no other freedom can be withheld.

Of the consequences of the First World War, Nock wrote: The war immensely fortified a universal faith in violence; it set in motion endless adventures in imperialism, endless nationalist ambitions. Every war does this to a degree roughly corresponding to its magnitude.

Nock wrote more about diplomacy than any other subject for The Freeman, and although he didn’t pore through all the diplomatic documents, he did gain perspective by traveling through Europe. For instance, he witnessed the 1923 German runaway inflation: I crossed from Amsterdam to Berlin with German money in my bill-fold amounting nearly to $1,250,000, pre-war value. Ten years earlier I could have bought out half a German town, lock, stock and barrel, with that much money, but when I left Amsterdam my best hope was that it might cover a decent dinner and a night’s lodging.

Nock turned some of his Freeman articles into his first book: The Myth of a Guilty Nation, which, based on the work of Francis Neilson, debunked the idea that Germany was solely responsible for World War I. Nock insisted all the participants deserved blame for the catastrophe that resulted in some 10 million deaths. Historian Harry Elmer Barnes wrote that The Myth of a Guilty Nation was a brilliant piece of journalistic Revisionism. . . . It took some courage in those days.

Unfortunately, The Freeman never attracted more than about 7,000 subscribers—far from enough to become self-sustaining. Annual losses reportedly exceeded $80,000. The magazine ceased publication after the March 5, 1924, issue. There had been 208 issues, and Nock seems to have contributed 259 pieces. Atlantic Monthly editor Ellery Sedgwick remembered Nock’s Freeman as admirably written, diverting, original, and full of unpredictable quirks. Oswald Garrison Villard expressed grateful thanks that it has existed, and our belief that it would be a misfortune if some other medium were not found to avail itself of Mr. Albert Jay Nock’s exceptional equipment for editorial service.

Nock sailed for Brussels, where he had many fond memories: Her ways and manners, her unpretending grace and charm, her feel of stability and soundness, are all just as you have been impatiently expecting to find them, and her face wears a jolly Flemish smile.

Back in New York, Nock became a good friend of H.L. Mencken, the maverick who edited American Mercury. There is no better companion in the world than Henry, Nock exulted after one Manhattan dinner. I admire him, and have the warmest affection for him. I was impressed afresh by his superb character—immensely able, unselfconscious, sincere, erudite, simple-hearted, kindly, generous, really a noble fellow if ever there was one in the world.

Soon Nock was writing for intellectual magazines like American Mercury, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Saturday Review of Literature, and Scribner’s. American Mercury, for instance, published On Doing the Right Thing. He wrote: The practical reason for freedom, then, is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fibre can be developed. Everything else has been tried, world without end. Going dead against reason and experience, we have tried law, compulsion and authoritarianism of various kinds, and the result is nothing to be proud of.

Three admirers from Philadelphia, Ellen Winsor, Rebecca Winsor Evans, and Edmund C. Evans, provided funds which enabled Nock to pursue his projects—their assistance continued for the rest of his life. In 1924, he gathered together writings of the American humorist and social critic Artemus Ward (1834-1867), who had inspired Mark Twain. Ward had fallen out of fashion, and Nock thought his social criticism could be appreciated by just a small number of unusually civilized and perceptive people whom he called the Remnant—a term that would blossom into one of his better-known ideas a dozen years later.

Mr. Jefferson

Then Nock focused on book-length biographical essays. The first was Mr. Jefferson (1926), which skipped the most famous events of the Founder’s life to focus on the development of his mind. Nock drew extensively on Charles Beard’s The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy. Claude Bowers’s Jefferson and Hamilton, published the same year, sold more copies at the time and did more to revive the reputation of Jefferson, who had been a forgotten man since the Civil War. But it is Nock’s book that remains in print. H.L. Mencken wrote that Nock’s book is accurate, it is shrewd, it is well ordered, and above all it is charming. I know of no other book on Jefferson that penetrates so persuasively to the essential substance of the man. Harvard University’s great narrative historian Samuel Eliot Morison hailed the brilliancy of Nock’s Jefferson. Historian Merrill Peterson calls it The most captivating single volume in the Jefferson literature.

Nock loved the sixteenth-century French humanist scholar, extravagant satirist, and maverick individualist Francois Rabelais, and in 1929 he wrote a book about him, collaborating with Oxford-educated researcher Catherine Rose Wilson. Rabelais is one of the world’s great libertarians . . . he has been a stay and support to my spirit for thirty years, and I could not possibly have got through without him. . . . The chief purpose of reading a classic like Rabelais is to prop and stay the spirit, especially in its moments of weakness and enervation, against the stress of life, to elevate it above the reach of commonplace annoyances and degradations, and to purge it of despondency and cynicism. He is to be read as Homer, Sophocles, and the English Bible, are to be read. Five years later, Nock wrote A Journey into Rabelais’s France, a travelogue illustrated by his friend Ruth Robinson (1934).

Nock did a book-length essay on Henry George (1939), drawing substantially on the two-volume biography by Henry George Jr. Nock’s contribution was as an interpreter, downplaying the importance of George’s famous policy proposal—a single tax on land—regretting George’s foray into New York City politics, and emphasizing his contributions as a philosopher of freedom. He was one of the greatest of philosophers, Nock wrote, and the spontaneous concurring voice of all his contemporaries acclaimed him as one of the best of men.

Meanwhile, in March 1930, backed by one Dr. Peter Fireman, Suzanne La Follette and Sheila Hibben had launched the New Freeman, but losses became too big, and it was discontinued after the March 1931 issue. Nock contributed 54 mostly short articles about art, literature, and education. There was little political commentary other than a call for ending Prohibition. His articles were reprinted in The Book of Journeyman (1930).

In The Theory of Education in the United States (1932) and other writings, Nock challenged the American dream of educating everybody. He believed that while most people could be trained to do useful things, only a few could truly cultivate their minds and contribute to civilization.

Nock provided an early warning of collectivist catastrophe. In July 1932, before Hitler came to power, Nock observed: Things in Germany look bad at this distance. The new government, which is making use of Hitler, seems bent on a Napoleonic absolutism.

Nock was decades ahead of most intellectuals in condemning all tyranny. Refrain from using the word Bolshevism, or Fascism, Hitlerism, Marxism, Communism, he noted in November 1933, and you have no trouble getting acceptance for the principle that underlies them all alike—the principle that the State is everything, and the individual nothing.

Nock became an implacable foe of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. In May 1934, he wrote: Probably not many realize how the rapid centralization of government in America has fostered a kind of organized pauperism. The big industrial states contribute most of the Federal revenue, and the bureaucracy distributes it in the pauper states wherever it will do the most good in a political way. The same thing takes place within the states themselves. In fostering pauperism it also by necessary consequence fosters corruption. . . . All this is due to the iniquitous theory of taxation with which this country has been so thoroughly indoctrinated—that a man should be taxed according to his ability to pay, instead of according to the value of the privileges he obtains from the government.

Nock embraced the pessimism of the architect Ralph Adams Cram, whose September 1932 American Mercury article Why We Do Not Behave Like Human Beings declared that most people are barbarians, there are limited prospects for improvement, and the future depends on a few civilized souls. I held to my Jeffersonian doctrine for a long time, meanwhile trying my best to pick holes in Mr. Cram’s theory, Nock recalled, but with no success.

Nock’s friend Bernard Iddings Bell persuaded him to accept a visiting professorship in American history at Bard College, part of Columbia University, and he served there between 1931 and 1933. He delivered a series of lectures which focused on the struggle for liberty. He subsequently massaged the lecture texts into his great radical polemic Our Enemy, the State. He drew from ideas of Franz Oppenheimer, who had written about the violent origins of the state. Nock championed the natural rights vision of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, the case for equal freedom articulated by Herbert Spencer. Nock ignored a taboo and spoke kindly of the American Articles of Confederation (1781-1789), the association of states without a central government. He shared American historian Charles Beard’s view that the Constitution reflected a struggle among interest groups.

Our Enemy, the State

Our Enemy, the State appeared in 1935. Nock wrote: There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man’s needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means . . . the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation.

The State, he continued, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.

Still far ahead of other intellectuals, Nock observed: The superficial distinctions of Fascism, Bolshevism, Hitlerism, are the concern of journalists and publicists; the serious student sees in them only the one root-idea of a complete conversion of social power into State power. . . . In Russia and Germany, for example, we have lately seen the State moving with great alacrity against infringement of its monopoly by private persons, while at the same time exercising that monopoly with unconscionable ruthlessness.

Nock despaired about individuals who become willing tools of state power: Instead of looking upon the State’s progressive absorption of social power with the repugnance and resentment that he would naturally feel towards the activities of a professional-criminal organization, he tends rather to encourage and glorify it, in the belief that he is somehow identified with the State, and that therefore, in consenting to its indefinite aggrandizement, he consents to something in which he has a share.

Most reviewers ignored Our Enemy, the State, but it won surprising praise from the pro-New Deal New Republic. Editor George Soule ranked Nock among the best essayists and soundest commentators on political history.

“Isaiah’s Job”

In his June 1936 Atlantic Monthly article Isaiah’s Job, Nock explained his view that the future of civilization depended on what he called the Remnant. He told the story of the Biblical prophet Isaiah, called by the Lord to warn people about terrible times coming. Tell them, Nock quoted the Lord, what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. But the Lord acknowledged missionary work wouldn’t yield quick results: The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you, and the masses will not even listen. They will keep on their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life.

Why bother? According to Nock, the Lord replied: There is a Remnant. . . . They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up, because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it.

Speaking to prospective prophets, Nock wrote that Two things you know, and no more: first, that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these two certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness; and this, I should say, is just the condition calculated most effectively to pique the interest of any prophet who is properly gifted with the imagination, insight, and intellectual curiosity necessary to a successful pursuit of his trade.

There was yet another revival of The Freeman in 1937. The creative spark was Frank Chodorov, who had met Nock the year before at the Players Club. The eleventh son of Russian immigrants, Chodorov had become director of the recently chartered Henry George School, and The Freeman served as its flagship publication. It was an 18- to 24-page monthly that defended capitalism and opposed American entry in the coming European war. Chodorov published at least eight articles by Nock.

More than ever, Nock rejected claims that government could deal with the monumental problems of the age. In his introduction to Henry Haskins’s 1940 book Meditations in Wall Street, he insisted that the State is the poorest instrument imaginable for improving human society, and that confidence in political institutions and political nostrums is ludicrously misplaced. Social philosophers in every age have been strenuously insisting that all this sort of fatuity is simply putting the cart before the horse; that society cannot be moralized and improved unless and until the individual is moralized and improved.

Nock recognized the futility of violent revolution. For instance, these remarks from his introduction to the 1940 edition of Herbert Spencer’s Man Versus the State: The people would be as thoroughly indoctrinated with Statism after the revolution as they were before, and therefore the revolution would be no revolution, but a coup d’état, by which the citizen would gain nothing but a mere change of oppressors. There have been many revolutions in the last twenty-five years, and thus has been the sum of their history.

Nock was considered a conservative for opposing Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who touted big government and schemed to get America into another European war. Yet Nock was among the few thinkers to maintain antiwar views during both world wars. Moreover, having abandoned his early progressive ideas for government intervention, he had actually become more radical. He affirmed his authentic radicalism in many of the 48 articles he wrote between 1932 and 1939 for American Mercury, hotbed of opposition to FDR. The German State is persecuting great masses of its people, he wrote in March 1939, the Russian State is holding a purge, the Italian State is grabbing territory, the Japanese State is buccaneering all along the Asiatic Coast. . . . The weaker the State is, the less power it has to commit crime. Where in Europe today does the State have the best criminal record? Where it is weakest: in Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Luxemburg, Sweden, Monaco, Andorra. . . .

Many now believe that with the rise of the ‘totalitarian’ State the world has entered upon a new era of barbarism. It has not. The totalitarian State is only the State; the kind of thing it does is only what the State has always done with unfailing regularity, if it had the power to do it, wherever and whenever its own aggrandizement made that kind of thing expedient. . . .

So it strikes me that instead of sweating blood over the inequity of foreign states, my fellow-citizens would do a great deal better by themselves to make sure that the American State is not strong enough to carry out the like inequities here. The stronger the American State is allowed to grow, the higher its record of criminality will grow, according to its opportunities and temptations.

Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

In the early 1940s Nock turned to writing his last and best-known book—Memoirs of a Superfluous Man. He worked at a house in Canaan, Connecticut. He gracefully chronicled the development of his ideas. He provided insightful commentary about his heroes—like Thomas Jefferson, Herbert Spencer, and Henry George. But he omitted most personal details about his life, and he was steeped in pessimism. The American people, he lamented, once had their liberties; they had them all; but apparently they could not rest o’nights until they had turned them over to a prehensile crew of professional politicians.

Nock assailed one of his favorite targets, compulsory government schooling, which promoted superstitious servile reverence for a sacrosanct State. In another view one saw [government schooling] functioning as a sort of sanhedrin, a leveling agency, prescribing uniform modes of thought, belief, conduct, social deportment, diet, recreation, hygiene; and as an inquisitional body for the enforcement of these prescriptions, for nosing out heresies and irregularities and suppressing them. In still another view one saw it functioning as a trade-unionist body, intent on maintaining and augmenting a set of vested interests . . . an extremely well-disciplined and powerful political pressure group.

Harper’s published Memoirs of a Superfluous Man in 1943. Adversaries, predictably, heaped criticism on the book—the New York Times’s Orville Prescott, for instance, blasted Nock for a corrosive, contemptuous cynicism and a profound despair. But some reviewers, like intellectual compatriot Isabel Paterson, who wrote for the New York Herald Tribune, were charmed by the book.

Nock seems to have had few friends during his last years. He corresponded with his sons Francis and Samuel, with Discovery of Freedom author Rose Wilder Lane, and former American Mercury editor Paul Palmer. He often lunched with Frank Chodorov, who had been forced out of the Henry George School because he opposed American entry in World War II; after 1943, The Freeman became the Henry George News and has continued up to the present. Chodorov recalled his times with Nock: Over a meal—I was usually ready for coffee before he finished his soup—he would regale you with bits of history that threw light on a headline, or quote from the classics a passage currently applicable, or take all the glory out of a ‘name’ character with a pithy statement of fact. He was a library of knowledge and a fount of wisdom, and if you were a kindred spirit you could have your pick of both.

Independent oilman William F. Buckley, Texas-born son of Irish immigrants, saw himself as part of the Remnant Nock cherished. Periodically he invited Nock to lunch at his family’s Great Elm mansion in Sharon, Connecticut—despite Nock’s radical ways. Buckley enjoyed Nock’s individualism and his scholarship, and Memoirs of a Superfluous Man helped spur his son William F. Buckley Jr. to defy the collectivist trends of the time.

Nock’s Last Years

Since no magazine would take Nock’s writing, several friends set up the National Economic Council. Starting on May 15, 1943, it published the Economic Council Review of Books, which he edited. He continued almost two years until failing health led him to bow out. This work was picked up by Rose Wilder Lane.

In 1945, Nock developed lymphatic leukemia, and he gradually ran out of steam. He told his son Francis: If sometimes you begin to think the old man is pretty good, and you feel that maybe you ought to be a bit proud of him . . . realize that he ain’t so much after all. He moved in with his friend Ruth Robinson, who lived in Wakefield, Rhode Island. There he died August 19, 1945. He was 74 and left an estate of about $1,300. Since Nock had wanted to be buried without any fuss, a local Episcopal priest conducted a simple funeral service at Robinson’s house, and he was buried nearby in Riverside Cemetery.

In his quiet way, Nock had remarkable influence. Frank Chodorov championed Nock’s brand of individualism through his books, his monthly newsletter analysis (he didn’t capitalize the first a), and in the weekly newsletter Human Events, where he became an editor. He founded the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists.

According to Henry Regnery, who published two volumes of Nock’s material after his death, The Freeman was an inspiration for Human Events, launched by newspaperman Frank Hanighen on February 2, 1944. Hanighen and his principal collaborator, former Haverford College president Felix Morley, were principled opponents of American intervention in foreign wars. Not long before his death, Nock had expressed his admiration for the enterprise and agreed to write some articles. Among the early contributors were William Henry Chamberlin, who had written for The Freeman, and Nock’s antiwar comrade Oswald Garrison Villard.

In 1950, Nock’s former editorial associate Suzanne La Follette joined with Life editor John Chamberlain and Newsweek columnist Henry Hazlitt to launch another Freeman—this time, as a biweekly. They were backed by businessman Alfred Kohlberg, Du Pont executive Jasper Crane, and Sun Oil heir Joseph N. Pew, Jr., among others. The distinguished contributors included William F. Buckley Jr., Frank Chodorov, John T. Flynn, F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Wilhelm Ropke. But by 1954, the editors were split between those (like Henry Hazlitt) who wanted to focus on economic freedom and those (like La Follette and volatile Willi Schlamm) who wanted to make anticommunism the key issue. The latter resigned and joined William F. Buckley Jr.’s new fortnightly, National Review—which, ironically, offered new subscribers a bonus collection of Nock’s essays under the title Snoring as a Fine Art (1958).

Leonard E. Read’s Foundation for Economic Education acquired The Freeman, pumped money into it, went to a monthly schedule, retained Chodorov as its first editor, and has issued it ever since. Freeman articles have been excerpted in the Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, Reader’s Digest, and dozens of other publications, and The Freeman reaches readers in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Malaysia, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, and 50 other countries, as well as the United States.

Despite the onslaught of wars and the relentless expansion of government power, individualism endures as a living creed, and Albert Jay Nock deserves considerable credit. He expressed fundamental issues of liberty with blazing clarity. He withstood withering criticism. He defied censors. He helped revive glorious names like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Herbert Spencer. His moral conviction, cosmopolitan scholarship, elegant prose, and steadfast devotion inspired others to join the epic struggle for liberty. []

http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=3580

What Conservatives Believe

WHAT CONSERVATIVES BELIEVE

By PHIL VALENTINE

August 3, 2008 –Conservatism is not only viable, it’s essential for a free society. The difference between liberalism and conservatism is best summed up in the old Chinese proverb: “Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.” Liberals have been handing out fish. Conservatives have been handing out fishing poles.

1. Conservatism makes for a productive society. Alexander Tytler said of democracy: “It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury.” Liberalism has raided the treasury to take from the producers and give to those less productive, leaving neither side with an incentive to work for either themselves or a nation.

2. Conservatism is compassionate. Liberals measure compassion by how many people are on the government dole. Conservatives measure compassion by how many people are off of it. While liberalism, by its very nature, looks down its nose at the less fortunate, conservatism sees all people as worthy of making it on their own. Conservatism is about preserving one’s dignity, not robbing it.

3. Liberals are pessimists by nature. The currency of liberalism is fear. It trades on the fear that something disastrous will happen unless liberals are there to stop it. Global warming, losing Social Security, banning guns; they all work from the vantage point that if liberals aren’t in charge something horrific will happen. The allure of Ronald Reagan was his positive message. He spoke of America’s greatness. He inspired pride and patriotism instead of trying to tear the country down and blame it for all of the world’s problems as many liberals do.

4. Military strength deters aggression. Peaceniks look upon our military as a war machine, and use any moment of calm as an excuse to cut its budget. It is a peace machine. Each time we fail to back our military, it emboldens those who would undermine our democracy or that of our allies.

5. Belief in God is a cornerstone of our republic. Try as the liberals may to separate them, there is no Constitutional separation of church and state, only a protection of religion from the state. Our founders believed this country was divinely inspired and it was only by remembering our religious roots that we would survive.

6. Conservatism believes in the entrepreneur. People who start companies take huge risks and they deserve everything they get if they succeed. Liberals want to punish entrepreneurs through confiscatory taxes. That’s why the IRS tells us that the top 5 percent of wage-earners pays more than 50 percent of the income tax. If you want to create jobs and, in turn, more money in the treasury, you must lower taxes on the rich and allow more people to take more chances.

7. Political correctness is the liberal version of fascism. Liberals have attempted to control the debate in America by attempting to control the language, and they’ve succeeded to some degree. There’s been no bigger muzzle on free speech than political correctness.

8. Guns are good. Liberals are quick to defend our freedom of speech, press and our right to protest but they ignore our right to bear arms, which figures prominently into our Bill of Rights. These selective constitutionalists will erode all of our constitutional rights if they succeed in being able to cherry pick them when they’re convenient.

9. Quotas are wrong. Society seems oblivious to the obvious solution to discrimination: strict enforcement of antidiscrimination laws. Making innocent people pay for the sins of previous generations runs counter to our fundamental principles and undermines race relations in our society.

10. Conservatism is still relevant today. Both Democrats and Republicans have veered from the basic philosophy of less government and more personal responsibility. Government is these to do only what the private sector won’t, can’t or shouldn’t do. That means the government shouldn’t be subsidizing professional sports or multi-million-dollar corporations any more than it should be subsidizing an able-bodied man who can work but chooses not to. Government must return to the basic conservative philosophy, as Jefferson said, “The government is best which governs least.”

Phil Valentine’s forthcoming book is “The Conservative’s Handbook: Defining the Right Position on Issues from A to Z” (Cumberland House).

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The Right Way

THE RIGHT WAY

By JAMES W. CEASER

August 3, 2008 –Kicking someone while they’re down has long been considered bad form – except in politics. Republicans have fallen on hard times of late, trailing Democrats in party identification by 9 points, 27% to 36%, the widest margin in many years. President Bush suffers record low approval ratings (but then, so does Congress), and the GOP’s election prospects look less than rosy.

But their plight has earned them little sympathy from their critics, particularly in journalist Thomas Frank’s delicately titled new book “The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule.” For those who may have forgotten, Frank published a bestseller shortly before the 2004 election called “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Born and raised in that state, Frank took a sabbatical from his sophisticated Washington world to return home and conduct a little anthropological fieldwork. He found the natives to be a bit, well, slow on the uptake.

Facing economic uncertainty, Kansans should have been voting their real interest, which for Frank clearly meant supporting the Democrats. But here they were, poor souls, clinging to their guns and Christianity and voting conservative. (It was widely believed that Barack Obama’s famous philippic on “bitter” voters, spoken before an ultra chic San Francisco audience, was inspired by Frank’s book.) Much like his acolyte, Frank was accused of condescension, a charge that he met by insisting all the more ardently on his support for the little guy, whom he wished to rescue from, as the Marxists used to say, “false consciousness.” “Kansas” did so well that Frank could not resist a sequel, or more accurately a prequel, since “Wrecking Crew” posits that voting conservative isn’t only wrong now, it was never right.

Frank’s central theme in “Crew”: that “the conservatism we meet on the streets of Wichita” (enough of the Kansas shtick already!) is not the conservatism of those in government. The former may be silly, but it is decent; the latter is wicked. Conservatism in power is about one thing and one thing only: a defense of “plutocracy.” It is about making the rich richer, nowadays at the expense of the middle class.

Despite what good conservatives “out there” in the country may think, or think that they are thinking, they are being had by the clever and cynical masters who pull the strings in Washington, Frank says. Conservatism in government since Ronald Reagan is about ripping people off, from lowering taxes on the rich to various scams that produce wholesale corruption. All else in conservative ideology is fly paper, designed to entrap the unsuspecting. Conservatism, to Frank, is the state of delusion. Indeed, conservatism in power likes to perform poorly and dishonestly because – here’s part of its genius – this only proves its point that government is bad. They’re failing on purpose.

*

There are more than enough conspiracies in the author’s imagination to fill another “X-Files” movie. But entertainment value aside, does Frank’s emphasis on class – forgetting his tortured account of it – really do justice to the sum and substance of conservative governance?

Of course not. The conservative movement in the past 30 years has defended ideas that almost all other nations in the West are abandoning. Conservatives have stood up for the concept of the nation itself in an age when more and more are sliding vaguely into notions of “global” citizenship; they have stressed the importance of Biblical religion as a background to our culture when other nations have lauded pure secularism; and they have reminded Americans of the truth of natural right positions at a time when Western intellectuals celebrate relativism.

Liberals in America sometimes squirm at the unvarnished proclamation of these ideas, often apologizing to foreigners in private for conservatives’ “bad manners.” But in public, liberals by and large acknowledge the importance of these ideas, albeit more modestly, and accept them. Conservatism has saved American exceptionalism.

The conservative movement also has put its own stamp on national security matters. Going back to the origin of the modern movement in 1980, many conservatives thought their vote for Ronald Reagan bore relation to his staunch anti-communism and promise to launch a defense build up. If they were deluded in this view, as Frank seems to think, then so too were most liberals, for liberals excoriated Reagan for his extremism, derided him for calling the Soviet Union an evil empire, and came pouring out on the streets by the thousands to protest his decision to put missiles into Germany.

Conservatives also backed the first George Bush in his decision to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, which they thought was a vital element of national policy that made a point of rebuffing international aggression and of guaranteeing the flow of oil to the West for the next decade.

Liberals too thought this was a crucial decision, only, still firmly in the grip of the Vietnam Syndrome, they took the opposite view and voted to oppose the war.

Indeed, what have the politics of the last six years been about, if not the issue of national security? George W. Bush made the initial critical decision to define the attack of September 11, 2001 as a “war” (a view that many resisted), and he proceeded to prosecute it first by a ground action in Afghanistan, and then, in a far more controversial venture, to follow it up with a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. When that war was going badly and all seemed lost, he doubled down after the 2006 election with the surge. This was conservative governance. Liberals denounced the war, the more so as it went poorly, and overwhelmingly opposed the surge (until it worked).

In assessing “how conservatives rule,” and whether they “wrecked” or secured the nation, an examination of conservative stewardship in foreign affairs must be a central element. Is the record one of error and failure from start to finish (the contemporaneous judgment of liberals at most of the critical junctures along the way), or one that, in retrospect, was mostly right over the early period, but wrong only in the last instance (a view now favored by Barack Obama)? Or is it one that history consistently has proven right? When it comes to questions of national security, perhaps that poor fellow in Wichita was onto something.

*

In area after area, conservative governance has either taken or proposed to take the nation in a different direction than liberals. And, as liberals would readily agree, these are not questions of mere rhetoric, but vital matters that define the character of our civilization. These include conservatives’ get tough stance on crime (something New Yorkers know about) and on terrorism; their opposition to unlimited federal funding of stem cell research; their efforts, however halting, to keep alive the issue of limitation on abortion; their attempt to provide alternatives to public education to inner city students; and their willingness to drill for oil off our coasts and in parts of Alaska.

But even when it comes to Frank’s main target, the arena of economics, just who is deluding whom? Yes, the rich have gotten richer, but have others on average really gotten poorer? Average real wages have varied in short periods, but they have risen substantially in America over the last 30 years.

Frank doesn’t want to admit it, but the lot of the average Kansan is hardly the life of quiet desperation he suggests.

Frank is a writer in the tradition of the muckrackers, down to the point of reviving their quaint old language of “plutocrats,” a class that includes not just the Republican millionaires he excoriates, but also George Soros, John Kerry, John Edwards and, if sales on the current book go as well as expected, perhaps Thomas Frank himself.

Frank was inspired most in this work by the turn of the century author, Lincoln Steffens, from whom he takes his own book’s theme that shrewd politicians can win elections by deliberate delusion and, strange as it may seem, by making people bitter. Steffen’s corrupt Philadelphia politicians were the original “wrecking crew.” But Steffens is known best for his own delusion. It was he who went to the Soviet Union in 1921 and returned with the unforgettable observation: “I’ve seen the future and it works.” The biggest difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives trust people to make their own decisions. John McCain now leads in Kansas polls over Obama by 14 points. Who is better suited to say what means the most to voters in that state than the voters themselves? Perhaps the real question is: What’s the matter with Thomas Frank?

Governing is a difficult activity, one in which even the most adept get as much wrong as they do right. It is closer to being a batter than to shooting free throws. Conservatives in office have made their share of blunders and mistakes, and Frank is at his finest in depicting some of the stunning instances of hypocrisy and idiocy in the period of Republican rule.

One thing is certain, however: conservatism has not repealed the limitations of human nature. But neither, as Frank seems to think, has liberalism. If the contrary were true, there would be no corruption in New Jersey and no public debt in California.

A fair look at the record will show that neither of our isms by itself has wholly wrecked – or saved – the nation. This should be enough to make Americans think twice before handing a complete monopoly to liberals in November.

After all, can three million Kansans really be that wrong?

James W. Ceaser is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of politics at the University of Virginia. He is the author of “Nature and History in American Political Development.”

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Republicans in the cities

WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH NEW YORK CITY?

By JOEL KOTKIN and MARK SCHILL

August 3, 2008 –Ever since the 1930s, most urban areas have leaned Democratic. But in presidential elections, many remained stubbornly competitive between the two parties. As late as 1988, for example, Republican nominees won Dallas County and made strong showings in the core urban counties of Cook (Chicago), Los Angeles and King (Seattle).

Today, America’s urban areas have evolved into a political monoculture that increasingly resembles the “solid South” that provided a base for Democrats from the late 19th century to the 1960s. Since 1972, the year of the Nixon landslide, the Democratic share has grown 20% or more in most of the largest urban counties.

The Right Way

What Conservatives Believe

As a result, places where Republicans such as Ronald Reagan could once win a respectable share of the vote – including San Francisco, Philadelphia and New York City – by 2004 were delivering 80% or more to the Democrats. Even in the losing year of 2004, Democratic nominee John F. Kerry won almost every city of more than 500,000 people.

This fall, Barack Obama, a resident of Chicago, can comfortably expect to triumph in virtually every major urban county, often by ratios of 2-to-1 or more. He can count just as much on cities in decline as he can on those that have been gentrified; he will rack up big margins both in heavily white core counties such as those around Minneapolis and Portland, Ore., as well as overwhelmingly minority Baltimore, Philadelphia and The Bronx.

Race and income levels do not explain the emerging urban monoculture, because the cause lies elsewhere: in the evolution of cities over the past four decades. The shift began in the late 1960s, when urban regions, from financial centers such as New York and Chicago to old industrial cities such as Detroit and Cleveland, began to suffer a massive exodus of predominantly white, middle-class residents.

This left behind an increasingly impoverished, highly minority population with very little proclivity to support conservative or even moderate Republicans.

More recently, some cities – such as New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco – have attracted a population of well-educated, white professionals. Many new urbanites tend to be students or professionals enjoying city life during their first, highly experimental years of adulthood. At this point, they are most open to liberal ideas and causes; they have yet to worry much about taxes and crime, issues that drive people to the center.

Yet if this urban base – roughly 30% of the population – offers Obama a huge edge in the election, he must not identify too much as an urban candidate. There are vocal constituencies who are openly hostile to people in suburbs and small cities. This ideology first emerged in 2004 in John Sperling’s “Retro vs. Metro” thesis, which envisioned the eventual triumph of a sophisticated urban population over backward-seeming rural, small town and suburban constituencies.

An even clearer example of this urbanist ideology came in the wake of Kerry’s 2004 defeat. Editors of The Stranger, a Seattle alternative weekly, pointed out in an article that “if the cities elected our president, if urban voters determined the outcome, John F. Kerry would have won by a landslide.”

“From here on out, we’re glad red-state rubes live in areas where guns are more powerful and more plentiful, cars are larger and faster, and people are fatter and slower and dumber,” The Stranger proclaimed. Given the editors’ uninhibited sense of superiority, they felt confident that in the emerging Darwinian struggle, the suburban and exurban Neanderthals would be forced to give way to the superiority of the urban Cro-Magnons.

Whatever Obama may believe personally, he would be well-advised to distance himself from such sentiments. For one thing, identifying with people who celebrate the demise of other geographies may offend the majority of Americans who prefer to live in “retro” environments. Suburb- and countryside-bashing may turn on readers of The New York Times, but it hardly constitutes good politics.

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Jose Ortega y Gasset on Hunting

“. . . we need to conserve that bitter impulse that we have inherited from primitive man. It alone permits us the greatest luxury of all, the ability to enjoy a vacation from the human condition through an authentic, ‘immersion in Nature’ . . . and this, in turn, can be achieved only by placing himself in relation to another animal. But there is no animal, pure animal, other than a wild one, and the relationship with him is the hunt.” – Jose Ortega y Gasset.

Walking the Road that Buckley Built

Walking the Road that Buckley Built

By Michael Johns

It can be said that modern conservatism knows only two times. There was the time before him and there was the time after him, and those two times could not be more contrasting. In this stark contrast lies his larger-than-life legacy, and let there be no mistake: It is a legacy that will endure the ages.

As word of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s passing reached his many students, admirers and colleagues late last week, it seemed each had an account (some grand, some small) of how this intellectual giant memorably impacted and touched their lives, their vision, and their work. In the aggregate, they tell the story of a man whose immense collective qualities–genius, boldness, industriousness, persuasiveness, and (perhaps least appreciated) kindness and generosity–were without equal in modern American public life. Even in death, Buckley is bringing conservatives together more effectually than many conservative leaders are doing in life. It should surprise no one. To have had the good fortune to have brushed upon Buckley during this life was to leave impressed, inspired, and reinvigorated in the purpose-driven life that he lived admirably and which he cultivated in a whole generation of conservatives who, now in his absence, carry forward his torch.

It may be said too often of the recently deceased, but it must be said emphatically of Buckley: We will not likely see his type again.

So diverse and ultimately immense were Buckley’s accomplishments that it becomes dangerously easy to shortchange the vastness of his ultimate legacy. During the 82 years that God granted him to us, he was described as the most prolific conservative writer of modern times. No doubt. From the early 1950s until a few weeks ago, Buckley’s writings eloquently challenged liberalism’s false promises at every step and defined the intellectual and political alternative that was and still is contemporary conservatism. His books (35 non-fiction, 12 in the Blackford Oakes novel series, and another eight of fiction), his National Review columns and commentary (beginning with the magazine’s 1955 founding and continuing through early this year), and his syndicated column (published since 1962 in over 300 U.S. and global newspapers) represent nothing short of a library of modern conservative thought. In these writings lies not just Buckley’s persuasive case for conservative policies and principles but one of the best depictions of conservatism’s evolution from a nascent ideology to the most consequential intellectual and political force of modern times. What a literary treasure he has left us.

But Buckley’s impact is not constrained to his role as the most prolific conservative author and writer of our times. His role in the ultimate ascent of conservatism as a national and even global political force is less broadly recognized but equally undeniable and important. The conservative revolution may have materialized nationally with Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election, but that electoral victory was the result of over two decades of work in the trenches, pre-dating even Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful 1964 challenge against Lyndon Johnson. What existed before Buckley was an ineffectual group (one cannot even really call it a political movement) of self-described conservatives whose relevance was largely negligible. Before Buckley, modern conservatism had no refined policy agenda (and if one existed at all, it would likely have been equated with Robert Taft’s dangerous isolationism at a moment when the global threat of communism was amassing). Conservatism then also had zero skill in communicating to, and connecting with, the hearts and minds of the American people. Add those two things up, and it’s not surprising that conservatives, pre-Buckley, also failed in the electoral process.

It was Buckley who, in 1960, quickly looked at this “movement,” and changed it forever. One of his first steps, the founding of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), formed the foundation that ultimately propelled Goldwater’s candidacy. On September 11, 1960, conservatives gathered in Buckley’s hometown of Sharon, Connecticut, where conservative author M. Stanton Evans, one of the first and greatest Buckley proteges, with input from Annette Kirk (wife of the late Russell Kirk), drafted the “Sharon Statement.” It is not an overstatement that it may well be one of the most important documents on the American purpose and conservative vision since the Declaration of Independence itself.

“In this time of moral and political crises,” the Sharon Document began, “it is the responsibility of the youth of America to affirm certain eternal truths.” It immediately and appropriately referenced the fact that it was only God’s gift of free will that permits man’s “rights to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force.” It followed with an unhesitating and accurate reference to the fact that political freedom, without economic freedom, cannot long endure. It defined the Constitutionally protected freedoms and national security interests that were incumbent on the American government to protect (including, if necessary, by military force). Consistent with this, it boldly called for victory over, not coexistence with, global communism, stating “that the forces of international Communism are, at present, the greatest single threat to these liberties” and “that the United States should stress victory over, rather than coexistence with, this menace.” Invigorated at Sharon, conservatives left that conference with a clear cut vision of who and what they were and who and what they opposed. Modern conservatism was born.

As the years progressed, it was this Sharon-inspired movement that challenged the emerging opposition to the U.S. effort to help defend South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, urging intervention against North Vietnam’s aggression not just in the defense of South Vietnam but also in resisting North Vietnam’s destabilization efforts in neighboring Cambodia and Laos. While accepting many of the objectives of Johnson’s “Great Society,” the movement simultaneously and staunchly denounced the extraordinary expansion of federal government that Johnson used to achieve them. In 1964, it was this movement that urged and then supported Goldwater’s national candidacy. While unsuccessful electorally, it did succeed in giving birth to Reagan’s monumental speech, “A Time for Choosing,” which was hugely and transparently influenced by the Sharon Statement’s position on the importance of defending economic liberty. In this nationally-televised endorsement of Goldwater, Reagan said: “The founding fathers knew a government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing.”

Reagan’s persuasive case for Goldwater was made too late to salvage the Arizona Senator’s Presidential candidacy, but it was this speech that gave birth to Reagan as a national political force. It was again Buckley and his allies that, following “A Time for Choosing,” led conservatism forward, championing Reagan as Goldwater’s conservative heir, first in his daring but unsuccessful 1976 challenge of Gerald Ford and then in his ultimately revolutionary 1980 victory. At each step, Buckley led these political advancements while carefully ensuring conservatism was kept on course and did not sacrifice its enduring principles in the name of political expediency. Buckley’s was always a long-term plan and a long-term vision, which makes it unsurprising that his will be a long-term legacy.

Still, to describe Buckley as the most prolific and politically consequential conservative of our time does not capture the totality of his contributions to American democracy. The reason is this: Even if one rejects every conservative idea that Buckley embraced and carefully and eloquently articulated in his six decades of public life–the importance of connectivity between God and democratic peoples, the correlation between free markets and economic growth, and the case for resisting and defeating (not merely containing) totalitarian threats–it was Buckley who recreated intellectual and political choice in America. As the conservative columnist Mona Charen observed in The Washington Post last week, before Buckley, the liberal intellectual Lionel Trilling was able to state without challenge that conservatism did not really have any ideas. It had, Trilling wrote in The Liberal Imagination, merely “irritable mental gestures.” When he died in 1975, Trilling probably still viewed conservatism in a similarly inconsequential light, but that’s only because he never lived to see the fruition of the revolution that Buckley brought us. With steady progress, those gestures that Trilling observed in 1949 turned to concepts, those concepts turned to ideas, those ideas turned to policies, and those policies, embraced fearlessly by a new generation of conservatives impacted at every turn by Buckley, ultimately transformed a political and ideological movement, then a nation, and finally the world.

But it’s equally important to remember that Buckley gave us conservatism as a choice, not as a guaranteed destination. That work falls to this and subsequent generations, and it is a job that, truth be told, will never be complete. Remembering one of his earliest Buckley-inspired influences, the conservative leader Bill Kristol recalled in The New York Times a few days ago that he proudly wore a lapel pin at his New York City high school in 1970. “Don’t let THEM immanentize the Eschaton,” it said, summarizing the philosophy of the early National Review contributor Eric Voegelin. “THEM,” of course, referred to those who sought (and still seek) to create and enforce, outside of God and through government, an ideologically-inspired utopian social order here on Earth.

Tragically, while we fought THEM (Marx, Lenin and his successors, and Hitler) necessarily and successfully in World War II and then again (under Buckley’s urging and inspiration) in the Cold War, it may be easy to conclude that it is a victory fully won. I believe Buckley would urge restraint in such a conviction, especially when, in our own nation, Americans still pack indoor stadiums, some apparently fainting in awe, at the false promises of liberalism’s allure, now conveyed in a junior Senator’s promises to confiscate the income of one group of Americans and send it through the federal Treasury to others, while simultaneously leading America’s retreat in the global war on terror and “daring” to engage without condition those remaining totalitarians in Pyongyang, Tehran, Havana and elsewhere who will use America’s diplomatic engagement with them to validate their suppression of human liberties at home and to send a global signal that the best way to earn America’s attention is to hate it. Sadly, even after Buckley, there exist some Americans who actually view such a course of false promises as a “brave” one. Message: The Eschaton is still being immanetized.

All of these grand battles, some under way right now and some yet to be fought, will now be waged by a seasoned generation of American conservative warriors educated and trained on Buckley’s watch and in his tradition. This conservative generation is a centerpiece of Buckley’s ultimate enduring legacy. It is a legacy, however, that is not restricted to what he accomplished in this world, but also in how he handled himself while doing it. As Charen accurately observed last week: “It was always Bill who rushed to get a chair for the person left standing. It was always Bill who reached to fill your glass. It was always Bill who volunteered to give you a lift wherever you were going, insisting it was on his way.”

As he bravely and victoriously faced down the most dangerous ideological threats and temptations of his time, William F. Buckley, Jr., it should be remembered, always did it with a smile. In that smile was an eternal optimism that he held in the grand potential of the unleashed human spirit. As we honor his giant and enduring legacy, it is an optimism that must carry us forward. We now walk this road in Buckley’s physical absence. But he has paved it well with the promises of the purpose-driven life amidst freedom and liberty, and a broadly-accepted and educated wisdom that permits us–and calls us–to defend both.