Freedom’s forgotten man

Freedom’s forgotten man

By Bill Steigerwald
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Saturday, December 4, 2004

Albert Jay Nock, a brilliant writer and editor who proudly called himself a “philosophical anarchist” and died in 1945, is revered today as one of America’s giants of individualism.

Links to Nock’s writings — including his 1935 masterwork, “Our Enemy the State” — can be easily found at Internet sites such as lewrockwell.com. But to learn why Nock is still important, I called columnist Sheldon Richman, author of books such as “Separating School & State.”

Richman edits The Freeman magazine, which is published by the Foundation for Economic Education (fee.org), an organization near New York City that exists solely to promote the values Nock held so dear — individual freedom, private property, limited government and free trade. He was at his home in Conway, Ark.

Q: Why should anyone who cares about freedom know about Albert J. Nock?

A: The reason they should know about Albert J. Nock is that he gets to some of the most basic principles that concern the issues of power versus liberty. He was heavily influenced by the German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, who wrote a book called “The State.” What Nock picked up from that is that there are two ways to organize society, what he called “the political means” and “the economic means.”

The economic means is what we know of as production and trade. The political means is the confiscation or expropriation of economic goods by some superior power. Nock goes back over history and looks at history as a struggle between liberty and power, between the economic means the political means, and that makes a lot of issues very, very clear when you look at things that way.

Q: What’s an example that demonstrates this difference?

A: All of the issues surrounding free trade versus protectionism are examples of this. But open the paper and just about any public issue being discussed can be analyzed this way. What people seem to forget, and this is why Nock is so important, is that anything the government does has to involve the threat of violence in order to take something from somebody who has produced that thing — money, of course, usually — and give it to someone who hasn’t produced it. What Nock does is remind us that the essence of government is the threat of violence. Whether you think government’s necessary and good is a different issue. First of all, let’s get straight about what government is. That’s the first thing Nock does for us.

Q: Can you sum up Nock’s political beliefs — and are they the same as yours?

A: Number one, they’re very much the same as mine. To sum up his belief, he would say that social power — by which he means voluntary cooperation, which is the marketplace — is good, and political power — or what he calls “coercive cooperation,” which really isn’t cooperation when you think about it — is bad. To the extent that society is organized along the lines of social power and voluntary cooperation, you have a good society, and to the extent it’s organized along the opposite principles, you have a bad society.

Q: Do you define this as “libertarianism” or 19th-century “classic liberalism” or what?

A: Classical liberalism and libertarianism are very similar. The way I think of it is that libertarianism is a later evolutionary state of classical liberalism. It’s a much more rigorous philosophy. Classical liberalism is less rigorous, but it certainly is in the same spirit of individualism: that the individual’s life is important, and he ought to be able to run it, and that society more or less runs itself as people run their own lives. Also, that any governance, whether we call it formal government or some other name, ought to have as its only goal, its only function, the keeping of the civil peace, so that free individuals can otherwise go about their business.

Q: Frederick Foer of the New Republic wrote last week that Nock was “a classic conservative who views the values of the past as superior to the present.” Did Foer accurately describe Nock?

A: Some of what he had to say was right about Nock. You need to separate things here. Nock was very concerned about the state of the culture and people’s moral values, and he thought that the New Deal and the growing state had done a lot to erode an older ethic of individualism and self-reliance. I think he was right about that.

He did not call himself a conservative. I think he still thought of himself as a liberal, though he knew that word had been co-opted during the Progressive Era. He called himself an “old liberal.”

Q: William F. Buckley Jr. was heavily influenced by Nock and even knew him. But has Nock been forgotten or repudiated by today’s conservatives, as Foer contends?

A: I think the new generation of conservatives probably don’t even know about him. He would be out of step with the conservative movement as Buckley founded it and as it’s developed. It’s kind of ironic, because in his younger days Buckley regarded himself as an anarchist, which Nock called himself in some places.

Nock wrote an essay called “On Doing the Right Thing,” where he’s very clear that the only way people will gain a moral education is by being free. That is not a very typical American conservative view these days, where they want the state to be the teacher of moral values. Nock would repudiate that. He, I think, would be sick about what’s going on in the name of conservatism.

Q: Is Nock’s greatest legacy “Our Enemy the State”?

A: He wrote some other good things. “Memoirs of a Superfluous Man” is a wonderfully written book and has some beautiful observations about freedom and life. It’s very enjoyable reading. But I think Nock’s monument to political philosophy and history is “Our Enemy the State.”

Q: What would Nock think about the role of government and the mass culture today?

A: I think he would be appalled by the war mongering that’s going on. He would have been appalled by the decades of U.S. meddling in foreign countries, which in my view, has caused us to suffer the problems we have been suffering. He’d be appalled at the size of the state, and that (President) Bush can use the rhetoric of small government while we have seen spending growth unprecedented since the time of Lyndon Johnson. Nock was a pessimist in 1935 and up until the time of his death, and I think he’d really be in the depths of his pessimism today.

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/steigerwald/s_279542.html