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

Albert Jay Nock news

Albert Jay Nock news

http://news.surfwax.com/general-news/files/Albert_Jay_Nock.html

Snoring as a Fine Art

Here is that passage that explains why Albert Jay Nock called his book Snoring as a Fine Art:

Snoring should be regarded as a fine art and respected accordingly. If this be admitted, I might suggest further that our civilization does not so regard it, as it should, and gives the practice no encouragement, but rather the contrary.

Consequently one might with reason think that there is too little snoring done—snoring with a purpose to guide it, snoring deliberately directed towards a salutary end which is otherwise unattainable—and that our society would doubtless be better off if the value of the practice were more fully recognized. In our public affairs, for instance, I have of late been much struck by the number of persons who professedly had something. The starry-eyed energumens of the New Deal were perhaps the most conspicuous examples; each and all, they were quite sure they had something. They had a clear premonition of the More Abundant Life into which we were all immediately to enter by the way of a Planned Economy. It now seems, however, that the New Deal is rapidly sinking in the same Slough of Despond which closed over poor Mr. Hoover’s head, and that the More Abundant Life is, if anything, a little more remote than ever before.

I do not disparage their premonition or question it; I simply suggest that the More Abundant Life might now be appreciably nearer if they had put enough confidence in their premonition to do a great deal less thinking, planning, legislating, organizing, and a great deal—oh yes, a very great deal—more snoring.

These essays were first put in book form in 1958.

Others esays include: “Life, Liberty, and …,” “Utopia in Pennsylvania,” “Advertising and Liberal Literature,” “Henry George,” “What the American Votes For,” “The Purpose of Biography,” “The King’s Jester: Modern Style,” “Alas, Poor Yorick,” “If Only,” “Epstean’s Law,” “Sunday in Brussels.”

Albert Jay Nock is one of the 20th century’s great writers and essayists, a thinker of immense power who was also a tremendous advocate of liberty. These essays are among his finest work.

http://www.mises.org/store/Product.aspx?ProductId=460

Buckley, Nock, and The Nation

From Victor Navasky’s NYT review of two books by or about William F. Buckley (thanks to Scott Lahti for an early link to the piece):

It is probably no accident, as the old-left journals used to say, that both Buckley and Carey McWilliams, The Nation’s longtime editor, were fans of Albert Jay Nock, who after briefly working at The Nation in the 1920s went on to found his own libertarian magazine called The Freeman (the rights to which Buckley sought unsuccessfully to buy when he began National Review). Nock started out as a left-wing anarchist and bohemian, but he metamorphosed into an anti-egalitarian who believed that journals of opinion were aimed at what he called the Remnant, the enlightened few who would influence the many.

“Bohemian” is a better description of Nock’s one-time American Magazine colleague John Reed; Nock was more of an anti-institutionalist than a party animal, and he remained one to the end (just look at the passages on marriage and organized religion in Memoirs of a Superfluous Man). “Left-wing anarchist” is misleading as well: Nock was an individualist anarchist heavily influenced by Henry George. He was far from being an anarcho-syndicalist, which is what “left-wing anarchist” might be taken to mean. Navasky probably doesn’t mean to suggest that, but the contrast he wants to draw between the the early and the late Nock is not accurate. The sharp contrast is between the Tolstoyan sensibility of the pre-World War I Nock and the partly Cram-inspired pessimistic Nock of later years.

Buckley’s relationship to Nock is pretty well known — WFB Sr. was a friend of AJN, and WFB Jr. often paid homage to Nock — but I had not known about Carey McWilliam’s admiration for him.

Postscript: For what it’s worth — we Nock aficionados can be a punctilious lot — Navasky’s dates are wrong, too. Nock worked for The Nation during World War I, not the 1920s, and even got the magazined censored when he wrote critically about Samuel Gompers. Bad for the labor-business-government war effort, don’t ya know. He launched The Freeman, with Francis Neilson as co-editor (in name, at least), in 1920.

http://toryanarchist.wordpress.com/2008/05/25/nockians-left-and-right/

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

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

The Conservative Spirit

THE NOCKIAN SPIRIT LIVES:

“The Conservative Spirit” (William F. Buckley, Jr., Keynote Address, The Philadelphia Society, 40th! Anniversary Gala, Chicago, Illinois April 30, 2004)

I noticed some months ago the remark of a cosmopolitan Englishman who had been asked about persistent British unemployment, which had sat there for many years at about 10 per cent. He said that all that those figures revealed was that some of his fellow citizens preferred not to work. “I think,” he said, “that unemployment is something we can afford.”Well of course it is, and we in America can “afford” subsidies of various kinds, which is different from saying that, in detached thought, we approve exactions from the public purse extrinsic to safety and justice.

Adam Smith did teach us that we correctly impose upon the state the burden of paying for public monuments.

The image sneaks its way into the imagination: Are the unemployed, in an expanded focus, entitled to pass as a monument to what an affluent society can sustain? As a kind of testimonial to its latitudinarian impulses?

The easiest answer to that question, and almost certainly the correct one, is No. Such extensions of what Adam Smith acknowledged as social embellishments are the business not of the state, but of the YMCA. Still, a fugitive thought to take to bed tonight—or another night, tonight’s thought being reserved for gratification at having spent time in one another’s company.

So we must sleep well, even though there are always grounds for discouragement. But those who, staring the data hard in the face, are driven to inconsolability, do well to guard against that temptation.

Richard Posner observed in a column in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that conservatives have a duty to be cheerful, because we have no right to be disappointed by failures, knowing as we do about the limitations of the state, and the weaknesses of human beings. Mr. Posner is surely correct, and surely that counsel of his shone always through the face and the attitude toward life of Don Lipsett.

We have many forebears; Albert Jay Nock is but one, and his investment in pessimism is not for us. In later years I have come to admire Mr. Nock more for how he said what he had to say, than for what he had to say.

We are devoted here to the proposition that what we do and say and write does matter, does have effect. Mr. Nock wrote in the closing pages of his book Our Enemy the State, “I would be the first to acknowledge that no results of the kind which we agree to call practical could accrue to the credit of a book of this order, were it a hundred times as cogent as this one—no results, that is, that would in the least retard the State’s progress in self-aggrandizement, and thus modify the consequences of the State’s course.”

But manifestly there has been a slowing down of statist impositions, even if not on the scale the Philadelphia Society seeks. Mr. Nock was the total platonist in respect of what can be achieved on earth. As for the efforts all of us here undertake, we “might indeed,” in his language, “be thought bound to do [such things] as a matter of abstract duty.” He says of the remnant that they—we—do indeed “have an intellectual curiosity, sometimes touched with emotion, concerning the august order of nature”—never mind that what we do is of no purpose.

But of course it does have purpose.

Mr. Buckley is a bit unfair to Nock, who, after all, succeeded admirably in Isaiah’s job. Hard to fault him too much for being too humble to realize that the American people harbored a sufficient remnant to reverse the slide of the 30′s. No other Western nation did.

&

The Conservative Spirit

WFB’s keynote address to the Philadelphia Society’s gala 40th-anniversary meeting in Chicago, April 30

Mr. President, Mr. Secretary: The trouble with this assignment is that there is so much to do, at least so much that I want to do. And since the auspices tonight are libertarian, that which I want to do, I shall of course proceed to do.

It will strike cynical members of this assembly that I speak kindly of Lee Edwards immediately following his speaking well of me. But he should not be penalized by my ignoring him, simply because he has not ignored me.

I keep wondering when Lee Edwards will receive the critical attention he has earned with his continuing work as historian of our movement. His most recent book, the history of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, is wise, penetrating, and readable. His brief history of the Philadelphia Society, published in this weekend’s program, is a remarkable feat of research and organization. Among other of his revelations, I am pleased to be reminded that I put up one hundred dollars to launch the Philadelphia Society’s bank account, forever rupturing my relations with the bank, which used to be friendly to me, but now spent its time coping with the Society’s overdrafts.

Indeed, my concern over the Society’s financial distresses is more regular than my irregular participation in our proceedings. That concern has been at one level steadfast, at another, reckless. I remember trying anxiously to reach Senator Goldwater on the phone years ago because I needed his vote before the end of a trustees’ meeting at noon the next day, in order to effect a grant for the Philadelphia Society.

I couldn’t locate him. He was off somewhere flying his airplane. In desperation, I sent a telegram to all seven of our fellow trustees, registering approval of the proposed grant to the Philadelphia Society. I signed it, “Best regards, Barry M. Goldwater.”

I was enormously relieved, when his airplane finally landed and I was able to tell him what I…

Notes & asides.

Publication: National Review

Publication Date: 31-MAY-04

Albert Jay Nock, Forgotten Man of the Old Right

Albert Jay Nock, Forgotten Man of the Old Right

by Jeffrey A. Tucker

For an earlier generation of American dissidents from the prevailing ideology of left-liberalism, a rite of passage was reading Albert Jay Nock‘s Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, which appeared in 1943. William F. Buckley was hardly alone in seeing it as a seminal text crucial to his personal formation.

Here it is in one package, an illustration of the level of learning that had been lost with mass education, a picture of the way a true political dissident from our collectivist period thinks about the modern world, and a comprehensive argument for the very meaning of freedom and civility – all from a man who helped shape the Right’s intellectual response to the triumph of FDR’s welfare-warfare State.

It was destined to be a classic, read by many generations to come. But then the official doctrine changed. Instead of seeing war as part of the problem, as a species of socialism, National Review led the American Right down a different path. Nock’s book was quickly buried with the rise of the Cold War State, which required that conservatives reject anything like radical individualism – even of Nock’s aristocratic sort – and instead embrace the Wilson-FDR values of nationalism and militarism.

Instead of Nock’s Memoirs, young conservatives were encouraged to read personal accounts of communists who converted to backing the Cold War (e.g. Whittaker Chambers), as if warming up to the glories of nukes represents some sort of courageous intellectual step. To the extent that Nock (1870–1947) is known at all today, it is by libertarians, and for his classic essay Our Enemy, The State (1935), and his wonderful little biography, Mr. Jefferson (1926). Both are great works. He was also the founder of The Freeman in its first incarnation (1920–1924), which held to the highest literary standards and provoked unending controversy with its sheer radicalism.

However, it is with the Memoirs, this wonderful little treatise – part autobiography, part ideological instructional – that we are given the full Nockian worldview, not just his politics but his culture, his life, and his understanding of man and his place in the universe. The book makes a very bracing read today, if only because it proves how little today’s “conservative movement” has to do with its mid-century ancestor in the Old Right. It is also instructive for libertarians to discover that there is more to anarchism than childish rantings against the police power.

The phrase Man of Letters is thrown around casually these days, but A.J. Nock was the real thing. Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, he was homeschooled from the earliest age in Greek and Latin, unbelievably well read in every field, a natural aristocrat in the best sense of that term. He combined an old-world cultural sense (he despised popular culture) and a political anarchism which saw the State as the enemy of everything that is civilized, beautiful, and true. And he applied this principle consistently in opposition to welfare, government-managed economies, consolidation, and, above all else, war.

In the introduction to my edition, Hugh MacLennan compares the Memoirs to The Education of Henry Adams, and expresses the hope that it will “one day be recognized as the minor classic it really is.” Well, I can predict that this time is not coming soon. Given its contents, consistency, relentless truth telling, and, above all, its sheer persuasive power, it is a wonder that the book is in print and that we are even allowed to read it.

To follow Nock, what traits must a man of the Right have? He must be both fiercely independent and believe in the power of social authority; he must love tradition but hate the State and everything it does; he must believe in radical freedom while never doubting the immutability of human nature and natural laws; he must be anti-materialist in his own life while defending economic freedom without compromise; he must be an elitist and anti-democrat yet despise elites who hold illicit power; and he must be realistic about the dim prospects for change while still retaining a strong sense of hope and enthusiasm for life.

I’m not sure I can think of anyone but Murray Rothbard who consistently upheld the Nockian position after Nock’s death, and it is his Memoirs that provides a full immersion in his genius. Consider Nock’s main literary device: to take a commonplace subject, make a casual and slightly quirky observation about it, one that wins your affections, and then surprise and shock by driving the point to score a deadly blow against some great evil that is widely taken for granted:

“Another neighbor, a patriarchal old Englishman with a white beard, kept a great stand of bees. I remember his incessant drumming on a tin pan to marshal them when they were swarming, and myself as idly wondering who first discovered that this was the thing to do, and why the bees should fall in with it. It struck me that if the bees were as intelligent as bees are cracked up to be, instead of mobilizing themselves for old Reynolds’ benefit, they would sting him soundly and then fly off about their business. I always think of this when I see a file of soldiers, wondering why the sound of a drum does not incite them to shoot their officers, throw away their rifles, go home, and go to work.”

In the course of his 325-page narrative, he employs this casual device again and again, until you begin to get the message that there is something profoundly wrong with the world, and the biggest thing of all is the State. In Nock’s view, it is the State that crowds out all that is decent, lovely, civilized. He demonstrates this not through deduction but through calm and entertaining tales of how rich and varied and productive life can be when the State does not interfere.

In a society without the State, for example, the “court of tastes and manners” would be the thing that guides the operation of society, and this “court” would have a much larger role in society than law, legislation, or religion. If such a court were not in operation, because people are too uncivilized or too ill-educated to maintain it, there was nothing the State could do to uplift people. No matter how low a civilization is, it can only be made to go lower through State activity.

Though an old-school Yankee of the purest-bred sort, he completely rejected what came to be the defining trait of his class: the impulse to try to improve others through badgering and coercion:

“One of the most offensive things about the society in which I later found myself was its monstrous itch for changing people. It seemed to me a society made up of congenital missionaries, natural-born evangelists and propagandists, bent on re-shaping, re-forming and standardizing people according to a pattern of their own devising – and what a pattern it was, good heavens! When one came to examine it. It seems to me, in short, a society fundamentally and profoundly ill-bred. A very small experience of it was enough to convince me that Cain’s heresy was not altogether without reason or without merit; and that conviction quickly ripened into a great horror of every attempt to change anybody; or I should rather say, every wish to change anybody, for that is the important thing. The attempt is relatively immaterial, perhaps, for it is usually its own undoing, but the moment one wishes to change anybody, one becomes like the socialists, vegetarians, prohibitionists; and this, as Rabelais, says, ‘is a terrible thing to think upon.’”

Given such views, it is hardly surprising that he had nothing but contempt for politics, which then and now seeks not to only manage society but manage thought as well:

“My first impression of politics was unfavorable; and my disfavor was heightened by subsequently noticing that the people around me always spoke of politics and politicians in a tone of contempt. This was understandable. If all I had casually seen…was of the essence of politics, if it was part and parcel of carrying on the country’s government, then obviously a decent person could find no place in politics, not even the place of a ordinary voter, for the forces of ignorance, brutality and indecency would outnumber him ten to one.”

But, with Nock’s infallible flair for radicalism, his logic takes him further down the anarchist road:

“Nevertheless there was an anomaly here. We were supposed to respect our government and its laws, yet by all accounts those who were charged with the conduct of government the making of its laws were most dreadful swine; indeed, the very conditions of their tenure precluded their being anything else.”

Nock is capable of surprising readers who think they might be able to anticipate the biases of a traditionalist-anarchist. Sometimes old-style, rightist aristocrats who wax eloquent on the virtues of tradition fall into strange left-wing habits of extolling the environment as something glorious and virtuous on its own, and somehow deserving of being left alone. Nock had no interest in this strange deviation. Consider his experience with the woods and nature:

“In those years [living in rural areas] I undoubtedly built up and fortified the singular immunity to infirmity and disease which has lasted all my life; but in those years also my congenital indifference to nature in the wild, natural scenery, rocks, rills, woods and templed hills, hardened into permanent distaste. Like the Goncourts, I can see nature only as an enemy; a highly respected enemy, but an enemy. ‘I am a lover of knowledge,’ Socrates said, ‘and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country.’”

Nock was thus not an American Tory by any stretch, though his cultural outlook was as high-brow as any landed aristocrat’s. What’s more, unlike the socialist anarchists and most conservatives of today, Nock believed in and understood the crucial importance, even centrality, of economic liberty:

“If a regime of complete economic freedom be established, social and political freedom will follow automatically; and until it is established neither social nor political freedom can exist. Here one comes in sight of the reason why the State will never tolerate the establishment of economic freedom. In a spirit of sheer conscious fraud, the State will at any time offer its people ‘four freedoms,’ or six, or any number; but it will never let them have economic freedom. If it did, it would be signing its own death-warrant, for as Lenin pointed out, ‘it is nonsense to make any pretence of reconciling the State and liberty.’ Our economic system being what it is, and the State being what it is, all the mass verbiage about ‘the free peoples’ and ‘the free democracies’ is merely so much obscene buffoonery.”

In fact, he understood even technical points of economics that are completely lost on most conservatives today. Here is Nock on the 1920s bubble economy:

“Many no doubt remember the ‘new economics’ hatched in the consulship of Mr. Coolidge, whereby it was demonstrated beyond question that credit could be pyramided on credit indefinitely, and all hands could become rich with no one doing any work. Then when this seductive theory blew up with a loud report in 1929, we began to hear of the economics of scarcity, the economics of plenty, and then appeared the devil-and-all of ‘plans,’ notions about pump-priming, and disquisitions on the practicability of a nation’s spending itself rich…. Ever since 1918 people everywhere have been thinking in terms of money, not in terms of commodities; and this in spite of the most spectacular evidence that such thinking is sheer insanity. The only time I was ever a millionaire was when I spent a few weeks in Germany in 1923. I was the proud possessor of more money than one could shake a stick at, but I could buy hardly anything with it.”

And on fiscal policy:

“Another strange notion pervading whole peoples is that the State has money of its own; and nowhere is this absurdity more firmly fixed than in America. The State has no money. It produces nothing. It existence is purely parasitic, maintained by taxation; that is to say, by forced levies on the production of others. ‘Government money,’ of which one hears so much nowadays, does not exist; there is no such thing. One is especially amused at seeing how largely a naïve ignorance of this fact underlies the pernicious measures of ‘social security’ which have been foisted on the American people. In various schemes of pensioning, of insurance against sickness, accident, unemployment and what-not, one notices that the government is supposed to pay so-much into the fund, the employer so-much, and the workman so-much…. But the government pays nothing, for it has nothing to pay with. What such schemes actually come to is that the workman pays his own share outright; he pays the employer’s share in the enhanced price of commodities; and he pays the government’s share in taxation. He pays the whole bill; and when one counts in the unconscionably swollen costs of bureaucratic brokerage and paperasserie, one sees that what the workman-beneficiary gets out the arrangement is about the most expensive form of insurance that could be devised consistently with keeping its promoters out of gaol.”

A special contribution of Nock’s book is his comprehensive critique of the pre-New Deal reform movements that culminated in the Progressive Era. Though he had once identified himself as a true liberal in the Jeffersonian sense, he was a close observer of the early stages of liberalism’s corruption, when it came to mean not liberty but something else entirely. He saw the essential error that the liberal movement was making:

“Liberals generally – there may be have exceptions, but I do not know who they were – joined in the agitation for an income-tax, in utter disregard of the fact that it meant writing the principle of absolutism into the Constitution. Nor did they give a moment’s thought to the appalling social effects of an income-tax; I never once heard this aspect of the matter discussed. Liberals were also active in promoting the ‘democratic’ movement for the popular election of senators. It certainly took no great perspicacity to see that these two measures would straightway ease our political systems into collectivism as soon as some Eubulus, some mass-man overgifted with sagacity, should maneuver himself into popular leadership; and in the nature of things, this would not be long.”

In time, of course, the liberal reform movement began to adopt a mild version of the class-war rhetoric of the socialist left, and the longer this went on, the more the political process came to be a struggle not between liberty and power but between two versions of State domination:

“What I was looking at was simply a tussle between two groups of mass-men, one large and poor, the other small and rich, and as judged by the standards of civilized society, neither of them any more meritorious or promising than the other. The object of the tussle was the material gains accruing from control of the State’s machinery. It is easier to seize wealth than to produce it; and as long as the State makes the seizure of wealth a matter of legalized privilege, so long will the squabble for that privilege go on.”

From Nock’s point of view, the Great Depression and the two world wars saddled America with a new faith in the State, and along with it came a shift in people’s loyalties, from themselves, their families, and communities to the Grand National Project, whatever it may be. We see the same thing today on the right and left, when questioning any aspect of the war on terrorism gets you branded as a heretic to the national religion. Nock would have nothing to do with it:

“I am profoundly thankful that during my formative years I never had contact with any institution under State control; not in school, not in college, nor yet in my three years of irregular graduate study. No attempt was ever made by anyone to indoctrinate me with State-inspired views – or any views, for that matter – of patriotism or nationalism. I was never dragooned into flag-worship or hero-worship, never was caught in any spate of verbiage about duty to one’s country, never debauched by any of the routine devices hatched by scoundrels for inducing a synthetic devotion to one’s native land and loyalty to its jobholders. Therefore when later the various aspects of contemporary patriotism and nationalism appeared before me, my mind was wholly unprepossessed, and my view of them was unaffected by any emotional distortion.”

What, then, is patriotism, if not faith in one’s government? Can patriotism be considered a virtue at all to the civilized man, and, if so, in what does it consist. Consider this passage of immense power:

“What is patriotism? Is it loyalty to a spot on a map, marked off from others spots by blue or yellow lines, the spot where one was born? But birth is a pure accident; surely one is in no way responsible for having been born on this spot or on that. Flaubert had poured a stream of corrosive irony on this idea of patriotism. Is it loyalty to a set of political jobholders, a king and his court, a president and his bureaucracy, a parliament, a congress, a Duce or Fuhrer, a camorra of commissars? I should say it depends entirely on what the jobholders are like and what they do. Certainly I had never seen any who commanded my loyalty; I should feel utterly degraded if ever once I thought they could. Does patriotism mean loyalty to a political system and its institutions, constitutional, autocratic, republican, or what-not? But if history has made anything unmistakably clear, it is that from the standpoint of the individual and his welfare, these are no more than names. The reality which in the end they are found to cover is the same for all alike. If a tree be known by its fruits, which I believe is regarded as good sound doctrine, then the peculiar merit of a system, if it has any, ought to be reflected in the qualities and conditions of the people who live under it; and looking over the peoples and systems of the world, I found no reason in the nature of things why a person should be loyal to one system rather than another. One could see at a glance that there is no saving grace in any system. Whatever merit or demerit may attach to any of them lies in the way it is administered.

“So when people speak of loyalty to one’s country, one must ask them what they mean by that. What is one’s country? Mr. Jefferson said contemptuously that ‘merchants have no country; the mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.’ But one may ask, why should I? This motive of patriotism seems to me perfectly sound, and if it should be sound for merchants, why not for others who are not merchants? If it holds good in respect of material gains, why not of spiritual gains, cultural gains, intellectual and aesthetic gains? As a general principle, I should put it that a man’s country is where the things he loves are most respected. Circumstances may have prevented his ever setting foot there, but it remains his country.”

In the early years of the American republic, patriotism and loyalty were primarily directed toward one’s town or county, because it was very likely the place that the things one loves are most respected. Something like national patriotism was unknown. It came to be imposed under consolidation. Under today’s conservative view of patriotism, that our loves must be dictated by the State, there would be no argument against the idea that we ought to be patriotic toward Nato or the UN. Nock had this to say about global consolidation:

“Some of the more adventurous spirits, apparently under the effects of Mr. Wilson’s inspiration, went so far as to propose educating all mankind into setting up a World State which should supersede the separatist nationalist State; on the principle, so it seemed, that if a spoonful of prussic acid will kill you, a bottleful is just what you need to do you a great deal of good.”

Nock would also be dissident on the Right today concerning the freedom of association, which he saw as the very essence of freedom itself.

“I know, however, that the problem of no minority anywhere can be settled unless and until two preliminaries are established. First, that the principle of equality before the law be maintained without subterfuge and with the utmost vigor. Second, that this principle be definitively understood as carrying no social implications of any kind whatever. ‘I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following,’ said Shylock; ‘but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you.’ These two preliminaries demand a much clearer conception of natural as well as legal rights than I think can ever prevail in America.”

Nock is sometimes presented as a brooding man who despaired for his country. There seems to be truth in that, but what’s most impressive is how he managed to keep his chin up and find personal joy in fighting evil, or at least exposing it as much as possible.

“All I have done towards the achievement of a happy life, has been to follow my nose…I learned early with Thoreau that a man is rich in proportion to the numbers of things he can afford to let alone; and in view of this I have always considered myself extremely well-to-do. All I ever asked of life was the freedom to think and say exactly what I pleased, when I pleased, and as I pleased. I have always had that freedom, with an immense amount of uncovenanted lagniappe thrown in; and having had it, I always felt I could well afford to let all else alone. It is true that one can never get something for nothing; it is true that in a society like ours one who takes the course which I have taken must reconcile himself to the status of a superfluous man; but the price seems to me by no means exorbitant and I have paid it gladly, without a shadow of doubt that I was getting all the best in the bargain.”

There are aspects of Nock that call for correction. His views on marriage and the family are highly unconventional, for example, and he sometimes takes his notion of the “remnant” too far, appearing to endorse passivity in the face of rising despotism, for example. He refused to join any antiwar movements, not because he disagreed with their goal but because he didn’t believe his participation would do any good.

But here is where his example is more instructive than his theory: Nock fought against the State with the most powerful weapons he had, his mind and his pen. Despite his claim, he was not superfluous at all, but essential, even indispensable, as are all great libertarian intellectuals.

Pass the Memoirs on to a twenty-year-old student and you stand a good chance of arming him against a lifetime of nonsense, whether it comes from the tedious Left that loves redistribution and collectivism or the fraudulent Right that is completely blind to the impossibility of reconciling war and nationalism with the true American spirit of freedom.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/tucker/tucker23.html

Isaiah’s Job by Albert Jay Nock

Isaiah’s Job

by Albert Jay Nock

One evening last autumn, I sat long hours with a European acquaintance while he expounded a political-economic doctrine which seemed sound as a nut and in which I could find no defect. At the end, he said with great earnestness: “I have a mission to the masses. I feel that I am called to get the ear of the people. I shall devote the rest of my life to spreading my doctrine far and wide among the population. What do you think?”

An embarrassing question in any case, and doubly so under the circumstances, because my acquaintance is a very learned man, one of the three or four really first-class minds that Europe produced in his generation; and naturally I, as one of the unlearned, was inclined to regard his lightest word with reverence amounting to awe. Still, I reflected, even the greatest mind can not possibly know everything, and I was pretty sure he had not had my opportunities for observing the masses of mankind, and that therefore I probably knew them better than he did. So I mustered courage to say that he had no such mission and would do well to get the idea out of his head at once; he would find that the masses would not care two pins for his doctrine, and still less for himself, since in such circumstances the popular favourite is generally some Barabbas. I even went so far as to say (he is a Jew) that his idea seemed to show that he was not very well up on his own native literature. He smiled at my jest, and asked what I meant by it; and I referred him to the story of the prophet Isaiah.

It occurred to me then that this story is much worth recalling just now when so many wise men and soothsayers appear to be burdened with a message to the masses. Dr. Townsend has a message, Father Coughlin has one, Mr. Upton Sinclair, Mr. Lippmann, Mr. Chase and the planned economy brethren, Mr. Tugwell and the New Dealers, Mr. Smith and Liberty Leaguers – the list is endless. I can not remember a time when so many energumens were so variously proclaiming the Word to the multitude and telling them what they must do to be saved. This being so, it occurred to me, as I say, that the story of Isaiah might have something in it to steady and compose the human spirit until this tyranny of windiness is overpast. I shall paraphrase the story in our common speech, since it has to be pieced out from various sources; and inasmuch as respectable scholars have thought fit to put out a whole new version of the Bible in the American vernacular, I shall take shelter behind them, if need be, against the charge of dealing irreverently with the Sacred Scriptures.

The prophet’s career began at the end of King Uzziah’s reign, say about 740 B.C. This reign was uncommonly long, almost half a century, and apparently prosperous. It was one of those prosperous reigns, however – like the reign of Marcus Aurelius at Rome, or the administration of Eubulus at Athens, or of Mr. Coolidge at Washington – where at the end the prosperity suddenly peters out and things go by the board with a resounding crash.

In the year of Uzziah’s death, the Lord commissioned the prophet to go out and warn the people of the wrath to come. “Tell them what a worthless lot they are.” He said, “Tell them what is wrong, and why and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don’t mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you,” He added, “that it won’t do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life.”

Isaiah had been very willing to take on the job – in fact, he had asked for it – but the prospect put a new face on the situation. It raised the obvious question: Why, if all that were so – if the enterprise were to be a failure from the start – was there any sense in starting it? “Ah,” the Lord said, “you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. 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.”

II

Apparently, then, if the Lord’s word is good for anything – I do not offer any opinion about that, – the only element in Judean society that was particularly worth bothering about was the Remnant. Isaiah seems finally to have got it through his head that this was the case; that nothing was to be expected from the masses, but that if anything substantial were ever to be done in Judea, the Remnant would have to do it. This is a very striking and suggestive idea; but before going on to explore it, we need to be quite clear about our terms. What do we mean by the masses, and what by the Remnant?

As the word masses is commonly used, it suggests agglomerations of poor and underprivileged people, labouring people, proletarians, and it means nothing like that; it means simply the majority. The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.

The picture which Isaiah presents of the Judean masses is most unfavorable. In his view, the mass-man – be he high or be he lowly, rich or poor, prince or pauper – gets off very badly. He appears as not only weak-minded and weak-willed, but as by consequence knavish, arrogant, grasping, dissipated, unprincipled, unscrupulous. The mass-woman also gets off badly, as sharing all the mass-man’s untoward qualities, and contributing a few of her own in the way of vanity and laziness, extravagance and foible. The list of luxury-products that she patronized is interesting; it calls to mind the women’s page of a Sunday newspaper in 1928, or the display set forth in one of our professedly “smart” periodicals. In another place, Isaiah even recalls the affectations that we used to know by the name “flapper gait” and the “debutante slouch.” It may be fair to discount Isaiah’s vivacity a little for prophetic fervour; after all, since his real job was not to convert the masses but to brace and reassure the Remnant, he probably felt that he might lay it on indiscriminately and as thick as he liked – in fact, that he was expected to do so. But even so, the Judean mass-man must have been a most objectionable individual, and the mass-woman utterly odious.

If the modern spirit, whatever that may be, is disinclined towards taking the Lord’s word at its face value (as I hear is the case), we may observe that Isaiah’s testimony to the character of the masses has strong collateral support from respectable Gentile authority. Plato lived into the administration of Eubulus, when Athens was at the peak of its jazz-and-paper era, and he speaks of the Athenian masses with all Isaiah’s fervency, even comparing them to a herd of ravenous wild beasts. Curiously, too, he applies Isaiah’s own word remnant to the worthier portion of Athenian society; “there is but a very small remnant,” he says, of those who possess a saving force of intellect and force of character – too small, preciously as to Judea, to be of any avail against the ignorant and vicious preponderance of the masses.

But Isaiah was a preacher and Plato a philosopher; and we tend to regard preachers and philosophers rather as passive observers of the drama of life than as active participants. Hence in a matter of this kind their judgment might be suspected of being a little uncompromising, a little acrid, or as the French say, saugrenu. We may therefore bring forward another witness who was preeminently a man of affairs, and whose judgment can not lie under this suspicion. Marcus Aurelius was ruler of the greatest of empires, and in that capacity he not only had the Roman mass-man under observation, but he had him on his hands twenty-four hours a day for eighteen years. What he did not know about him was not worth knowing and what he thought of him is abundantly attested on almost every page of the little book of jottings which he scribbled offhand from day to day, and which he meant for no eye but his own ever to see.

This view of the masses is the one that we find prevailing at large among the ancient authorities whose writings have come down to us. In the eighteenth century, however, certain European philosophers spread the notion that the mass-man, in his natural state, is not at all the kind of person that earlier authorities made him out to be, but on the contrary, that he is a worthy object of interest. His untowardness is the effect of environment, an effect for which “society” is somehow responsible. If only his environment permitted him to live according to his lights, he would undoubtedly show himself to be quite a fellow; and the best way to secure a more favourable environment for him would be to let him arrange it for himself. The French Revolution acted powerfully as a springboard for this idea, projecting its influence in all directions throughout Europe.

On this side of the ocean a whole new continent stood ready for a large-scale experiment with this theory. It afforded every conceivable resource whereby the masses might develop a civilization made in their own likeness and after their own image. There was no force of tradition to disturb them in their preponderance, or to check them in a thoroughgoing disparagement of the Remnant. Immense natural wealth, unquestioned predominance, virtual isolation, freedom from external interference and the fear of it, and, finally, a century and a half of time – such are the advantages which the mass-man has had in bringing forth a civilization which should set the earlier preachers and philosophers at naught in their belief that nothing substantial can be expected from the masses, but only from the Remnant.

His success is unimpressive. On the evidence so far presented one must say, I think, that the mass-man’s conception of what life has to offer, and his choice of what to ask from life, seem now to be pretty well what they were in the times of Isaiah and Plato; and so too seem the catastrophic social conflicts and convulsions in which his views of life and his demands on life involve him. I do not wish to dwell on this, however, but merely to observe that the monstrously inflated importance of the masses has apparently put all thought of a possible mission to the Remnant out of the modern prophet’s head. This is obviously quite as it should be, provided that the earlier preachers and philosophers were actually wrong, and that all final hope of the human race is actually centred in the masses. If, on the other hand, it should turn out that the Lord and Isaiah and Plato and Marcus Aurelius were right in their estimate of the relative social value of the masses and the Remnant, the case is somewhat different. Moreover, since with everything in their favour the masses have so far given such an extremely discouraging account of themselves, it would seem that the question at issue between these two bodies of opinion might most profitably be reopened.

III

But without following up this suggestion, I wish only, as I said, to remark the fact that as things now stand Isaiah’s job seems rather to go begging. Everyone with a message nowadays is, like my venerable European friend, eager to take it to the masses. His first, last and only thought is of mass-acceptance and mass-approval. His great care is to put his doctrine in such shape as will capture the masses’ attention and interest. This attitude towards the masses is so exclusive, so devout, that one is reminded of the troglodytic monster described by Plato, and the assiduous crowd at the entrance to its cave, trying obsequiously to placate it and win its favour, trying to interpret its inarticulate noises, trying to find out what it wants, and eagerly offering it all sorts of things that they think might strike its fancy.

The main trouble with all this is its reaction upon the mission itself. It necessitates an opportunist sophistication of one’s doctrine, which profoundly alters its character and reduces it to a mere placebo. If, say, you are a preacher, you wish to attract as large a congregation as you can, which means an appeal to the masses; and this, in turn, means adapting the terms of your message to the order of intellect and character that the masses exhibit. If you are an educator, say with a college on your hands, you wish to get as many students as possible, and you whittle down your requirements accordingly. If a writer, you aim at getting many readers; if a publisher, many purchasers; if a philosopher, many disciples; if a reformer, many converts; if a musician, many auditors; and so on. But as we see on all sides, in the realization of these several desires, the prophetic message is so heavily adulterated with trivialities, in every instance, that its effect on the masses is merely to harden them in their sins. Meanwhile, the Remnant, aware of this adulteration and of the desires that prompt it, turn their backs on the prophet and will have nothing to do with him or his message.

Isaiah, on the other hand, worked under no such disabilities. He preached to the masses only in the sense that he preached publicly. Anyone who liked might listen; anyone who liked might pass by. He knew that the Remnant would listen; and knowing also that nothing was to be expected of the masses under any circumstances, he made no specific appeal to them, did not accommodate his message to their measure in any way, and did not care two straws whether they heeded it or not. As a modern publisher might put it, he was not worrying about circulation or about advertising. Hence, with all such obsessions quite out of the way, he was in a position to do his level best, without fear or favour, and answerable only to his august Boss.

If a prophet were not too particular about making money out of his mission or getting a dubious sort of notoriety out of it, the foregoing considerations would lead one to say that serving the Remnant looks like a good job. An assignment that you can really put your back into, and do your best without thinking about results, is a real job; whereas serving the masses is at best only half a job, considering the inexorable conditions that the masses impose upon their servants. They ask you to give them what they want, they insist upon it, and will take nothing else; and following their whims, their irrational changes of fancy, their hot and cold fits, is a tedious business, to say nothing of the fact that what they want at any time makes very little call on one’s resources of prophesy. The Remnant, on the other hand, want only the best you have, whatever that may be. Give them that, and they are satisfied; you have nothing more to worry about. The prophet of the American masses must aim consciously at the lowest common denominator of intellect, taste and character among 120,000,000 people; and this is a distressing task. The prophet of the Remnant, on the contrary, is in the enviable position of Papa Haydn in the household of Prince Esterhazy. All Haydn had to do was keep forking out the very best music he knew how to produce, knowing it would be understood and appreciated by those for whom he produced it, and caring not a button what anyone else thought of it; and that makes a good job.

In a sense, nevertheless, as I have said, it is not a rewarding job. If you can tough the fancy of the masses, and have the sagacity to keep always one jump ahead of their vagaries and vacillations, you can get good returns in money from serving the masses, and good returns also in a mouth-to-ear type of notoriety:

Digito monstrari et dicier, Hic est!

We all know innumerable politicians, journalists, dramatists, novelists and the like, who have done extremely well by themselves in these ways. Taking care of the Remnant, on the contrary, holds little promise of any such rewards. A prophet of the Remnant will not grow purse-proud on the financial returns from his work, nor is it likely that he will get any great renown out of it. Isaiah’s case was exceptional to this second rule, and there are others, but not many.

It may be thought, then, that while taking care of the Remnant is no doubt a good job, it is not an especially interesting job because it is as a rule so poorly paid. I have my doubts about this. There are other compensations to be got out of a job besides money and notoriety, and some of them seem substantial enough to be attractive. Many jobs which do not pay well are yet profoundly interesting, as, for instance, the job of research student in the sciences is said to be; and the job of looking after the Remnant seems to me, as I have surveyed it for many years from my seat in the grandstand, to be as interesting as any that can be found in the world.

IV

What chiefly makes it so, I think, is that in any given society the Remnant are always so largely an unknown quantity. You do not know, and will never know, more than two things about them. You can be sure of those – dead sure, as our phrase is – but you will never be able to make even a respectable guess at anything else. You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor what they are doing or will do. Two things you do 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.

The fascination and the despair of the historian, as he looks back upon Isaiah’s Jewry, upon Plato’s Athens, or upon Rome of the Antonines, is the hope of discovering and laying bare the “substratum of right-thinking and well-doing” which he knows must have existed somewhere in those societies because no kind of collective life can possibly go on without it. He finds tantalizing intimations of it here and there in many places, as in the Greek Anthology, in the scrapbook of Aulus Gellius, in the poems of Ausonius, and in the brief and touching tribute, Bene merenti, bestowed upon the unknown occupants of Roman tombs. But these are vague and fragmentary; they lead him nowhere in his search for some kind of measure on this substratum, but merely testify to what he already knew a priori – that the substratum did somewhere exist. Where it was, how substantial it was, what its power of self-assertion and resistance was – of all this they tell him nothing.

Similarly, when the historian of two thousand years hence, or two hundred years, looks over the available testimony to the quality of our civilization and tries to get any kind of clear, competent evidence concerning the substratum of right-thinking and well-doing which he knows must have been here, he will have a devil of a time finding it. When he has assembled all he can and has made even a minimum allowance for speciousness, vagueness, and confusion of motive, he will sadly acknowledge that his net result is simply nothing. A Remnant were here, building a substratum like coral insects; so much he knows, but he will find nothing to put him on the track of who and where and how many they were and what their work was like.

Concerning all this, too, the prophet of the present knows precisely as much and as little as the historian of the future; and that, I repeat, is what makes his job seem to me so profoundly interesting. One of the most suggestive episodes recounted in the Bible is that of a prophet’s attempt – the only attempt of the kind on the record, I believe – to count up the Remnant. Elijah had fled from persecution into the desert, where the Lord presently overhauled him and asked what he was doing so far away from his job. He said that he was running away, not because he was a coward, but because all the Remnant had been killed off except himself. He had got away only by the skin of his teeth, and, he being now all the Remnant there was, if he were killed the True Faith would go flat. The Lord replied that he need not worry about that, for even without him the True Faith could probably manage to squeeze along somehow if it had to; “and as for your figures on the Remnant,” He said, “I don’t mind telling you that there are seven thousand of them back there in Israel whom it seems you have not heard of, but you may take My word for it that there they are.”

At that time, probably the population of Israel could not run to much more than a million or so; and a Remnant of seven thousand out of a million is a highly encouraging percentage for any prophet. With seven thousand of the boys on his side, there was no great reason for Elijah to feel lonesome; and incidentally, that would be something for the modern prophet of the Remnant to think of when he has a touch of the blues. But the main point is that if Elijah the Prophet could not make a closer guess on the number of the Remnant than he made when he missed it by seven thousand, anyone else who tackled the problem would only waste his time.

The other certainty which the prophet of the Remnant may always have is that the Remnant will find him. He may rely on that with absolute assurance. They will find him without his doing anything about it; in fact, if he tries to do anything about it, he is pretty sure to put them off. He does not need to advertise for them nor resort to any schemes of publicity to get their attention. If he is a preacher or a public speaker, for example, he may be quite indifferent to going on show at receptions, getting his picture printed in the newspapers, or furnishing autobiographical material for publication on the side of “human interest.” If a writer, he need not make a point of attending any pink teas, autographing books at wholesale, nor entering into any specious freemasonry with reviewers. All this and much more of the same order lies in the regular and necessary routine laid down for the prophet of the masses; it is, and must be, part of the great general technique of getting the mass-man’s ear – or as our vigorous and excellent publicist, Mr. H. L. Mencken, puts it, the technique of boob-bumping. The prophet of the Remnant is not bound to this technique. He may be quite sure that the Remnant will make their own way to him without any adventitious aids; and not only so, but if they find him employing any such aids, as I said, it is ten to one that they will smell a rat in them and will sheer off.

The certainty that the Remnant will find him, however, leaves the prophet as much in the dark as ever, as helpless as ever in the matter of putting any estimate of any kind upon the Remnant; for, as appears in the case of Elijah, he remains ignorant of who they are that have found him or where they are or how many. They did not write in and tell him about it, after the manner of those who admire the vedettes of Hollywood, nor yet do they seek him out and attach themselves to his person. They are not that kind. They take his message much as drivers take the directions on a roadside signboard – that is, with very little thought about the signboard, beyond being gratefully glad that it happened to be there, but with every thought about the directions.

This impersonal attitude of the Remnant wonderfully enhances the interest of the imaginative prophet’s job. Once in a while, just about often enough to keep his intellectual curiosity in good working order, he will quite accidentally come upon some distinct reflection of his own message in an unsuspected quarter. This enables him to entertain himself in his leisure moments with agreeable speculations about the course his message may have taken in reaching that particular quarter, and about what came of it after it got there. Most interesting of all are those instances, if one could only run them down (but one may always speculate about them), where the recipient himself no longer knows where nor when nor from whom he got the message – or even where, as sometimes happens, he has forgotten that he got it anywhere and imagines that it is all a self-sprung idea of his own.

Such instances as these are probably not infrequent, for, without presuming to enroll ourselves among the Remnant, we can all no doubt remember having found ourselves suddenly under the influence of an idea, the source of which we cannot possibly identify. “It came to us afterward,” as we say; that is, we are aware of it only after it has shot up full-grown in our minds, leaving us quite ignorant of how and when and by what agency it was planted there and left to germinate. It seems highly probable that the prophet’s message often takes some such course with the Remnant.

If, for example, you are a writer or a speaker or a preacher, you put forth an idea which lodges in the Unbewußtsein of a casual member of the Remnant and sticks fast there. For some time it is inert; then it begins to fret and fester until presently it invades the man’s conscious mind and, as one might say, corrupts it. Meanwhile, he has quite forgotten how he came by the idea in the first instance, and even perhaps thinks he has invented it; and in those circumstances, the most interesting thing of all is that you never know what the pressure of that idea will make him do.

For these reasons it appears to me that Isaiah’s job is not only good but also extremely interesting; and especially so at the present time when nobody is doing it. If I were young and had the notion of embarking in the prophetical line, I would certainly take up this branch of the business; and therefore I have no hesitation about recommending it as a career for anyone in that position. It offers an open field, with no competition; our civilization so completely neglects and disallows the Remnant that anyone going in with an eye single to their service might pretty well count on getting all the trade there is.

Even assuming that there is some social salvage to be screened out of the masses, even assuming that the testimony of history to their social value is a little too sweeping, that it depresses hopelessness a little too far, one must yet perceive, I think, that the masses have prophets enough and to spare. Even admitting that in the teeth of history that hope of the human race may not be quite exclusively centred in the Remnant, one must perceive that they have social value enough to entitle them to some measure of prophetic encouragement and consolation, and that our civilization allows them none whatever. Every prophetic voice is addressed to the masses, and to them alone; the voice of the pulpit, the voice of education, the voice of politics, of literature, drama, journalism – all these are directed towards the masses exclusively, and they marshal the masses in the way that they are going.

One might suggest, therefore, that aspiring prophetical talent may well turn to another field. Sat patriae Priamoque datum – whatever obligation of the kind may be due the masses is already monstrously overpaid. So long as the masses are taking up the tabernacle of Moloch and Chiun, their images, and following the star of their god Buncombe, they will have no lack of prophets to point the way that leadeth to the More Abundant Life; and hence a few of those who feel the prophetic afflatus might do better to apply themselves to serving the Remnant. It is a good job, an interesting job, much more interesting than serving the masses; and moreover it is the only job in our whole civilization, as far as I know, that offers a virgin field.

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This essay first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1936.

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) was an influential American libertarian author, educational theorist, and social critic. Murray Rothbard was deeply influenced by him, and so was that whole generation of free-market thinkers.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/nock3b.html