Albert Jay Nock–Our Enemy, The State–Videos
“…There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one’s own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others…. I propose … to call one’s own labor and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others, the “economic means” for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the “political means.”
… The state is an organization of the political means. No state, therefore, can come into being until the economic means has created a definite number of objects for the satisfaction of needs, which objects may be taken away or appropriated by warlike robbery. …”
~Albert Jay Nock
Our Enemy The State
By Albert Jay Nock
http://smeedonstate-ism.com/Library/Our%20Enemy,%20the%20State.pdf
Our Enemy, The State (Preface) by Albert Jay Nock
Our Enemy, The State (Part 1/6) by Albert Jay Nock
Our Enemy, The State (Part 2/6) by Albert Jay Nock
Our Enemy, The State (Part 3/6) by Albert Jay Nock
Our Enemy, The State (Part 4/6) by Albert Jay Nock
Our Enemy, The State (Part 5/6) by Albert Jay Nock
Our Enemy, The State (Part 6/6) by Albert Jay Nock
“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. Give any State like power hereafter, and put it in like circumstances, and it will do precisely the same kind of thing. The State will unfailingly aggrandize itself, if only it has the power, first at the expense of its own citizens, and then at the expense of anyone else in sight. It has always done so, and always will.”
~Albert Jay Nock
Background Articles and Videos
Mortal Remains
The wisdom and folly in Albert Jay Nock’s anti-statism
JONAH GOLDBERG
“…Nock would have no use for today’s tea parties or talk-radio Jeremiahs of the Right, but he would also scoff at Paul Krugman and roll his eyes at Barack Obama’s talk of hope and change, for he denied that the state was the proper object of hope or a worthwhile agent of change. Moreover, he had contempt for the vast bulk of humanity, the “Neolithic mass” and those who spoke to them. In the dark, or at least darkening, age in which he believed himself to live (Nock died two weeks after Hiroshima), he cared only for the Remnant — a tiny slice of humanity he could describe but not locate. The best way to grasp this idea is to read his 1936 Atlantic essay “Isaiah’s Job” (easily found on the Web). It is one of the oddest and most powerful essays in the history of conservatism. At the end of King Uzziah’s reign in 740 b.c., the prophet Isaiah was tasked with warning the Jews of God’s wrath. But, in Nock’s rephrasing of the Biblical text, God gave this disclaimer: “I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you 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 asked why he should even bother, then? “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.” For Nock, the Remnant was his audience. At times, the idea of the Remnant is unapologetically elitist, but in a thoroughly Jeffersonian way. The Remnant were not the “best and brightest,” the most successful, the richest. Rather, they were those occupying the “substratum of right thinking and well doing” (in Matthew Arnold’s words). “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 it is here that we find an explanation for why Nock is so admired by liberals such as The New Republic’s Franklin Foer and the New York Times’s Sam Tanenhaus: He openly embraced the idea that he couldn’t change anything. History was driven by forces too large to be affected by politics or punditry. Any revolution would result only in a new crop of exploiters and scoundrels eager to pick up where the deposed ones left off. So, Nock figured, why bother with politics? Now what more could today’s liberals ask for from a conservative pundit?
Nock was charming, eccentric, cosmopolitan, and very, very interesting. But his Immortal’s cynicism left him with a self-absorption that amounted to a personal philosophy of muddling through. “Taking his inspiration from those Russians who seemed superfluous to their autocratic nineteenth-century society and sought inspiration in the private sphere, even to the point of writing largely for their desk drawers,” writes Robert Crunden, Nock’s best biographer, “Nock made the essential point: ransack the past for your values, establish a coherent worldview, depend neither on society nor on government insofar as circumstances permitted, keep your tastes simple and inexpensive, and do what you have to do to remain true to yourself.” …”
http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=NTRjNzA4NDZmNTc3OTk1ZmNmNzM4ZDEwMzEwNjBkYjg=
Revisiting a Libertarian Classic: Nock’s Our Enemy, the State
by <!– put author name below, before tag –>Sheldon Richman,
“…Nock and American history
Nock’s overview of American history is bracing indeed. The standard libertarian view is that, aside from slavery and the tariff, the American political system approached the laissez-faire ideal until things began to go wrong during the Progressive Era, with the pace quickening after the election of Franklin Roosevelt and the advent of the New Deal. (Sometimes the Civil War era is seen as the start of pervasive statism.) Nock doesn’t see it that way, although he pegged the New Deal a monstrous extension of centralized bureaucracy. But for him, things started going wrong much earlier than the Civil War — in fact, right after the American Revolution if not earlier. He saw far more continuity from the colonial to the national period than others have. For Nock, the transition from feudalism to the “merchant-State” (in England) was not a matter of kind, but of degree. To be sure, there were differences between the two, but the essential exploitation of one class by another was present in both cases. In the merchant-State, however, there was more opportunity to enter the exploiting class. You did not have to be born into it. But you did need connections. The English merchant-State was brought to the New World, where it took root and grew into the United States. …”
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0603b.asp
Albert Jay Nock
“…Albert Jay Nock (October 13, 1873[1] – August 19, 1945) was an influential American libertarian author, educational theorist, and social critic of the early and middle 20th century. …”
“…Thought
Describing himself as a philosophical anarchist, Nock called for a radical vision of society free from the influence of the political state. He described the state as that which “claims and exercises the monopoly of crime”. He opposed centralization, regulation, the income tax, and mandatory education, along with what he saw as the degradation of society. He denounced in equal terms all forms of totalitarianism, including “Bolshevism … Fascism, Hitlerism, Marxism, [and] Communism”, but was also harshly critical of democracy. Nock argued instead that, “[t]he practical reason for freedom is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fiber can be developed – we have tried law, compulsion and authoritarianism of various kinds, and the result is nothing to be proud of.” (“On Doing the Right Thing”, The American Mercury, 1925)
During the 1930s, Nock was one of the most consistent critics of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. In Our Enemy, the State, Nock argued that the New Deal was merely a pretext for the federal government to increase its control over society. He was dismayed that the president had gathered unprecedented power in his own hands and called this development an out-and-out coup d’etat. Nock criticized those who believed that the new regimentation of the economy was temporary, arguing that it would prove a permanent shift. He believed that the inflationary monetary policy of the Republican administrations of the 1920s were responsible for the onset of the Great Depression, and that the New Deal was responsible for perpetuating it.
Nock was also a passionate opponent of war and what he considered the U.S. government’s aggressive foreign policy. He believed that war could bring out only the worst in society, arguing that it led inevitably to collectivization and militarization and “fortified a universal faith in violence; it set in motion endless adventures in imperialism, endless nationalist ambitions,” while, at the same time, costing countless human lives. During the First World War, Nock wrote for The Nation, which was censored by the Wilson administration for opposing the war. Despite his distaste for communism, Nock harshly criticized the U.S. invasion of Russia following the parliamentary revolution and Bolshevik coup in that country. Before the Second World War, Nock wrote a series of articles deploring what he saw as Roosevelt’s gamesmanship and interventionism leading inevitably to U.S. involvement. Nock maintained a principled opposition to the war throughout its course, which was rare at the time.
Despite becoming considerably more obscure in death than he had been in life, Nock was an important influence on the next generation of American thinkers, including libertarians such as Murray Rothbard, Frank Chodorov, and Leonard Read and conservatives such as William F. Buckley, Jr. Nock’s conservative view of society would help inspire the paleoconservative movement in response to the development of neo-conservatism during the Cold War. In insisting on the state itself as the root problem, Nock’s thought was one of the main precursors to anarcho-capitalism. …”
Books
- The Myth of a Guilty Nation.[1] New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1922.
- The Freeman Book.[2] B.W. Huebsch, 1924.
- Jefferson.[3] New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1926 (also known as Mr. Jefferson).
- On Doing the Right Thing, and Other Essays.[4] New York: Harper and Brothers, 1928.
- Francis Rabelais: The Man and His Work. Harper and Brothers, 1929.
- The Book of Journeyman: Essays from the New Freeman.[5] New Freeman, 1930.
- The Theory of Education in the United States.[6] New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932.
- A Journey Into Rabelais’s France. William Morrow & Company, 1934.
- A Journal of These Days: June 1932-December 1933. William Morrow & Company, 1934.
- Our Enemy, the State.[7] William Morrow & Company, 1935.
- Free Speech and Plain Language. William Morrow & Company, 1937.
- Henry George: An Essay. William Morrow & Company, 1939.
- Memoirs of a Superfluous Man.[8] New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943.
Published posthumously:
- A Journal of Forgotten Days: May 1934-October 1935. Henry Regnery Company, 1948.
- Letters from Albert Jay Nock, 1924-1945, to Edmund C. Evans, Mrs. Edmund C. Evans, and Ellen Winsor. The Caxton Printers, 1949.
- Snoring as a Fine Art and Twelve Other Essays.[9] Richard R. Smith, 1958.
- Selected Letters of Albert Jay Nock. The Caxton Printers, 1962.
- Cogitations from Albert Jay Nock.[10] The Nockian Society, 1970, revised edition, 1985.
- The State of the Union: Essays in Social Criticism. Liberty Press, 1991.
- The Disadvantages of Being Educated and Other Essays. Hallberg Publishing Corporation, 1996.
Origins of the Old Right II: The Tory Anarchism of Mencken and Nock
Chapter 3 of The Betrayal of the American Right
by Murray N. Rothbard
“…Most of this loose coalition of individualistic radicals was totally disillusioned with the political process, but to the extent that they distinguished between existing parties, the Republican Party was clearly the major enemy. Eternal Hamiltonian champions of Big Government and intimate government “partnership” with Big Business through tariffs, subsidies, and contracts, long-time brandishers of the Imperial big stick, the Republicans had capped their antilibertarian sins by being the party most dedicated to the tyranny of Prohibition, an evil that particularly enraged H.L. Mencken. Much of the opposition (e.g., Mencken, Villard) supported the short-lived LaFollette Progressive movement of 1924, and the Progressive Senator William E. Borah (R-Idaho) was an opposition hero in leading the fight against the war and the League of Nations, and in advocating recognition of Soviet Russia. But the nearest political home was the conservative Bourbon, non-Wilsonian or “Cleveland” wing of the Democratic Party, a wing that at least tended to be “wet,” was opposed to war and foreign intervention, and favored free trade and strictly minimal government. Mencken, the most politically minded of the group, felt closest in politics to Governor Albert Ritchie, the states-rights Democrat from Maryland, and to Senator James Reed, Democrat of Missouri, a man staunchly “isolationist” and anti-intervention in foreign affairs and pro-laissez-faire at home.
It was this conservative wing of the Democratic Party, headed by Charles Michelson, Jouett Shouse, and John J. Raskob, which launched a determined attack on Herbert Hoover in the late 1920s for his adherence to Prohibition and to Big Government generally. It was this wing that would later give rise to the much-maligned Liberty League.
To Mencken and to Nock, in fact, Herbert Hoover – the pro-war Wilsonian and interventionist, the Food Czar of the war, the champion of Big Government, of high tariffs and business cartels, the pious moralist and apologist for Prohibition – embodied everything they abhorred in American political life. They were clearly leaders of the individualist opposition to Hoover’s conservative statism.
Since they were, in their very different styles, the leaders of libertarian thought in America during the 1920s, Mencken and Nock deserve a little closer scrutiny. The essence of Mencken’s remarkably consistent “Tory anarchism” was embodied in the discussion of government that he was later to select for his Chrestomathy:
All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible . . . to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally [as Mencken clearly was not] he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are. . . .
The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone – one which barely escapes being no government at all. This ideal, I believe, will be realized in the world twenty or thirty centuries after I have . . . taken up my public duties in Hell.4 …”
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/betrayal/3.html
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