No matter how low a civilization is, it can only be made to go lower through state activity. Nock was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. His father was a steel worker and an Episcopal prelate. Albert received the best education possible for that generation, complete with a thorough knowledge of classical languages and literature. He later wrote. I am profoundly thankful that during my formative years I never had contact with any institution under State con-trol; 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. 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.
He graduated from St. He later left the ministry for full-time journalism and writing, joining the staff of The Nation. He left The Nation to be the founder of the original Freeman magazine that ran from to In those days, he might have considered himself a man of the Left, since it was the Left that most strongly resisted the rise of the corporate warfare state and resisted the increase of power over the individual.
In this respect, he was not unlike his friend H. Mencken and many other members of what was later called the Old Right generation of antistatist thinkers. Believing that it would be impossible to persuade any large portion of the general population of the correct course and opposing any suggestion of a violent revolution, Nock instead argued that libertarians should focus on nurturing what he called "the Remnant ". The Remnant, according to Nock, consisted of a small minority who understood the nature of the state and society, and who would become influential only after the current dangerous course had become thoroughly and obviously untenable, a situation which might not occur until far into the future.
Nock's argument was that the Jews were an Oriental people, acceptable to the "intelligent Occidental" yet forever strangers to "the Occidental mass-man. This innate hostility of the masses, he concluded, might be exploited by a scapegoating state to distract from "any shocks of an economic dislocation that may occur in the years ahead. Despite this obvious dread of anti-Semitism , the article was itself declared by some to be anti-Semitic, and Nock was never asked to write another article, effectively ending his career as a social critic.
Against charges of anti-Semitism, Nock answered, "Someone asked me years ago if it were true that I disliked Jews, and I replied that it was certainly true, not at all because they are Jews but because they are folks, and I don't like folks.
In , two years before his death, Nock published his autobiography, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man , the title of which expressed the degree of Nock's disillusionment and alienation from current social trends. After the publication of this autobiography, Nock became the sometime guest of oilman William F. Buckley, Sr. Buckley, Jr. Nock died of leukemia in , at the Wakefield, Rhode Island home of his longtime friend, Ruth Robinson, the illustrator of his book, A Journey into Rabelais' France.
He is buried in Riverside Cemetery, in Wakefield. Describing himself as a philosophical anarchist , [14] 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 also harshly criticized democracy. Instead, Nock argued, "The practical reason for freedom is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fiber 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. During the s, 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.
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 s was responsible for the onset of the Great Depression and that the New Deal was responsible for perpetuating it. 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…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.
Around , Nock was invited to deliver a series of history lectures at Columbia University, and he focused on the struggle for liberty. He developed the lecture texts into his great radical prolemic, Our Enemy, the State. He drew from ideas of German sociologist 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 — , the association of states without a central government. Our Enemy, the State appeared in 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. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.
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.
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. There was yet another revival of The Freeman in It was an 18—24 page monthly. Chodorov published at least eight articles by Nock. He worked at a house in Canaan, Connecticut. He remained as reticent as ever, omitting most personal details about his life, but he gracefully chronicled the development of his ideas.
Nock seems to have had few friends during his last years. 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. Maverick oilman William F. Buckley Jr. The latter hated these arrangements and duly enrolled the state to destroy them.
This was also true in Virginia, despite a feudal-patriarchal overlay. 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.
Such interference irritated American elites no end. Political independence would provide them with full access to and control of state power. All 13 states continued the monopolistic state-system of land tenure defined above. The Constitution provided republican forms with little democratic content. Nock was not optimistic about the future. Social dissolution came last. Unless noted, quotations are from Our Enemy, the State. Nock sided with the defeated parties.
Progressive History. When Nock says that ideological lags sustain institutions, or that the American Whigs of did not care deeply about popular sovereignty and natural rights, he adopts Progressive views containing considerable truth.
0コメント