Albert Jay Nock, Forgotten Man of the Old Right
by
Jeffrey A. Tucker
DIGG THIS
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.
August
22, 2002
Jeffrey
Tucker [send him mail]
is editorial vice president of www.Mises.org.
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