Albert Jay Nock
Albert Jay Nock | |
---|---|
Born | Scranton, Pennsylvania, U.S. | October 13, 1870
Died | August 19, 1945 Wakefield, Rhode Island, U.S. | (aged 74)
Resting place | Riverside Cemetery South Kingstown, Rhode Island |
Occupation | Writer and social theorist |
Language | English |
Alma mater | St. Stephen's College (now known as Bard College) |
Period | 1922–1943 |
Subject | Political philosophy |
Literary movement | Old Right Libertarianism |
Notable works | Our Enemy, the State |
This article is part of a series on |
Libertarianism in the United States |
---|
Albert Jay Nock (October 13, 1870 – August 19, 1945) was an American
Life and work
Throughout his life, Nock was a deeply private man who shared few of the details of his personal life with his working partners. He was born in
After graduation he had a brief career playing minor league baseball, and then attended a theological seminary and was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1897. Nock married Agnes Grumbine in 1900 and the couple had two children, Francis and Samuel (both of whom became college professors). In 1909, Nock left the ministry as well as his wife and children, and became a journalist.[4]
In 1914, Nock joined the staff of
However, while Nock was a lifelong admirer of
Between 1920 and 1924, Nock was the co-editor of
His editorials during the three brief years of the Freeman 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.[9]
When the unprofitable The Freeman ceased publication in 1924, Nock became a freelance journalist in
"The Myth of a Guilty Nation",[10] which came out in 1922, was Albert Jay Nock's first anti-war book, a cause he backed his entire life as an essential component of a libertarian outlook. The burden of the book is to prove American war propaganda to be false. The purpose of World War I, according to Nock, was not to liberate Europe and the world from German imperialism and threats. If there was a conspiracy, it was by the allied powers to broadcast a public message that was completely contradicted by its own diplomatic cables. Along with that came war propaganda designed to make Germany into a devil nation.
In the mid-1920s, a small group of wealthy American admirers funded Nock's literary and historical work to enable him to follow his own interests. Shortly thereafter, he published his biography of Thomas Jefferson. When Jefferson was published in 1928, Mencken praised it as "the work of a subtle and highly dexterous craftsman" which cleared "off the vast mountain of doctrinaire rubbish that has risen above Jefferson's bones and also provides a clear and comprehensive account of the Jeffersonian system", and the "essence of it is that Jefferson divided all mankind into two classes, the producers and the exploiters, and he was for the former first, last and all the time." Mencken also thought the book to be accurate, shrewd, well-ordered and charming.[9]
In his two 1932 books, On the Disadvantages of Being Educated and Other Essays and Theory of Education in the United States, Nock launched a scathing critique of modern government-run education.
In his 1936 article "Isaiah's Job",
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.
did not pretend to believe that everyone is educable, for they knew, on the contrary, that very few are educable, very few indeed. They saw this as a fact of nature, like the fact that few are six feet tall. [...] They accepted the fact that there are practicable ranges of intellectual and spiritual experience which nature has opened to some and closed to others.
In 1941, Nock published a two-part essay in The Atlantic Monthly titled "The
Nock's argument was that the Jews were an Oriental people, acceptable to the "intelligent Occidental" yet forever strangers to "the Occidental mass-man."
The articles were themselves declared by some commentators to be anti-Semitic,[18] 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."[19]
In 1943, 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 was a frequent guest at the Sharon, Connecticut house of oilman William F. Buckley Sr., whose son, William F. Buckley Jr., would later become an influential author and speaker.[20]
Nock died of leukemia in 1945, at the Wakefield, Rhode Island home of his longtime friend, Ruth Robinson, the illustrator of his 1934 book, "A Journey into Rabelais' France". He is buried in Riverside Cemetery, in Wakefield.
Thought
This section needs additional citations for verification. (March 2017) |
Describing himself as a
During the 1930s, Nock was one of the most consistent
Nock was also a passionate opponent of war, and what he considered the US government's aggressive foreign policy. He believed that war could bring out only the worst in society and argued that it led inevitably to
Despite his distaste for communism, Nock harshly criticized the
Despite becoming considerably more obscure in death than he had been in life, Nock was an important influence on the next generation of laissez-faire capitalist American thinkers, including libertarians such as Murray Rothbard, Frank Chodorov,[23] 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 neoconservatism 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.
Anti-Semitism and disillusionment with democracy
When Albert Jay Nock started The Freeman magazine in 1920, The Nation offered its congratulations to a new voice in liberal journalism. Nock rebuffed the gesture in a letter to the magazine's owner,
The historian and biographer, Michael Wreszin,[30] compared Nock's disillusionment with democracy and his attacks on the Jewish people to similar feelings held by Henry Adams.[31] Before he died, Nock destroyed all his notes and papers, except a few letters and an autobiographical manuscript published posthumously as Journal of Forgotten Days (Nock was so secretive about the details of his personal life that Who's Who could not find out his birthdate).[32]
In Journal of Forgotten Days, Nock wrote these passages about the Jews of New York City:
31 August—Leaving for New York today, in great dissatisfaction, to be tied to the public libraries, which are infested with Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics, such as orthodox members of the Church of England are supposed to pray for in the Good Friday collect.[33]
20 September—The Jewish holiday Yom Kippur yesterday closed New York up as tight as a white-oak knot. One would say there was not a hundred dollars' worth of business done in all the town. It sets one's mind back on Hitler's policy. The question is not what one thinks of it as an American, but what one would think of it if one were a German in Germany, where the control of cultural agencies is so largely in the hands of Jews—the press, drama, music, education, etc.—and where there is, or was, a superb native culture essentially antithetical. Is one's own culture worth fighting for? I think so. I think I would fight for it.[34]
Nock took a jaundiced view of American politics and of American democracy itself,[35] and asserted that in all his life he voted in only one presidential election, in which he cast a write-in vote for Jefferson Davis.[36][37][38] In an article he wrote for the American Mercury Magazine in 1933, What the American Votes For, Nock claimed, "My first and only presidential vote was cast many, many years ago. It was dictated by pure instinct."[39]
In Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943), Nock had this to say about mass democracy in America:
I could see how "democracy" might do very well in a society of saints and sages led by an Alfred or an Antoninus Pius. Short of that, I was unable to see how it could come to anything but an ochlocracy of mass-men led by a sagacious knave. The collective capacity for bringing forth any other outcome seemed simply not there."[40]
The author Clifton Fadiman, reviewing Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, wrote: "I have not since the days of the early Mencken read a more eloquently written blast against democracy or enjoyed more fully a display of crusted prejudice. Mr. Nock is a highly civilized man who does not like our civilization and will have no part of it."[41] Nock's biographer Michael Wreszin wrote concerning Nock's reaction to the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932: "Sailing to Brussels in February 1933, before Roosevelt's inauguration in March, he repeated in a journal his appreciation of Catherine Wilson's observation that the skyline of New York was the finest sight in America when viewed from the deck of an outbound steamer."[42]
In popular culture
In the fictional The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith, as part of the North American Confederacy Series, in which the United States becomes a Libertarian state after a successful Whiskey Rebellion and the overthrow and execution of George Washington by firing squad for treason in 1794, Albert Jay Nock serves as the 18th President of the North American Confederacy from 1912 to 1928.
Works
- The Myth of a Guilty Nation.[1] New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1922. [2]
- The Freeman Book.[3] B.W. Huebsch, 1924.
- Jefferson.[4] New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1926 (also known as Mr. Jefferson).
- On Doing the Right Thing, and Other Essays.[5] 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.[6] New Freeman, 1930.
- The Theory of Education in the United States.[7] New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932.
- A Journey Into Rabelais's France. [8] William Morrow & Company, 1934.
- A Journal of These Days: June 1932–December 1933. William Morrow & Company, 1934.
- Our Enemy, the State.[9] ePub MP3 HTML 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.[10] New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943.
Miscellany
- World Scouts,[11] World Peace Foundation, 1912.
- "Officialism and Lawlessness." [12] In College Readings on Today and its Problems, Oxford University Press, 1933.
- Meditations in Wall Street, with an introduction by Albert Jay Nock,[13] W. Morrow & Company, 1940.
Published posthumously:
- A Journal of Forgotten Days: May 1934–October 1935. [14] 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.[15] Richard R. Smith, 1958.
- Selected Letters of Albert Jay Nock. The Caxton Printers, 1962.
- Cogitations from Albert Jay Nock.[16] 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.
Notes
- ISBN 978-1-60819-355-4.
- ^ Powell, Jim (July 4, 2000). "Stylish Elegance: A Biography of Albert Jay Nock". www.libertarianism.org. Archived from the original on December 19, 2020. Retrieved February 4, 2015.
- ^ Wreszin, Michael (1972). The Superfluous Anarchist: Albert Jay Nock, Brown University Press, p. 11.
- ISBN 978-0195168839.
This early, quiet career as a minister ended abruptly in 1909, when Nock left the ministry, his wife, and his children to take up journalism.
- ISBN 978-1-61016-372-9.
- ^ Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State, The Caxton Printers, 1950, p. 59.
- ^ Neilson, Francis (1946). "The Story of 'The Freeman'". The American Journal of Economics and Sociology. 6 (1): 3–53.
- ^ Presley, Sharon (1981). "Suzanne La Follette: The Freewoman", Libertarian Review (Cato Institute).
- ^ a b Mencken, H.L. (1926). "The Immortal Democrat". American Mercury. 9 (33): 123.
- ^ Originally published in 1922 by B. W. Huebsch, Inc. Published in 2011 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
- ^ Nock, Albert Jay (1956). "Isaiah's Job". The Freeman. 6 (12): 31–37.
- ^ Harris, Michael R. (1970). Five Counterrevolutionists in Higher Education: Irving Babbitt, Albert Jay Nock, Abraham Flexner, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Alexander Meiklejohn, Oregon State University Press, p. 97.
- ^ Cram, Ralph Adams (1932). "Why We Do Not Behave Like Human Beings". The American Mercury. 27 (105): 41–48.
- ISBN 978-0-674-02620-9. Archived from the original on 2023-01-20. Retrieved 2022-06-14.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location (link - ISBN 978-0-300-15529-7.
- ^ Nock, Albert Jay (1941). "The Jewish Problem in America", Archived 2017-02-04 at the Wayback Machine The Atlantic Monthly, June 1, pp. 699–705.
- ^ Crunden, Robert Morse (1964). The Mind and Art of Albert Jay Nock, Henry Regnery Company, pp. 183–84.
- ^ Blonder, Edward G. (17 July 1941). "A Reply To Albert Jay Nock 's Articles On "The Jewish Problem " | The Sentinel | 17 July 1941 | Newspapers | The National Library of Israel". The Sentinel. p. 11. Archived from the original on 13 June 2022. Retrieved 13 June 2022.
- ^ Albert Jay Nock (May 16, 1998). "Autobiographical Sketch (unpublished piece written for Paul Palmer, editor of the American Mercury Magazine, c. 1936)". alumnus.caltech.edu. California Institute of Technology. Archived from the original on June 29, 2017. Retrieved 12 July 2017.
- ISBN 978-0-7867-2689-9.
- ^ Wreszin, Michael (1969). "Albert Jay Nock and the Anarchist Elitist Tradition in America", American Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 2, Part 1, pp. 165–89.
- ^ Nock, Albert Jay (1924). "On Doing the Right Thing". American Mercury. 3 (11): 257–62.
- ^ Nitsche, Charles G. (1981). Albert Jay Nock and Frank Chodorov: Case Studies in Recent American Individualist and Anti-statist Thought, (Ph.D. Dissertation), University of Maryland.
- ISBN 978-0070364943.
- ISBN 978-0812240498.
- ^ Francis Neilson; Albert Jay Nock, eds. (1921). The Freeman. Vol. 3. Freeman Incorporated. p. 391.
- ^ The Thomist. Thomist Press. 1951. p. 302.
- ISBN 978-1412816878.
- ^ Robert Sherrill (June 11, 1988). "William F. Buckley Lived Off Evil As Mold Lives Off Garbage". The Nation. The Nation Company. Archived from the original on February 20, 2017. Retrieved 23 July 2017.
One of Will Sr.'s favorite authors, Albert Jay Nock, became a personal friend and was often in the Buckley household when Bill was growing up. Along with being anti-democratic, Nock was, at least in his later years, "virulently anti-Semitic." Young Buckley fell under Nock's spell and never quit quoting him. Another of Will Sr.'s friends, Merwin K. Hart, was one of America's most notorious anti-Semites for three decades.
{{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) - ^ Paul Vitello (15 September 2012). "Michael Wreszin, Biographer of American Radicals, Dies at 85". The New York Times. Archived from the original on March 1, 2017. Retrieved 23 July 2017.
- ISBN 978-0870571305.
Jewish had been for [Henry] Adams what Finkman became for Nock, a synonym for avarice and materialism. When Nock lamented the presence of Jews and other undesirables in what he seemed to consider his private study, the New York Public Library, he echoed the fierce resentment of the elderly Adams against the presence of Jews in places that he loved, and on boats and trains.
- ^ Stanley Kunitz (1955). Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature. Supplement. H. W. Wilson. p. 721.
- ^ Albert Jay Nock (19 August 2021). Journal of Forgotten Days, May 1934–October 1935. Hinsdale, Illinois: H. Gegnery Company. p. 47. Archived from the original on 25 September 2020. Retrieved 24 July 2017.
- ^ Albert Jay Nock (19 August 2021). Journal of Forgotten Days, May 1934–October 1935. Hinsdale, Illinois: H. Gegnery Company. p. 56. Archived from the original on 9 September 2020. Retrieved 24 July 2017.
- ISBN 978-0465003341.
A year later, in conversation with Mr. Nock, my father disclosed that he had voted for Willkie, thus departing from a near-lifelong resolution, beginning in his thirties, never to vote for any political candidate. He now affirmed, with Mr. Nock's hearty approval, his determination to renew his vows of abstinence, Willkie having been revealed—I remember the term he used—as a "mountebank." "They are all mountebanks", Mr. Nock said.
- ISBN 9780870571305.
Nock didn't vote in 1932; in fact, he couldn't remember when he had last voted. He couldn't even remember the candidates, but he had, he claimed, weighed the issues carefully before casting a write-in vote for Jefferson Davis.
- ISBN 978-0814781081.
- ISBN 978-1439128794.
His attitude toward voting (and toward Jefferson Davis) is given in this passage: I once voted at a presidential election. There being no real issue at stake, and neither candidate commanding any respect whatever, I cast my vote for Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. I knew Jeff was dead, but I voted on Artemus Ward's principle that if we can't have a live man who amounts to anything, by all means let's have a first-rate corpse.
- ^ Albert Jay Nock (1933). "What the American Votes For". In Henry Louis Mencken; George Jean Nathan (eds.). The American Mercury. Vol. 28. Knopf. p. 176.
- ISBN 978-1610163927.
- ^ Claude Moore Fuess; Emory Shelvy Basford, eds. (1947). Unseen Harvests: A Treasury of Teaching. Macmillan. p. 610.
- ISBN 978-0870571305.
Further reading
- Cline, Edward (January 8, 2009). "Albert Jay Nock: How to Throw the Fight for Freedom". Capitalism Magazine. Archived from the original on October 3, 2013.
- Hamilton, Charles (2008). "Nock, Albert J. (1870–1945)". In OCLC 750831024.
- Opitz, Edmund A (1975). "The Durable Mr. Nock" (PDF). The Intercollegiate Review. X (1): 25–31.
- Riggenbach, Jeff (September 10, 2010). "Albert Jay Nock and the Libertarian Tradition". Mises Daily. Ludwig von Mises Institute.
- Ludwig von Mises Institute.
External links
- Works by Albert Jay Nock at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Albert Jay Nock at Internet Archive
- The Nockian Society Books available through one of the original founders and Honorable Secretary, Robert M. Thornton.
- Works by Albert Jay Nock, at JSTOR
- The Dangers of Literacy (Nock, 1934), reprinted in The American Conservative
- Literature Library: Albert Jay Nock works published by Ludwig von Mises Institute
- Nock on Education by Wendy McElroy
- Will Lissner remembers Nock
- Fulton's Lair's Nockian Page : A collection of Nock's essays
- Yale Library : Correspondence, photographs, and related drawings annotated and donated to Yale University by Ruth Robinson
- Albert Jay Nock, Writings
- Albert Jay Nock papers (MS 375). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.[17]