Our Enemy, the State
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ISBN 1502585634 | | |
Text | Our Enemy, the State at Wikisource |
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This article is part of a series on |
Conservatism in the United States |
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Our Enemy, the State is the best-known book by
Legacy
The book has been cited as an influence by a wide range of conservative and libertarian thinkers and political figures, including
It is seen as a key foundation for the modern
In arguing that John F. Kennedy was actually Conservative, Ira Stoll cited his ownership of Our Enemy, the State as well as The Man Versus the State, by 19th century leader of the individualist movement, Herbert Spencer.[6]
Summary
Nock argues in the book that something like the modern conservative movement should be formed of what he described as The Remnant, those remaining people who recognize The State as a destructive burden on society.[7]
Nock is not attacking government, per se, but "The State", authority that violates society itself, claiming to rule in the people's name but taking power away from the community.[8][9] He states that the expansion of the state comes at the expense of social power, shrinking the role of community. Denying that the two are the same, he points out the historic origin of authoritarian government through conquering warlords and robber barons.
Nock argues that the
While he did laud the Founders for establishing a legitimate government, as opposed to state, that was intended to protect natural rights.[12]
The state, according to Nock, "turns every contingency into a resource for accumulating power in itself, always at the expense of social power". People become conditioned to accept their lost freedom and social power as normal, in each subsequent generation, and so the State continues to expand, and society to shrink.[13] He cites Thomas Paine as pointing out that the state "even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one".
He goes on to quote Sigmund Freud as noting that government does not actually show any tendency to suppress crime, but only to protect its own monopoly over it. Along with Paine and Freud, Nock talks about the usurpation of power and resources by The State in the context of Benjamin Franklin, Henry George, and others. In fact, he argues that this seizure is comparable to the gathering of land by the Crown in 1066 England, be it in the Federalization of land in Western states or elsewhere as "needed" for control over the populace.
There are two methods, according to Nock, by which a man's needs and desires can be satisfied.[10]
One is the production and exchange of wealth, which he sees as natural, honest, and healthy. The other is by the initiation of force to rob others of it, whether by conquest, confiscation, slavery, or other coercive means. The former he sees as freedom, the latter as the inevitable function of the state.
Like
Nock sees The State as expanding radically under
References
- ^ Ayn Rand and the World She Made
Rand is channeling the ideas of Albert Jay Nock, who argued that members of a society can be grouped in one or the other of two opposing camps: either they are "economic man," those who produce what they need to survive, or "political man," those who use charm or coercion to live off the productivity of others. Rand's fascinating contribution to this formulation is her depiction of the psychology. Nock's political man is her second-hander; his economic man is her individualist hero, reliant on his own ego as the fountainhead of productivity and value. In Roark's self-defense at trial, he says, "The creator's concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite's concern is the conquest of men." - ^ The Wisdom of Albert Jay Nock: A Collection of Quotations
- ^ Debating the American Conservative Movement: 1945 to the Present
In 1935, journalist Albert Jay Nock wrote a book widely circulated by conservatives in the post-SecondWorldWar years, Our Enemy, the State. In the book, he outlined the conservative complaint against centralized government as a parasite that drained the productive forces from society. The State usurped individual rights in the name of the amorphous collective. For postwar conservatives such as Nock, the New Deal welfare state embodied the worst aspects of the growth of leviathan government in America... - ^ The Right Talk: How Conservatives Transformed The Great Society into the Economic Society
Although his Our Enemy, the State achieved only limited acclaim at the time of its initial release, its lasting influence was confirmed by its being republished on two occasions. Postwar intellectuals such as William F. Buckley, Jr., and John Chamberlain paid homage to Nock for informing their views. - ^ OUR ENEMY THE STATE, Illinois Review
- ^ JKK, Conservative
- ^ The Conservative Ascendancy: how the GOP right made political history
- ^ Monica Perez — Our Enemy the State
- ^ Do You Hate the State? — Murray Rothbard — The Mises Institute
- ^ a b >Stylish Elegance: A Biography of Albert Jay Nock
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 (1781-1789), the association of states without a central government. - ^ Our Enemy, the State — Ludwig von Mises Institute
- ^ The State faces humiliation and bankruptcy, and that's the good news
But until the New Deal, while virtually everyone would have recognized that the United States had a government, whether it had a “state” would have been a much more complicated question. For Nock, the government is the machinery created by the Founders to protect our individual rights, our shores from foreign enemies, and, well, that's about it. - ^ The Counsel of Despair? Albert J. Nock on Self-Government
- ^ The Death of Conservatism
- ^ Our Enemy, the State — Laissez-Faire Books
External links
- Our Enemy, the State (Internet Archive)
- Our Enemy, the State quotations on Wikiquote