Posts in "Albert Jay Nock"

By Ryan Ekvall at 9:44AM

Jul 20, 2011

What Will Replace Statism?

Albert Jay Nock In Walter E. William's autobiography, Up From The Projects, the economist recalls a lecture he gave in South Africa around the time apartheid was coming to an end. Williams told South Africans their problem "wasn't ending apartheid but ﬁguring out what was going to replace it."

After reading Albert Jay Nock's Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, I wonder if we needn't have the same concern in our society today. Instead of apartheid, we need to replace statism. Nock proposes the New Deal was the final writing on the wall for the American people, in kind with Nazism, Communism and Fascism -- that is, just another form of statism. Our society would necessarily degenerate and eventually crumble like Rome after the fall of Marcus Aurelias.

"History goes on to its end, carrying all incidental and temporary leadership in its sweep, and throwing it away when it has served its little shred of particular purpose," writes Nock. So, after the American presidency is dethroned, what comes next? According to Nock, after the dust clears comes more statism, as the cycle simply repeats itself. The majority of people don't want the responsibility of liberty, but love its rhetoric -- kind of like a certain popular religion.

My question is this: if we perceive correctly that America is dangerously close to an imperceivable edge, what happens when the wheels come off? And if we are to replace the current wheels with liberty, what happens when the brakes cannot stop us from going off that imperceivable edge?

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By Bonnie Kristian at 12:37PM

Nov 17, 2009

Our Enemy, the State

I'm currently reading Albert Jay Nock's Our Enemy, the State for a Ron Paul book club I've joined, so I was happy to see a post about it on the Mises Institute blog. As is explained there,

There are two political institutions, Nock held: government and the state. Government is an agency of society limited to negative interventions aimed at protecting individuals against force and fraud; governments are established to secure persons in their rights and to punish any trespass on them.

The state, on the other hand, intervenes positively in society; it dragoons people into the chase after various national goals, wars on poverty, provides welfare, pays out subsidies, offers cradle-to-grave security, and so on.

Nock opposed the state, but not government. He argues that appropriate and severely limited government (but not the state) can effectively preserve liberty. Meanwhile, unfortunately, "the general public, however disillusioned with politicians, still has faith in politics as the means of curing all the ills of society and improving the quality of life. Hopefully, people will someday realize that what counts is the overextension of state power, not who holds public office."

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By Seth Mann at 5:34PM

Oct 6, 2009

Albert Jay Nock: Forgotten Man of the Old Right

A fantastic article from Jeffery Tucker at the Mises Institute:

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...

Read the rest here.

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By Jeremy Hodes at 6:32PM

Jul 27, 2009

Ron Paul and the Remnant

"When everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society." Albert Jay Nock

If you're like me you've seen more of Ron Paul's speeches than you can count. And no doubt during several of those speeches you too have heard mention of what Dr. Paul calls the "remnant," a group that cannot be counted but is still alive and well. When I first heard him mention the remnant, I didn't know exactly what he meant but my curiosity grew each time I heard him mention it. Through my research I ran across an old libertarian thinker by the name of Albert Jay Nock who wrote in the first half of the 20th century and defined the term in an essay entitled "Isaiah's Job." Both Dr. Paul and Nock discuss the uncountable nature of the remnant. I believe by comparing Nock's definition of the remnant to Dr. Paul's description of our movement that we can understand exactly what Dr. Paul means to tell us by mentioning it in his speeches.