Anarchist's Progress
Albert Jay Nock
[This article appeared in the March 1927 issue of the
American Mercury, and was reprinted, by Nock, in On Doing
the Right Thing]
When I was seven years old, playing in front of our house on the
outskirts of Brooklyn one morning, a policeman stopped and chatted
with me for a few moments. He was a kindly man, of a Scandinavian
blonde type with pleasant blue eyes, and I took to him at once. He
sealed our acquaintance permanently by telling me a story that I
thought was immensely funny; I laughed over it at intervals all day.
I do not remember what it was, but it had to do with the antics of a
drove of geese in our neighbourhood. He impressed me as the most
entertaining and delightful person that I had seen in a long time,
and I spoke of him to my parents with great pride.
At this time I did not know what policemen were. No doubt I had
seen them, but not to notice them. Now, naturally, after meeting
this highly prepossessing specimen, I wished to find out all I could
about them, so I took the matter up with our old colored cook. I
learned from her that my fine new friend represented something that
was called the law; that the law was very good and great, and that
everyone should obey and respect it. This was reasonable; if it were
so, then my admirable friend just fitted his place, and was even
more highly to be thought of, if possible. I asked where the law
came from, and it was explained to me that men all over the country
got together on what was called election day, and chose certain
persons to make the law and others to see that it was carried out;
and that the sum-total of all this mechanism was called our
government. This again was as it should be; the men I knew, such as
my father, my uncle George, and Messrs. So-and-so among the
neighbours (running them over rapidly in my mind), could do this
sort of thing handsomely, and there was probably a good deal in the
idea. But what was it all for! Why did we have law and government,
anyway! Then I learned that there were persons called criminals;
some of them stole, some hurt or killed people or set fire to
houses; and it was the duty of men like my friend the policeman to
protect us from them. If he saw any he would catch them and lock
them up, and they would be punished according to the law.
A year or so later we moved to another house in the same
neighbourhood, only a short distance away. On the corner of the
block -- rather a long block -- behind our house stood a large
one-story wooden building, very dirty and shabby, called the Wigwam.
While getting the lie of my new surroundings, I considered this
structure and remarked with disfavour the kind of people who seemed
to be making themselves at home there. Some one told me it was a "political
headquarters," but I did not know what that meant, and
therefore did not connect it with my recent researches into law and
government. I had little curiosity about the Wigwam. My parents
never forbade my going there, but my mother once casually told me
that it was a pretty good place to keep away from, and I agreed with
her.
Two months later I heard someone say that election day was shortly
coming on, and I sparked up at once; this, then, was the day when
the lawmakers were to be chosen. There had been great doings at the
Wigwam lately; in the evenings, too, I had seen noisy processions of
drunken loafers passing our house, carrying transparencies and tin
torches that sent up clouds of kerosene-smoke. When I had asked what
these meant, I was answered in one word, "politics,"
uttered in a disparaging tone, but this signified nothing to me. The
fact is that my attention had been attracted by a steam-calliope
that went along with one of the first of these processions, and I
took it to mean that there was a circus going on; and when I found
that there was no circus, I was disappointed and did not care what
else might be taking place.
On hearing of election day, however, the light broke in on me. I
was really witnessing the August performances that I had heard of
from our cook. All these processions of yelling hoodlums who sweat
and stank in the parboiling humidity of the Indian-summer evenings
-- all the squalid goings-on in the Wigwam -- all these, it seemed,
were part and parcel of an election. I noticed that the men whom I
knew in the neighbourhood were not prominent in this election; my
uncle George voted, I remember, and when he dropped in at our house
that evening, I overheard him say that going to the polls was a
filthy business. I could not make it out. Nothing could be clearer
than that the leading spirits in the whole affair were most dreadful
swine; and I wondered by what kind of magic they could bring forth
anything so majestic, good and venerable as the law. But I kept my
questionings to myself for some reason, though, as a rule, 1 was
quite a hand for pestering older people about matters that seemed
anomalous. Finally, I gave it up as hopeless, and thought no more
about the subject for three years.
An incident of that election night, however, stuck in my memory.
Some devoted brother, very far gone in whisky, fell by the wayside
in a vacant lot just back of our house, on his way to the Wigwam to
await the returns. He lay there all night, mostly in a comatose
state. At intervals of something like half an hour he roused himself
up in the darkness, apparently aware that he was not doing his duty
by the occasion, and tried to sing the chorus of "Marching
Through Georgia," but he could never get quite through three
measures of the first bar before relapsing into somnolence. It was
very funny; he always began so bravely and earnestly, and always
petered out so lamentably. I often think of him. His general sense
of political duty, I must say, still seems to me as intelligent and
as competent as that of any man I have met in the many, many years
that have gone by since then, and his mode of expressing it still
seems about as effective as any I could suggest.
When I was just past my tenth birthday we left Brooklyn and went
to live in a pleasant town of ten thousand population. An orphaned
cousin made her home with us, a pretty girl, who soon began to cut a
fair swath among the young men of the town. One of these was an
extraordinary person, difficult to describe. My father, a great
tease, at once detected his resemblance to a chimpanzee, and bored
my cousin abominably by always speaking of him as Chim. The young
man was not a popular idol by any means, yet no one thought badly of
him. He was accepted everywhere as a source of legitimate diversion,
and in the graduated, popular scale of local speech was invariably
designated as a fool -- a born fool, for which there was no help.
When I heard he was a lawyer, I was so astonished that I actually
went into the chicken court one day to hear him plead some trifling
case, out of sheer curiosity to see him in action; and I must say I
got my money's worth. Presently the word went around that he was
going to run for Congress, and stood a good chance of being elected;
and what amazed me above all was that no one seemed to see anything
out of the way about it.
My tottering faith in law and government got a hard jolt from
this. Here was a man, a very good fellow indeed -- he had nothing in
common with the crew who herded around the Wigwam -- who was
regarded by the unanimous judgment of the community, without doubt,
peradventure, or exception, as having barely sense enough to come in
when it rained; and this was the man whom his party was sending to
Washington as contentedly as if he were some Draco or Solon. At this
point my sense of humour forged to the front and took permanent
charge of the situation, which was fortunate for me, since otherwise
my education would have been aborted, and I would perhaps, like so
many who have missed this great blessing, have gone in with the
reformers and uplifters; and such a close shave as this, in the
words of Rabelais, is a terrible thing to think upon. How many
reformers there have been in my day; how nobly and absurdly busy
they were, and how dismally unhumorous! I can dimly remember Pingree
and Altgeld in the Middle West, and Godkin, Strong, and Seth Low in
New York. During the nineties, the goodly fellowship of the prophets
buzzed about the whole country like flies around a tar-barrel --
and, Lord! where be they now?
It will easily be seen, I think, that the only unusual thing about
all this was that my mind was perfectly unprepossessed and blank
throughout. My experiences were surely not uncommon, and my
reasonings and inferences were no more than any child, who was more
than halfwitted, could have made without trouble. But my mind had
never been perverted or sophisticated; it was left to itself. I
never went to school, so I was never indoctrinated with
pseudo-patriotic fustian of any kind, and the plain, natural truth
of such matters as I have been describing, therefore, found its way
to my mind without encountering any artificial obstacle.
This freedom continued, happily, until my mind had matured and
toughened. When I went to college I had the great good luck to hit
on probably the only one in the country (there certainly is none
now) where all such subjects were so remote and unconsidered that
one would not know they existed. I had Greek, Latin, and
mathematics, and nothing else, but I had these until the cows came
home; then I had them all over again (or so it seemed) to make sure
nothing was left out; then I was given a bachelor's degree in the
liberal arts, and turned adrift. The idea was that if one wished to
go in for some special branch of learning, one should do it
afterward, on the foundation laid at college. The college's business
was to lay the foundation, and the authorities saw to it that we
were kept plentifully busy with the job. Therefore, all such
subjects as political history, political science, and political
economy were closed to me throughout my youth and early manhood; and
when the time came that I wished to look into them, I did it on my
own, without the interference of instructors, as any person who has
gone through a course of training similar to mine at college is
quite competent to do.
That time, however, came much later, and meanwhile I thought
little about law and government, as I had other fish to fry; I was
living more or less out of the world, occupied with literary
studies. Occasionally some incident happened that set my mind
perhaps a little farther along in the old sequences, but not often.
Once, I remember, I ran across the case of a boy who had been
sentenced to prison, a poor, scared little brat, who had intended
something no worse than mischief, and it turned out to be a crime.
The judge said he disliked to sentence the lad; it seemed the wrong
thing to do; but the law left him no option. I was struck by this.
The judge, then, was doing something as an official that he would
not dream of doing as a man; and he could do it without any sense of
responsibility, or discomfort, simply because he was acting as an
official and not as a man. On this principle of action, it seemed to
me that one could commit almost any kind of crime without getting
into trouble with one's conscience. Clearly, a great crime had been
committed against this boy; yet nobody who had had a hand in it --
the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, the complaining witness, the
policemen and jailers -- felt any responsibility about it, because
they were not acting as men, but as officials. Clearly, too, the
public did not regard them as criminals, but rather as upright and
conscientious men.
The idea came to me then, vaguely but unmistakably, that if the
primary intention of government was not to abolish crime but merely
to monopolize crime, no better device could be found for doing it
than the inculcation of precisely this frame of mind in the
officials and in the public; for the effect of this was to exempt
both from any allegiance to those sanctions of humanity or decency
which anyone of either class, acting as an individual, would have
felt himself bound to respect -- nay, would have wished to respect.
This idea was vague at the moment, as I say, and I did not work it
out for some years, but I think I never quite lost track of it from
that time.
Presently I got acquainted in a casual way with some
officeholders, becoming quite friendly with one in particular, who
held a high elective office. One day he happened to ask me how I
would reply to a letter that bothered him; it was a query about the
fitness of a certain man for an appointive job. His recommendation
would have weight; he liked the man, and really wanted to recommend
him -- moreover, he was under great political pressure to recommend
him -- but he did not think the man was qualified. Well, then, I
suggested offhand, why not put it just that way? -- it seemed all
fair and straightforward. "Ah yes," he said, "but if
I wrote such a letter as that, you see, I wouldn't be reelected."
This took me aback a bit, and I demurred somewhat. "That's all
very well," he kept insisting, "but I wouldn't be
reelected." Thinking to give the discussion a semi-humorous
turn, I told him that the public, after all, had rights in the
matter; he was their hired servant, and if he were not reelected it
would mean merely that the public did not want him to work for them
any more, which was quite within their competence. Moreover, if they
threw him out on any such issue as this, he ought to take it as a
compliment; indeed, if he were reelected, would it not tend to show
in some measure that he and the people did not fully understand each
other! He did not like my tone of levity, and dismissed the subject
with the remark that I knew nothing of practical politics, which was
no doubt true.
Perhaps a year after this I had my first view of a legislative
body in action. I visited the capital of a certain country, and
listened attentively to the legislative proceedings. What I wished
to observe, first of all, was the kind of business that was mostly
under discussion; and next, I wished to get as good a general idea
as I could of the kind of men who were entrusted with this business.
I had a friend on the spot, formerly a newspaper reporter who had
been in the press gallery for years; he guided me over the
government buildings, taking me everywhere and showing me everything
I asked to see.
As we walked through some corridors in the basement of the
Capitol, I remarked the resonance of the stonework. "Yes,"
he said, thoughtfully, "these walls, in their time, have echoed
to the uncertain footsteps of many a drunken statesman." His
words were made good in a few moments when we heard a spirited
commotion ahead, which we found to proceed from a good-sized room,
perhaps a committee room, opening off the corridor. The door being
open, we stopped, and looked in on a strange sight.
In the centre of the room, a florid, square-built, portly man was
dancing an extraordinary kind of break-down, or kazak dance. He
leaped straight up to an incredible height, spun around like a
teetotum, stamped his feet, then suddenly squatted and hopped
through several measures in a squatting position, his hands on his
knees, and then leaped up in the air and spun around again. He blew
like a turkeycock, and occasionally uttered hoarse cries; his
protruding and fiery eyes were suffused with blood, and the veins
stood out on his neck and forehead like the strings of a bass-viol.
He was drunk.
About a dozen others, also very drunk, stood around him in
crouching postures, some clapping their hands and some slapping
their knees, keeping time to the dance. One of them caught sight of
us in the doorway, came up, and began to talk to me in a maundering
fashion about his constituents. He was a loathsome human being; I
have seldom seen one so repulsive. I could make nothing of what he
said; he was almost inarticulate; and in pronouncing certain
syllables he would slaver and spit, so that I was more occupied with
keeping out of his range than with listening to him. He kept trying
to buttonhole me, and I kept moving backward; he had backed me
thirty feet down the corridor when my friend came along and
disengaged me; and as we resumed our way, my friend observed for my
consolation that "you pretty well need a mackintosh when X
talks to you, even when he is sober."
This man, I learned, was interested in the looting of certain
valuable public lands; nobody had heard of his ever being interested
in any other legislative measures. The florid man who was dancing
was interested in nothing but a high tariff on certain manufactures;
he shortly became a Cabinet officer. Throughout my stay I was struck
by seeing how much of the real business of legislation was in this
category -- how much, that is, had to do with putting unearned money
in the pockets of beneficiaries -- and what fitful and perfunctory
attention the legislators gave to any other kind of business. I was
even more impressed by the prevalent air of cynicism; by the
frankness with which everyone seemed to acquiesce in the view of
Voltaire, that government is merely a device for taking money out of
one person's pocket and putting it into another's.
These experiences, commonplace as they were, prepared me to pause
over and question certain sayings of famous men, when subsequently I
ran across them, which otherwise I would perhaps have passed by
without thinking about them. When I came upon the saying of Lincoln,
that the way of the politician is "a long step removed from
common honesty," it set a problem for me. I wondered just why
this should be generally true, if it were true. When I read the
remark of Mr. Jefferson, that "whenever a man has cast a
longing eye on office, a rottenness begins in his conduct," I
remembered the judge who had sentenced the boy, and my officeholding
acquaintance who was so worried about reelection. I tried to
reexamine their position, as far as possible putting myself in their
place, and made a great effort to understand it favorably. My first
view of a parliamentary body came back to me vividly when I read the
despondent observation of John Bright, that he had sometimes known
the British Parliament to do a good thing, but never just because it
was a good thing. In the meantime I had observed many legislatures,
and their principal occupations and preoccupations seemed to me
precisely like those of the first one I ever saw; and while their
personnel was not by any means composed throughout of noisy and
disgusting scoundrels (neither, I hasten to say, was the first one),
it was so unimaginably inept that it would really have to be seen to
be believed. I cannot think of a more powerful stimulus to one's
intellectual curiosity, for instance, than to sit in the galleries
of the last Congress, contemplate its general run of membership, and
then recall these sayings of Lincoln, Mr. Jefferson, and John
Bright.[1]
It struck me as strange that these phenomena seemed never to stir
any intellectual curiosity in anybody. As far as I know, there is no
record of its ever having occurred to Lincoln that the fact he had
remarked was striking enough to need accounting for; nor yet to Mr.
Jefferson, whose intellectual curiosity was almost boundless; nor
yet to John Bright. As for the people around me, their attitudes
seemed strangest of all. They all disparaged politics. Their common
saying, "Oh, that's politics," always pointed to something
that in any other sphere of action they would call shabby and
disreputable. But they never asked themselves why it was that in
this one sphere of action alone they took shabby and disreputable
conduct as a matter of course. It was all the more strange because
these same people still somehow assumed that politics existed for
the promotion of the highest social purposes. They assumed that the
State's primary purpose was to promote through appropriate
institutions the general welfare of its members.
This assumption, whatever it amounted to, furnished the rationale
of their patriotism, and they held to it with a tenacity that on
slight provocation became vindictive and fanatical. Yet all of them
were aware, and if pressed, could not help acknowledging, that more
than 90 per cent of the State's energy was employed directly against
the general welfare. Thus one might say that they seemed to have one
set of credenda for week-days and another for Sundays, and never to
ask themselves what actual reasons they had for holding either.
I did not know how to take this, nor do I now. Let me draw a rough
parallel. Suppose vast numbers of people to be contemplating a
machine that they had been told was a plough, and very valuable --
indeed, that they could not get on without it -- some even saying
that its design came down in some way from on high. They have great
feelings of pride and jealousy about this machine, and will give up
their lives for it if they are told it is in danger. Yet they all
see that it will not plough well, no matter what hands are put to
manage it, and in fact does hardly any ploughing at all; sometimes
only with enormous difficulty and continual tinkering and adjustment
can it be got to scratch a sort of furrow, very poor and short,
hardly practicable, and ludicrously disproportionate to the cost and
pains of cutting it. On the other hand, the machine harrows
perfectly, almost automatically. It looks like a harrow, has the
history of a harrow, and even when the most enlightened effort is
expended on it to make it act like a plough, it persists, except for
an occasional six or eight per cent of efficiency, in acting like a
harrow.
Surely such a spectacle would make an intelligent being raise some
enquiry about the nature and original intention of that machine. Was
it really a plough? Was it ever meant to plough with! Was it not
designed and constructed for harrowing? Yet none of the anomalies
that I had been observing ever raised any enquiry about the nature
and original intention of the State. They were merely acquiesced in.
At most, they were put down feebly to the imperfections of human
nature which render mismanagement and perversion of every good
institution to some extent inevitable; and this is absurd, for these
anomalies do not appear in the conduct of any other human
institution. It is no matter of opinion, but of open and notorious
fact, that they do not. There are anomalies in the church and in the
family that are significantly analogous; they will bear
investigation, and are getting it; but the analogies are by no means
complete, and are mostly due to the historical connection of these
two institutions with the State.
Everyone knows that the State claims and exercises the monopoly of
crime that I spoke of a moment ago, and that it makes this monopoly
as strict as it can. It forbids private murder, but itself organizes
murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself
lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property
of citizen or of alien. There is, for example, no human right,
natural or Constitutional, that we have not seen nullified by the
United States Government. Of all the crimes that are committed for
gain or revenge, there is not one that we have not seen it commit --
murder, mayhem, arson, robbery, fraud, criminal collusion and
connivance. On the other hand, we have all remarked the enormous
relative difficulty of getting the State to effect any measure for
the general welfare. Compare the difficulty of securing conviction
in cases of notorious malfeasance, and in cases of petty private
crime. Compare the smooth and easy going of the Teapot Dome
transactions with the obstructionist behaviour of the State toward a
national child-labour law. Suppose one should try to get the State
to put the same safeguards (no stronger) around service-income that
with no pressure at all it puts around capital-income: what chance
would one have? It must not be understood that I bring these matters
forward to complain of them. I am not concerned with complaints or
reforms, but only with the exhibition of anomalies that seem to me
to need accounting for.
In the course of some desultory reading I noticed that the
historian Parkman, at the outset of his volume on the conspiracy of
Pontiac, dwells with some puzzlement, apparently, upon the fact that
the Indians had not formed a State. Mr. Jefferson, also, who knew
the Indians well, remarked the same fact -- that they lived in a
rather highly organized society, but had never formed a State.
Bicknell, the historian of Rhode Island, has some interesting
passages that bear upon the same point, hinting that the collisions
between the Indians and the whites may have been largely due to a
misunderstanding about the nature of land-tenure; that the Indians,
knowing nothing of the British system of land-tenure, understood
their land-sales and land-grants as merely an admission of the
whites to the same communal use of land that they themselves
enjoyed. I noticed, too, that Marx devotes a good deal of space in
Das Kapital to proving that economic exploitation cannot take place
in any society until the exploited class has been expropriated from
the land. These observations attracted my attention as possibly
throwing a strong side light upon the nature of the State and the
primary purpose of government, and I made note of them accordingly.
At this time I was a good deal in Europe. I was in England and
Germany during the Tangier incident, studying the circumstances and
conditions that led up to the late war. My facilities for this were
exceptional, and I used them diligently. Here I saw the State
behaving just as I had seen it behave at home. Moreover, remembering
the political theories of the eighteenth century, and the
expectations put upon them, I was struck with the fact that the
republican, constitutional-monarchical and autocratic States behaved
exactly alike. This has never been sufficiently remarked. There was
no practical distinction to be drawn among England, France, Germany,
and Russia; in all these countries the State acted with unvarying
consistency and unfailing regularity against the interests of the
immense, the overwhelming majority of its people. So flagrant and
flagitious, indeed, was the action of the State in all these
countries, that its administrative officials, especially its
diplomats, would immediately, in any other sphere of action, be put
down as a professional-criminal class; just as would the
corresponding officials in my own country, as I had already
remarked. It is a noteworthy fact, indeed, concerning all that has
happened since then, that if in any given circumstances one went on
the assumption that they were a professional-criminal class, one
could predict with accuracy what they would do and what would
happen; while on any other assumption one could predict almost
nothing. The accuracy of my own predictions during the war and
throughout the Peace Conference was due to nothing but their being
based on this assumption.
The Liberal party was in power in England in 1911, and my
attention became attracted to its tenets. I had already seen
something of Liberalism in America as a kind of glorified
mugwumpery. The Cleveland Administration had long before proved what
everybody already knew, that there was no essential difference
between the Republican and Democratic parties; an election meant
merely that one was in office and wished to stay in, and the other
was out and wished to get in. I saw precisely the same relation
prevailing between the two major parties in England, and I was to
see later the same relation sustained by the Labour Administration
of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald. All these political permutations resulted
only in what John Adams admirably called "a change of
impostors." But I was chiefly interested in the basic theory of
Liberalism. This seemed to be that the State is no worse than a
degenerate or Perverted institution, beneficent in its original
intention, and susceptible of restoration by the simple expedient of
"putting good men in office."
I had already seen this experiment tried on several scales of
magnitude, and observed that it came to nothing commensurate with
the expectations put upon it or the enormous difficulty of arranging
it. Later I was to see it tried on an unprecedented scale, for
almost all the Governments engaged in the war were Liberal, notably
the English and our own. Its disastrous results in the case of the
Wilson Administration are too well known to need comment; though I
do not wish to escape the responsibility of saying that of all forms
of political impostorship, Liberalism always seemed to me the most
vicious, because the most pretentious and specious. The general
upshot of my observations, however, was to show me that whether in
the hands of Liberal or Conservative, Republican or Democrat, and
whether under nominal constitutionalism, republicanism or autocracy,
the mechanism of the State would work freely and naturally in but
one direction, namely, against the general welfare of the people.
So I set about finding out what I could about the origin of the
State, to see whether its mechanism was ever really meant to work in
any other direction; and here I came upon a very odd fact. All the
current popular assumptions about the origin of the State rest upon
sheer guesswork; none of them upon actual investigation. The
treatises and textbooks that came into my hands were also based,
finally, upon guesswork. Some authorities guessed that the State was
originally formed by this-or-that mode of social agreement; others,
by a kind of muddling empiricism; others, by the will of God; and so
on. Apparently none of these, however, had taken the plain course of
going back upon the record as far as possible to ascertain how it
actually had been formed, and for what purpose. It seemed that
enough information must be available; the formation of the State in
America, for example, was a matter of relatively recent history, and
one must be able to find out a great deal about it. Consequently I
began to look around to see whether anyone had ever anywhere made
any such investigation, and if so, what it amounted to.
I then discovered that the matter had, indeed, been investigated
by scientific methods, and that all the scholars of the Continent
knew about it, not as something new or startling, but as a sheer
commonplace. The State did not originate in any form of social
agreement, or with any disinterested view of promoting order and
justice. Far otherwise. The State originated in conquest and
confiscation, as a device for maintaining the stratification of
society permanently into two classes -- an owning and exploiting
class, relatively small, and a propertyless dependent class. Such
measures of order and justice as it established were incidental and
ancillary to this purpose; it was not interested in any that did not
serve this purpose; and it resisted the establishment of any that
were contrary to it. No State known to history originated in any
other manner, or for any other purpose than to enable the continuous
economic exploitation of one class by another.[2]
This at once cleared up all the anomalies which I had found so
troublesome. One could see immediately, for instance, why the
hunting tribes and primitive peasants never formed a State.
Primitive peasants never made enough of an economic accumulation to
be worth stealing; they lived from hand to mouth. The hunting tribes
of North America never formed a State, because the hunter was not
exploitable. There was no way to make another man hunt for you; he
would go off in the woods and forget to come back; and if he were
expropriated from certain hunting-grounds, he would merely move on
beyond them, the territory being so large and the population so
sparse. Similarly, since the State's own primary intention was
essentially criminal, one could see why it cares only to monopolize
crime, and not to suppress it; this explained the anomalous
behaviour of officials, and showed why it is that in their public
capacity, whatever their private character, they appear necessarily
as a professional-crimina1 class; and it further accounted for the
fact that the State never moves disinterestedly for the general
welfare, except grudgingly and under great pressure.
Again, one could perceive at once the basic misapprehension which
forever nullifies the labors of Liberalism and Reform. It was once
quite seriously suggested to me by some neighbours that I should go
to Congress. I asked them why they wished me to do that, and they
replied with some complimentary phrases about the satisfaction of
having some one of a somewhat different type "amongst those
damned rascals down there." "Yes, but," I said, "don't
you see that it would be only a matter of a month or so -- a very
short time, anyway -- before I should be a damned rascal, too!"
No, they did not see this; they were rather taken aback; would I
explain! "Suppose," I said, "that you put in a
Sunday-school superintendent or a Y.M.C.A. secretary to run an
assignation-house on Broadway. He might trim off some of the coarser
fringes of the job, such as the badger game and the panel game, and
put things in what Mayor Gaynor used to call a state of æoutward
order and decency,' but he must run an assignation-house, or he
would promptly hear from the owners." This was a new view to
them, and they went away thoughtful.
Finally, one could perceive the reason for the matter that most
puzzled me when I first observed a legislature in action, namely,
the almost exclusive concern of legislative bodies with such
measures as tend to take money out of one set of pockets and put it
into another -- the preoccupation with converting labour-made
property into law-made property, and redistributing its ownership.
The moment one becomes aware that just this, over and above a purely
legal distribution of the ownership of natural resources, is what
the State came into being for, and what it yet exists for, one
immediately sees that the legislative bodies are acting altogether
in character, and otherwise one cannot possibly give oneself an
intelligent account of their behaviour.[3]
Speaking for a moment in the technical terms of economics, there
are two general means whereby human beings can satisfy their needs
and desires. One is by work -- i.e., by applying labour and capital
to natural resources for the production of wealth, or to
facilitating the exchange of labour-products. This is called the
economic means. The other is by robbery -- i.e., the appropriation
of the labour-products of others without compensation. This is
called the political means. The State, considered functionally, may
be described as the organization of the political means, enabling a
comparatively small class of beneficiaries to satisfy their needs
and desires through various delegations of the taxing power, which
have no vestige of support in natural right, such as private
land-ownership, tariffs, franchises, and the like.
It is a primary instinct of human nature to satisfy one's needs
and desires with the least possible exertion; everyone tends by
instinctive preference to use the political means rather than the
economic means, if he can do so. The great desideratum in a tariff,
for instance, is its license to rob the domestic consumer of the
difference between the price of an article in a competitive and a
non-competitive market. Every manufacturer would like this privilege
of robbery if he could get it, and he takes steps to get it if he
can, thus illustrating the powerful instinctive tendency to climb
out of the exploited class, which lives by the economic means
(exploited, because the cost of this privilege must finally come out
of production, there being nowhere else for it to come from), and
into the class which lives, wholly or partially, by the political
means.
This instinct -- and this alone -- is what gives the State its
almost impregnable strength. The moment one discerns this, one
understands the almost universal disposition to glorify and magnify
the State, and to insist upon the pretence that it is something
which it is not -- something, in fact, the direct opposite of what
it is. One understands the complacent acceptance of one set of
standards for the State's conduct, and another for private
organizations; of one set for officials, and another for private
persons. One understands at once the attitude of the press, the
Church and educational institutions, their careful inculcations of a
specious patriotism, their nervous and vindictive proscriptions of
opinion, doubt or even of question. One sees why purely fictitious
theories of the State and its activities are strongly, often
fiercely and violently, insisted on; why the simple fundamentals of
the very simply science of economics are shirked or veiled; and why,
finally, those who really know what kind of thing they are
promulgating, are loth to say so.
The outbreak of the war in 1914 found me entertaining the
convictions that I have here outlined. In the succeeding decade
nothing has taken place to attenuate them, but quite the contrary.
Having set out only to tell the story of how I came by them, and not
to expound them or indulge in any polemic for them, I may now bring
this narrative to an end, with a word about their practical outcome.
It has sometimes been remarked as strange that I never joined in
any agitation, or took the part of a propagandist for any movement
against the State, especially at a time when I had an unexampled
opportunity to do so. To do anything of the sort successfully, one
must have more faith in such processes than I have, and one must
also have a certain dogmatic turn of temperament, which I do not
possess. To be quite candid, I was never much for evangelization; I
am not sure enough that my opinions are right, and even if they
were, a second-hand opinion is a poor possession. Reason and
experience, I repeat, are all that determine our true beliefs. So I
never greatly cared that people should think my way, or tried much
to get them to do so. I should be glad if they thought -- if their
general turn, that is, were a little more for disinterested
thinking, and a little less for impetuous action motivated by mere
unconsidered prepossession; and what little I could ever do to
promote disinterested thinking has, I believe, been done.
According to my observations (for which I claim nothing but that
they are all I have to go by) inaction is better than wrong action
or premature right action, and effective right action can only
follow right thinking. "If a great change is to take place,"
said Edmund Burke, in his last words on the French Revolution, "the
minds of men will be fitted to it." Otherwise the thing does
not turn out well; and the processes by which men's minds are fitted
seem to me untraceable and imponderable, the only certainty about
them being that the share of any one person, or any one movement, in
determining them is extremely small. Various social superstitions,
such as magic, the divine right of kings, the Calvinist teleology,
and so on, have stood out against many a vigorous frontal attack,
and thrived on it; and when they finally disappeared, it was not
under attack. People simply stopped thinking in those terms; no one
knew just when or why, and no one even was much aware that they had
stopped. So I think it very possible that while we are saying, "Lo,
here!" and "Lo, there!" with our eye on this or that
revolution, usurpation, seizure of power, or what not, the
superstitions that surround the State are quietly disappearing in
the same way.[4]
My opinion of my own government and those who administer it can
probably be inferred from what I have written. Mr. Jefferson said
that if a centralization of power were ever effected at Washington,
the United States would have the most corrupt government on earth.
Comparisons are difficult, but I believe it has one that is
thoroughly corrupt, flagitious, tyrannical, oppressive. Yet if it
were in my power to pull down its whole structure overnight and set
up another of my own devising -- to abolish the State out of hand,
and replace it by an organization of the economic means -- I would
not do it, for the minds of Americans are far from fitted to any
such great change as this, and the effect would be only to lay open
the way for the worse enormities of usurpation -- possibly, who
knows! with myself as the usurper! After the French Revolution,
Napoleon!
Great and salutary social transformations, such as in the end do
not cost more than they come to, are not effected by political
shifts, by movements, by programs and platforms, least of all by
violent revolutions, but by sound and disinterested thinking. The
believers in action are numerous, their gospel is widely preached,
they have many followers. Perhaps among those who will see what I
have here written, there are two or three who will agree with me
that the believers in action do not need us -- indeed, that if we
joined them, we should be rather a dead weight for them to carry. We
need not deny that their work is educative, or pinch pennies when we
count up its cost in the inevitable reactions against it. We need
only remark that our place and function in it are not apparent, and
then proceed on our own way, first with the more obscure and
extremely difficult work of clearing and illuminating our own minds,
and second, with what occasional help we may offer to others whose
faith, like our own, is set more on the regenerative power of
thought than on the uncertain achievements of premature action.
Footnotes
- As indicating the impression
made on a more sophisticated mind, I may mention an amusing
incident that happened to me in London two years ago. Having an
engagement with a member of the House of Commons, I filled out a
card and gave it to an attendant. By mistake I had written my name
where the member's should be, and his where mine should be. The
attendant handed the card back, saying, "l'm afraid this will
'ardly do, sir. I see you've been making yourself a member. It
doesn't go quite as easy as that, sir -- though from some of what
you see around 'ere, I wouldn't say as 'ow you mightn't think so."
- There is a considerable
literature on this subject, largely untranslated. As a beginning,
the reader may be conveniently referred to Mr. Charles A. Beard's
Rise of American Civilization and his work on the Constitution of
the United States. After these he should study closely -- for it
is hard reading -- a small volume called The State by Professor
Franz Oppenheimer, of the University of Frankfort. It has been
well translated and is easily available.
- When the Republican convention
which nominated Mr. Harding was almost over, one of the party
leaders met a man who was managing a kind of dark-horse, or
one-horse, candidate, and said to him, "You can pack up that
candidate of yours, and take him home now. I can't tell you who
the next President will be; it will be one of three men, and I
don't just yet know which. But I can tell you who the next
Secretary of the Interior will be, and that is the important
question, because there are still a few little things lying around
loose that the boys want." I had this from a United States
Senator, a Republican, who told it to me merely as a good story.
- The most valuable result of
the Russian Revolution is in its liberation of the idea of the
State as an engine of economic exploitation. In Denmark, according
to a recent article in The English Review, there is a considerable
movement for a complete separation of politics from economics,
which, if effected, would of course mean the disappearance of the
State.