Albert Jay Nock --
Truly a Superfluous Man

Oscar B. Johannsen

[Reprinted from Fragments, April-June, 1982]

That unique poetic genius, T. S. Eliot, cared little for those publicists who for the moment are in the public eye because they are in tune with the public's particular foible or prejudice. Rather, he was interested in the "few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue."

He may not have had Albert Jay Nock in mind when he penned the above, but that he was describing a person like Nock is irrefutable. Whether one reads The Theory of Education in the U.S.; Our Enemy, the State; Henry George; or Memoirs of a Superflous Man, the conclusion is the same. Nock indeed goes to the core of the subject matter in question, and in such an effortlessly elegant and lucid style as to be the envy of every aspiring writer.

For him, education is a maturing process to be obtained by the study of literature, as that of Greece and Rome, for it "covers twenty-five hundred consecutive years of the human mind's operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, politics, medicine, theology, geography, everything." Such a study does not necessarily make one more adept at making a living, but rather helps one attain that degree of maturity which distinguishes the cultured man or woman from the all too prevalent mass man.

And the State, "both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him." Nock wryly observed that "instead of recognizing the State as 'the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men,' the run of mankind, with rare exceptions, regards it not only as a final and indispensable entity, but also as, in the main, beneficent."

Despite his loathing of the State, or more probably because of his contempt for it, he said he "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-class corpse. I still think that vote was effective as any of the millions that have been cast since then."

For Nock, economics was hardly the obscure and arcane mystery that economists often try to portray it to be. He argued that "fundamental economics are very simple," and implied that essentially all one had to do was to use common sense. He remarked on the curious ideas which have arisen with regard to money. He noted, "One such belief is that commodities - goods and services - can be paid for with money. This is not so. Money does not pay for anything, never has, never will. It is an economic axiom as old as the hills that goods and services can be paid for only with goods and services. …" But people have lost sight of this simple fact that "everything which is paid for must be paid for out of production, for there is no other source of payment."

Though Nock at one time was in agreement with the general impression, which still prevails, that mankind has a deep-seated love of liberty, he sadly "discovered scarcely a corporal's guard of persons who had any conception whatever of liberty as a principle, let alone caring for any specific vindications of it as such."

You, the reader, should not read any of Nock's works unless you are not of the common mold. You must be willing, as Nock says, to go "back to the classics of a subject for the practical purpose of saving yourself a lot of work. You get an accumulation of observation, method, technique, that subsequent experience has confirmed, and you can take it at second-hand and don't have to work it all out afresh for yourself. …It is just good sense." Nock's experience had been that few Americans had the patience to read the classics on any subject, which is why so many fall prey to other people who have had some knowledge of what previous generations did.

If you have not had the pleasure of reading any of Nock's works, if you wish to get some idea of the flavor of Nock's ideas, you can do no better than to read Cogitations from Albert Jay Nock, which contains selections from Nock's works arranged by Robert M. Thornton, published by The Nockian Society, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York 10533.

If you do not come away with the desire to read as much of Nock as you can get your hands on, you are beyond hope. You would be far better advised to continue to read the torrent of contemporary "liberal" bilge which passes for profound intellectualism today. But if you do delve avidly into Nock, not only will your perception of the world about you be broadened, but you will have attained some bit of timeless knowledge and tolerance which will enable you to enjoy life, even though you are forced to watch helplessly as today's mass-man works, in his own assiduous fashion, to make an intolerable mess of things.