Albert J. Nock - Our Enemy, the State

In Memoriam Edmund Cadwalader Evans A sound economist, one of the few who understand the nature of the state

1935

Be it or be it not true that Man is shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin, it is unquestionably true that Government is begotten of aggression, and by aggression.

Herbert Spencer, 1850.

This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention, the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State; that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long-run sustains, nourishes and impels human destinies.

Jose Ortega y Gasset, 1922.

It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.

Henry L. Mencken, 1926.

H ALF A century ago, as I was struggling to articulate a social and political philosophy with which my inner voices could find approval, I discovered one of my earliest introductions to what has since come to be known as libertarian thought. I had readand enjoyedclassical philosophers John Locke, John Stuart Mill, the Stoics, and others who took seriously the plight of the individual at the hands of political systems. Discovering the writings of H.L. Mencken, during the early days of my inquiries, introduced me to a number of contemporary critics of governmental behavior. It was at this time that I read a book, titled Our Enemy the State, written by Albert Jay Nock, that began the real transformation of my thinking. I soon became less interested in the pursuit of abstract philosophic reasoning, and increasingly focused on the realpolitik of political systems.

A major problem with political philosophies is that they involve the playing out of the abstract thoughts of their authors. Are the differing visions of a state of nature as seen by Hobbes, Rousseau, or Locke, grounded in empirical studies of the history of stateless societies or only the projections of the life experiences, intuitive speculations, indoctrinations, the collective unconscious, and other internally generated influences upon the mind of the writer? As our understanding of the world is grounded in subjectivity, the same question needs to be asked of anyone engaged in speculative philosophy: is it possible to stand outside our own minds and comment upon the world free of the content of our own thinking? Was Heisenberg right in telling us that the observer is an indispensable ingredient in what is being observed? We are easily seduced into confusing the reality of political systems with our expectations as to how such systems ought to work.

Who was this observer I had just discovered? Albert Jay Nock began his career as an Episcopal priest, later turning to journalism. At different times, he wrote for the magazines The Nation and Freeman, publications with different perspectives than their current versions. A self-described Jeffersonian and Georgist, he was an articulate spokesman for classical liberalism; an advocate of free markets, private property, who had a strong distrust of power. He wrote at a time when the concept of liberalism was being intellectually and politically corrupted into its antithesis of the state-directed society; and he was troubled by the detrimental effect such a transformation would have on both individuals and the culture when the resulting debasement of character and behavior became accepted as the norm.

Nock had an abiding interest in the epistemological question that asks how we know what it is we know, and how changes in our thinking generate the outward modifications that occur in our world. In his classic Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, he observed that the most significant thing about [a man] is what he thinks; and significant also is how he came to think it, why he continued to think it, or, if he did not continue, what the influences were which caused him to change his mind.

Albert Jay Nock was what, in my youth, would have been described as an exponent of a liberal arts education. He understood not only that ideas have consequencesa proposition later expounded upon by Richard Weaverbut that organizations have a certain dynamic which, when mobilized, can generate unexpected consequences. He acknowledged the pursuit of individual self-interest as a principal motivating factor, but saw how corporate and political interests can combine to promote such interests, coercively, at the expense of others.

Nocks intellectual development was greatly influenced by the works of the German economist and sociologist, Franz Oppenheimer. Nock focused much of his attention on Oppenheimers analysis of the two principal meansexpounded upon in Der Staatby which human needs can be met. Satisfying such needs through the exercise of ones own labor and the equivalent exchange of ones own labor for the labor of others, Oppenheimer defined as the economic means. By contrast, pursuing such interests through the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others he termed the political means. Nock elaborates upon Oppenheimers thesis to describe how the state actually works. Because people tend to act with the least possible exertion in pursuing their ends, they will tend to prefer the political to the economic means, a trait that has produced the modern corporate-stateor what Nock referred to as the merchant-State.

The efforts of earlier political philosophers to explain the origins of the state either as an expression of divine will, or the product of an alleged social contract, begin to melt away when confronted by Nocks realism. He tells us that the state has its genesis not in some highly principled pursuit of a common will to resist some imagined perverse human nature, but in nothing more elevated than conquest and confiscation. He echoes Voltaires observation that the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of the citizens to give to the other. The Watergate-era mantra follow the money reverberates this more prosaic theme.

Those who chide critics of the state as being idealistic or utopian must, themselves, answer for their visionary faith that state power could be made to restrain itself. As Nock understood, and as more recent history confirms, it is those who believe that written constitutions can protect the individual from the exercise of state power who hold to a baseless idealism, particularly when it is the states judicial powers of interpretation that define the range of such authority. Words are abstractions that never correlate with what they purport to describe and must, therefore, be interpreted. Supreme Court decisions continue to affirm Nocks realistic assessment that anything may be made to mean anything. The twentieth century, alone, provided thinkers such as Nock with a perspective that allowed them to see how the earlier speculations about the nature of the state actually played out. The post-9/11 years have seen a wholesale retreat by the American government from the illusion of limited government, with constitutional prescriptions for and proscriptions against state power widely ignored. Anthony deJasay has added his critique of the imaginary nature of limited government, by observing that collective choice is never independent of what significant numbers of individuals wish it to be. Has history shown that political systems and the citizenry retain the sense of mutuality that is implicit in the contract theory that supposedly underlies the modern state? Does the avowed purpose of political systems to protect the lives, liberty, and property interests of individuals remain intact?