Blast from the Past: The Anti-Statism of Albert Jay Nock

The Goldberg File
By Jonah Goldberg

March 06, 2015

Editor's Note: Jonah will be back to filing your favorite "news"letter next week. In the meantime, we editorial lackeys have pulled his fascinating 2009 feature article on the anti-statism of journalist Albert Jay Nock out from behind the NR paywall. Here's an excerpt:

There is a stock character in fiction, particularly science fiction, who might be called the Immortal. Whether he be vampire or angel, alien or just some everyman blessed -- or cursed -- with Methuselah-like longevity, certain traits define the Immortal. He is polite, generous, even kind, but also resigned to the fact that life is often none of these things. Sometimes he is dismissive or condescending, or perhaps bemusedly indulgent of men's political or ideological passions, the way old professors relate to freshmen who insist upon the novelty of their ideas and the audacity of their fervor. He's seen it all before, maybe done it himself when he was a younger man, and he knows deep in the subterranean reservoirs of his soul that there is indeed nothing new under the sun. His own passions are more like cultivated tastes, hard-learned lessons formed by trial and error over many decades. He is disgusted by harmful stupidity but reluctant to correct what can only be gleaned from firsthand experience. He understands Edmund Burke's insight that "example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other."

This thought kept intruding on me while reading the works of Albert Jay Nock, whose elegant criticism of statism seems to grow more relevant with each passing day. Nock was born in 1870, which he believed was as good a year as any to mark the beginning of the end of civilization. Often compared to Henry Adams as a chronicler of his age, Nock was one of the great men of letters of the 20th century. He counted among his friends and admirers H. L. Mencken, Charles Beard, Dwight Macdonald, Oswald Garrison Villard, Frank Chodorov, William F. Buckley Jr., and William Jennings Bryan (for whom he did some work as a special envoy when Bryan was secretary of state). An ironic feature of the innumerable profiles, remembrances, odes, encyclopedia entries, and biographies about Nock is that they all go out of their way to assert that he was never famous in life, or in death. Many writers would count their blessings if they were cursed with such anonymity.

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Born in Scranton, Pa., and raised in Brooklyn, Nock was an autodidact who mastered numerous languages, including French, Latin, and Greek. He spent a good deal of his youth in a small town in upstate New York, where he imbibed from the wellspring of American individualism and gained an enduring appreciation for the power and magisterially ennobling competence of what we would today call civil society (he used the word "society" or "social power" to denote the good and decent realm of life not corrupted or coerced by the state). In 1887 he went to St. Stephen's College (now Bard), where he was later a professor.

After college he attended divinity school, and he became a minister in the Episcopal Church in 1897. A dozen years later he quit the clergy and became a full-time journalist and editor, first at American Magazine and then at The Nation (which was still a classically liberal publication). In 1920 he became the co-editor of the original Freeman magazine, which, in its four-year run, managed to inspire the men who would one day launch National Review and the second incarnation of The Freeman, run by Nock's disciple Frank Chodorov. According to Nock, when a young writer asked if The Freeman had any "sacred cows," Nock said: No, save that the writers must have a point, write it well, and use clear, idiomatic English. Then he dismissed the lad, saying, "Now you run along home and write us a nice piece on the irremissibility of post-baptismal sin, and if you can put it over those three jumps, you will see it in print. Or if you would rather do something on a national policy of strangling all the girl-babies at birth, you might do that -- glad to have it."

A large part of Nock's mystique stems from the fact that he was mysterious, and deliberately so. He wore a cape, thought as well of Belgium as he did of America, knew nearly everything but pretended that he didn't read the newspaper (William F. Buckley Jr. recounted how his father once stumbled on the proudly anti-newspaper Nock sitting on the floor poring over the Sunday papers). Nock's memoirs say nothing about his failed marriage or neglected children and do not disclose his parents' names or even mention that he played minor-league baseball. The joke at The Freeman was that the only way he could be contacted was to leave a note under a certain rock in Central Park . . .

Read the whole thing here.

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Blast from the Past: The Anti-Statism of Albert Jay Nock

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