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Our Enemy, the State
Albert Jay Nock
"Our Enemy, the State, hit me between the eyes when I read it as a book review editor for The New York Times. During the past sixty years history has surely proven his thesis correct." --John Chamberlain Albert Jay Nock Albert Jay Nock was never one to conform to the times. In 1935, at perhaps the apex of the intellectual world’s infatuation with collectivist thinking, Nock penned his broadside against socialism, Our Enemy, the State. Founder of The Freeman, sometime college professor, and author of more than a dozen books, Nock’s ideas influenced a diverse array of seminal thinkers. Russell Kirk devoured his work while he served as an Army sergeant during World War II and corresponded with him frequently. Nock socialized at the home of a young William F. Buckley, a man who helped to jumpstart the conservative movement in the postwar years. The journalist John Chamberlain remarked that Our Enemy, the State "hit me between the eyes when I read it in the thirties." Scores of towering intellects trace many of their ideas to Nock—yet most of his books haven’t been published for years. Our Enemy, the State is required reading in only one college course in the United States and would be out of print if not for the efforts of Hallberg Publishing, a small publishing house in Tampa, Florida. Many scholars trace the rise of the modern conservative movement to a group of thinkers that came to prominence after World War II. Too much emphasis on the importance of such figures is folly. There is a vast body of largely undiscovered writings of Nock and other 1930s thinkers that deserve to be read. What makes the writings of Nock and other pre-war, right-wing thinkers all the more profound is that they did not have the benefit of hindsight into the coming years—a time that demonstrated just how dangerous it was to surrender power to the state. Yet in many ways Nock still provides more prescient insights into the evils of a state directed society. "The superficial distinctions of Fascism, Bolshevism, Hitlerism," he wrote in his 1935 classic, "are the concern of journalists and publicists; the serious student sees them as the root-idea of a complete conversion of social power into state power." At less than 100 pages, Nock’s masterpiece is short, to the point, and easy to read—much like it’s antithesis, The Communist Manifesto.. The basic premise can be found on its opening page: as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of state power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and a roughly equivalent depletion of social power. Is it any wonder why left-wing professors would impose an intellectual blacklist on such a powerful statement in favor of freedom? --Daniel J. Flynn |
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