Albert Jay Nock was not one to squeeze a profound remark into eight or eighteen words. Neither was he a waster of words but took his leisure with a thought, and packaged his points in such a way as would assure that they were understood. Robert M. Thornton distilled a diverse sampling of Nock’s writing in Cogitations. The snippets here have been chosen from that enticing volume.
And what did Nock want to tell us? George Santayana offers this:
Socrates and his disciples admired this world, but they did not particularly covet it, or wish to live long in it, or expect to improve it; what they cared for was an idea or a good which they found expressed in it, something outside it and timeless, in which the contemplative intellect might be literally absorbed.
AJN thrived on learning and struggled to understand why others were not comparably dazzled by the wonders of the written word that have come to us down through the ages. He pondered the phenomenon that Truth could walk into a room like an unclothed goddess and stand before an assembled crowd unnoticed. Let him speak for himself:
1
“The worst thing I see about life at the present time is that whereas the ability to think has to be cultivated by practice, like the ability to dance or to play the violin, everything is against that practice. Speed is against it, commercial amusements, noise, the pressure of mechanical diversions, reading habits, even studies are all against it. Hence a whole race is being bred without the power to think, or even the disposition to think, and one cannot wonder that public opinion, qua opinion, does not exist.”
Journal, 245
2
“I deteriorate with astonishing rapidity when separated from my books, and am never aware that I have done so until I come back to them; I deteriorate in temper as well as in other ways, for I miss the peculiarly powerful sustaining and calming power of literary studies.”
Journal Forgotten, 41
3
“My notion is that it is not so important at the moment to try to make people take up with this, that, or the other view, as it is to establish the questions that must be considered before any competent view can be formulated. These questions are sunk now in an immense depth of ignorance, and until they are brought up and at least clearly presented, I don’t believe the moralist has any chance at all.”
Selected Letters, 115
4
“How can there be any great men among us until the right relation between formative knowledge and instrumental knowledge becomes implicit in the actual practice and technique of education?”
Right Thing, 114
5
“Americans have been too thoroughly conditioned to serf-mindedness to care two straws about freedom, whereas economic security exactly suits them, and they will cheerfully sacrifice all their other prospects in this world and all their hopes for the next, in their determination to get it.”
Journal Forgotten, 32
6
“I suppose you can’t play every instrument in the orchestra, you can’t be a philosophicker and a politicker at the same time. That has always been a favourite theory of mine and I believe ’tis true.”
Selected Letters, 81
7
“Now, the experienced mind is aware that all the progress in actual civilisation that society has ever made has been brought about, not by machinery, not by political programmes, platforms, parties, not even by revolutions, but by right thinking.”
Education, 123
8
“Our society has made no place for the individual who is able to think, who is, in the strict sense of the word, intelligent; it merely tosses him into the rubbish heap… Intelligence is the power and willingness always disinterestedly to see things as they are, an easy accessibility to ideas, and a free play of consciousness upon them, quite regardless of the conclusions to which this play may lead.”
Free Speech, 137
9
“What was the best that the State could find to do with an actual Socrates and an actual Jesus when it had them? Merely to poison the one and crucify the other, for no reason but that they were too intolerably embarrassing to be allowed to live any longer.”
Memoirs, 274
10
“Truth is a cruel flirt, and must be treated accordingly. Court her abjectly, and she will turn her back; feign indifference, and she will throw herself at you with a coaxing submission. Try to force an acquaintance — try to make her put on her company manners for a general public — and she will revolt them like an ugly termagant; let her take her own way and her own time, and she will show all her fascinations to everyone who has eyes to see them.”
Snoring, 67-68
11
“Not long ago I read of a fine exhibition of intellectual integrity by a physicist lecturing on magnetic attraction. He told his students that he could describe the phenomena, put them in order, state the problem they present, and perhaps carry it a step or two backward, but as for the final ‘reason of the thing,’ the best he could say was that the magnet pulls on the steel because God wants it to.”
Memoirs, 288
12
“It is a commonplace that the persistence of an institution is due solely to the state of mind that prevails toward it, the set of terms in which men habitually think about it. So long, and only so long, as those terms are favourable, the institution lives and maintains its power; and when for any reason men generally cease thinking in those terms, it weakens and becomes inert.”
The State, 146
13
“I learned early with Thoreau that a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone; and in view of this I have always considered myself extremely well-to-do.”
Memoirs, 321
14
“One marvels continually at man’s ingenuity in devising means of communication, and at the utter futility of the uses to which he habitually puts them.”
Journal, 293
15
“How interesting it is, that in this most pretentious and swaggering country, a man can get himself elected to any kind of office on the strength of any kind of promises, then disregard the math is utter pleasure, with no action taken, or even any notice taken.”
Journal Forgotten, 51
16
“It is a mark of maturity to differentiate easily and naturally between personal or social opposition, and intellectual opposition. Everyone has noticed how readily children transfer their dislike of an opinion to the person who holds it, and how quick they are to take umbrage at a person who speaks in an unfamiliar mode or even with an unfamiliar accent.”
Right Thing, 38
17
“Our society has made no place for the individual who is able to think, who is, in the strict sense of the word, intelligent; it merely tosses him into the rubbish heap… Intelligence is the power and willingness always disinterestedly to see things as they are, an easy accessibility to ideas, and a free play of consciousness upon them, quite regardless of the conclusions to which this play may lead.”
Free Speech, 137
18
“ What was the best that the State could find to do with an actual Socrates and an actual Jesus when it had them? Merely to poison the one and crucify the other, for no reason but that they were too intolerably embarrassing to be allowed to live any longer.”
Memoirs, 274
19
“…the great truth which apparently must forever remain unlearned, that if a regime of complete economic freedom be established, social and political freedom will follow automatically; and until it is established neither social nor political freedom can exist. Here one comes in sight of the reason why the State will never tolerate the establishment of economic freedom. In a spirit of sheer conscious fraud, the State will at any time offer its people “four freedoms,” or six, or any number; but it will never let them have economic freedom. If it did, it would be signing its own death warrant, for as Lenin pointed out, “it is nonsense to make any pretense of reconciling the State and liberty.” Our economic system being what it is, and the State being what it is, all the mass of verbiage about “the free peoples” and “the free democracies” is merely so much obscene buffoonery.”
Memoirs, 211
20
“Maybe there is no authoritative answer from the Church to these here now modern problems, but there is a dam’ authoritative answer from the Church’s supposititious Head, and if anyone asks you, I can show it. Ain’t no modern problems they are all as old as the hills. Tawney’s game seems to be adapting the Church to modern society, instead of the other way around. I don’t get that stuff — never did — we’ve been all through it for half a century. Society, modern or ancient, is only a lot of folks, and the Church has no rightful message to Society — if it has I don’t know it. We are overdoing “Society” a lot. The only practicable reform I know of is reform of yourself, and that’s where the Church comes in. As for teaching economics and sociology in the seminaries, I think nothing of it. Let’s have all the economics there is from the economists and let’s have religion from the Church, eh, what?”
Selected Letters, 143
21
“I could never read Carlyle, but I admire him for his cussedness and his crusty readiness to say just what he thought about anybody and anything, and why he thought it, and to put forth his opinions good and hot. I wish there were a few more like him writing nowadays. One gets an awful surfeit of mush-and-milk in the current writing about public affairs. It reminds me of the preacher who told his people that “unless you repent, as it were, and, as one might say, have a change of heart, you will be damned — so to speak — and, in a measure, go to hell.” There was none of that sort of bilgewater in Carlyle’s pronouncements. ”
Journal, 26
22
“Lord, how the world is given to worshipping words! Eschew the coarse word slavery, and you can get glad acceptance for a condition of actual slavery. A man is a slave when his labour — products are appropriated, and his activities are governed by some agency other than himself; that is the essence of slavery. Refrain from using the word Bolshevism, or Fascism, Hitlerism, Marxism, Communism, and you have no troubles getting acceptance for the principle that underlies them all alike — the principle that the State is everything, and the individual nothing.”
Journal, 280
23
“As long as you have nations, you will have armaments; and as long as you have nationalism, you will have nations; and you will have nationalism as long as the existing theory of the State predominates. Therefore any talk about disarmament, even if sincere, is superficial and puerile.”
Journal Forgotten, 57
24
“Slave-mindedness is the hateful thing, whether it follows Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini — what matter? Is not the mass-leader, too, the most slave-minded of all? The French revolutionist’s saying, “I must follow the mob, because I lead them,” ought to be embroidered on every national flag, it strikes me. How right Huxley was about what he called the coach-dog theory of political leadership, i.e., that a leader’s duty is to look sharp for which way the social coach is going, and then run in front of it and bark.”
Journal, 231-232
25A
“We all now know pretty well, probably, that the primary reason for a tariff is that it enables the exploitation of the domestic consumer by a process indistinguishable from sheer robbery.”
The State, 125
25B
“The simple truth is that our businessmen do not want a government that will let business alone. They want a government that they can use.”
Letters, 105
26
“Respect for life is at the vanishing-point, and respect for the dignity of death has disappeared.”
Memoirs, 243
27
“Politicians leap with joy on this-or-that proposed advance in “social legislation,” not out of any primary interest in social welfare, but because it means more government, more jobs, more patronage, more diversions of public money to their own use and behoof; and what but a flagrant disservice to society can accrue from that?”
Snoring, 191
The sources of the above quotations are credited to one or another of Nock’s works but using a sort of shorthand. Mr. Thornton, the compiler of Cogitations, provided a table at the close of the volume to match each shorthand entry with the full title of the original book or document. There is no need to do so here.
The full text of Cogitations is on line at the Mises Institute. Copies occasionally become available from on-line book sellers as well.
Albert Jay Nock 