Who is albert jay nock

Nock was not optimistic about the prospects of liberty but he saw a way out for the individual. The answer is to surround yourself by great ideas and a community of people who share them, and work toward preservation of all that is good and great.

Circumstances may have prevented his ever setting foot there, but it remains his country. Nock fought against the state with the most powerful weapons he had, his mind and his pen. Pass the works of Nock on to a year-old student and you stand a good chance of arming him against a lifetime of nonsense, whether it comes from the tedious Left that loves redistribution and collectivism or the fraudulent Right that is completely blind to the impossibility of reconciling war and nationalism with the true American spirit of freedom.

War and Foreign Policy World History. Biographies U. It is quite certain that dissatisfaction with the old Articles was not general, for when the new order was implemented in , it was effected with great difficulty and only through methods both unscrupulous and dishonourable.

Free Markets U. History Interventionism. Media and Culture Political Theory. Philosophy and Methodology Political Theory. Skip to main content. Major Works. He presents here a full theory of society, state, economy, and culture. Memoirs of a Superfluous Man. Jefferson Biographies U. All Works. Liberty vs. Born in , he witnessed the severe societal changes resulting from world wars, revolutions in ideology, and the consequences of political measures passed decades earlier.

He watched with particular concern as American schools abandoned classical education in favor of the less disciplined liberal arts approach favored by John Dewey and his followers. Nock charted what he saw as the disastrous consequences to American society of democratizing education.

In doing so, he opposed one of the most popular trends of the early twentieth century: mass education. In his watershed book, Democracy and Education , Dewey wrote that popular education should be used as a conscious tool to remove social evil and promote social good. But it was not until the s, when the alleged superiority of Russian scientific knowledge and training became a national concern, that Americans seriously questioned whether public schools adequately educated their children. He rejected, for example, educational egalitarianism.

He saw no reason to believe that equal rights and treatment under the law implied that everyone had equal intellectual capacities any more than it implied that everyone would grow to the same height. Yet he was careful to praise the intentions of parents who sent their children to public schools. For his views on education, some commentators have called Nock an elitist. Be that as it may, the probing questions he asked about American education and its impact on the American character deserve to be explored and answered.

Albert Jay Nock was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to a respectable but poor family, which relocated a few years afterward to Brooklyn, New York. He learned to read without formal assistance by staring at a news clipping posted on his wall until, at the age of three, he could spell out words.

Eventually, Nock went to a private preparatory school in order to pass the entrance examinations for college. Nevertheless, we somehow managed to behave decently. At college St. Robert M. Nock did some graduate work at Berkeley Divinity School in Connecticut, then decided in to be ordained as a minister of the Episcopal Church.

After 12 years, he withdrew from preaching to join the staff of the American Magazine , where he stayed until During this period, he developed a specific social philosophy. He became a single-taxer a follower of the classical-liberal reformer Henry George because he believed that private ownership of land led to monopoly and, in turn, a war between labor and capital.

As a pacifist, Nock opposed American entry into both world wars. As a radical individualist, he spoke out against collectivism and the policies of Franklin D. Oppenheimer argued that people achieved their goals, including basic survival, either by economic means work or by political means theft. Nock immediately adopted this distinction and used it as a touchstone in his social analysis. Although Nock was often called a liberal, he rejected the label, preferring to call himself a radical.

He reportedly went on to attend Berkeley Divinity School, Middletown, Connecticut for about a year and was ordained in the Episcopal Church, The following year, he began serving as assistant rector at St. James Church, Titusville, Pennsylvania. He was 29, and she was They had two sons: Samuel, born in , and Francis, born in Nock left his wife soon thereafter. His sons became college teachers. In , he experienced a crisis of faith.

He quit the clergy to become an editor of American Magazine , a cauldron of radicalism where he worked four years. He befriended former Toledo mayor and aspiring scholar Brand Whitlock who later wrote a biography of Lafayette.

Nock spent time with the likes of muckraking journalists Lincoln Steffens and John Reed. Nock hung out at the Players Club, fabled gathering place for people in the arts since it was established by actor Edwin Booth and author Mark Twain. A portrait of Mark Twain hangs over a fireplace, and one of his pool cues is on display. Nock liked to take mail, eat and play pool at the Players Club. Nock had absorbed, too, the ideas of German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer whose radical book Der Staat was published in An English translation, The State , appeared in Oppenheimer had noted that there were only two fundamental ways of acquiring wealth — work and robbery.

He declared that government was based on robbery. The first weekly issue appeared March 17, Huebsch who later was president of The Freeman. In his contributions, though, Nock discussed many issues involving liberty. Every war does this to a degree roughly corresponding to its magnitude. The final settlement at Versailles, therefore, was a mere scramble for loot.

The magazine ceased publication after the March 5, issue. Nock seems to have contributed pieces. He became a good friend of H. Evans, provided funds which enabled Nock to pursue projects of his choosing. The first was Mr. I know of no other book on Jefferson that penetrates so persuasively to the essential substance of the man.

Nock loved the 16th century French humanist scholar, extravagant satirist and maverick individualist Francis Rabelais, and in he wrote a book about him, collaborating with scholar Catherine Rose Wilson.

Nock embraced ideas of Henry George.