Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

by Albert Jay Nock

Memoirs of a Superfluous Man was written by Albert Jay Nock, published by Henry Regnery Company and was printed in 1964 in a Paperback binding.

Genres: Biography, Politics, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Memoir, History, Economics

326 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1943

About the author

American libertarian author, Georgist, social critic of the early and middle 20th century, outspoken opponent of the New Deal.

He served as a inspiration for the modern libertarian and Conservative movements.

He was one of the first Americans to self-identify as "libertarian"

http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~ckank/Ful...

Reviews

[nostalgebraist · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hard to know how to rate this. It's well-written, and it's pretty interesting as a historical document (Albert Jay Nock was a significant proto-libertarian figure who influenced Ayn Rand among others). And taken solely as the rambling, genially cynical blather of an eccentric old codger, it's a lot of fun, although for me that sort of enjoyment ceased long before the book was over. But ultimately the book is repetitive, pompous, inane, and confused, and I can't imagine recommending that anyone read the entire thing.

This book is Nock's autobiography, although it's a bit atypical of the genre -- there are relatively few details about Nock's personal and emotional life or about his employment or day-to-day business. Largely, it's a record of Nock's opinions and beliefs. In certain broad and vague ways I find Nock's temperament appealing: he is cynical, pragmatic, pleased with the day-to-day business of life but not given to enthusiasms of any kind. Unlike many people with this kind of temperament, however, Nock attempts to distill his inherently concrete, anti-formal attitudes into an abstract, formal philosophy. He then cites the terms of this philosophy incessantly while propounding upon every topic under the sun. This, to put it mildly, does not go well.

What is Nock's stated philosophy? Roughly speaking it has six pieces (the numbering and ordering is mine). Three of these are three "laws," which he sees as eternal determinants of human behavior: Epstean's Law, Gresham's Law ("bad money drives out good"), and the Law of Diminishing Returns. The latter two are familiar from economics, while the former, named after an acquaintance of Nock's, is Nock's own invention, and states roughly that people will, all else being equal, expend the least effort possible.

Epstean's Law and the Law of Diminishing Returns are clear enough and probably true enough; Nock's "applications" of these laws are usually banalities, adding up to little more than garden-variety cynicism, but at least they are not falsehoods. His use of Gresham's Law is much stranger. In its original context, Gresham's Law is about paper money backed by metal, and states that money whose face value exceeds its metal-backed value ("bad money") will drive money with more accurate face value ("good money") out of circulation. With these technical definitions in place, it is possible to actually point to a mechanism for this phenomenon, and to historical evidence that it occurs.

In Nock's idiolect, though, "Gresham's Law" is a much more broad statement: roughly, "bad things drive out good things." The notions of "good" and "bad" here are completely unexamined, and so in a typical case Nock will invoke "Gresham's Law" to explain why, in some field containing both things he likes and things he doesn't, the latter came to predominate.

Since Nock has a cynical temperament, he sees things he doesn't like on the rise all over the place, and thus "Gresham's Law" appears to be frequently in action. Of course, there are various instances that buck the trend, instances in which something Nock likes becomes popular or prevalent. In these cases, Nock of course does not mention "Gresham's Law" at all. Thus his version of "Gresham's Law" explains nothing and lends no insight. Either bad things will predominate or they won't; Nock has no way of determining in advance which will happen in any given case.

Beyond the "Laws," there are three other major planks of Nock's philosophy. One of these is the peculiar "Economism." Whatever this is, Nock is sure that it is on the rise, and he is sure he is against it. (Gresham's Law!) As Nock describes it, it seems to be some sort of outlook on life, running something like "the only thing that matters is material gain." Of course it is difficult to point to anyone who outright states this, and so Nock can only gesture at various people who seem too materialistic for his taste, and attribute their materialism to the pernicious rise of Economism. (Indeed, he goes much further than this; it often seems that everything Nock dislikes is in some obscure way a symptom of Economism.)

This fourth plank, (distaste for) Economism, clashes hilariously with Nock's fifth plank, which is that nothing ever really changes. Nock attaches great importance to the classical education he received at an early incarnation of Bard College, for he claims to have learned from reading the ancients that man is essentially the same everywhere and that modern events and debates are just approximate retreads of ancient ones. For this reason he treats most contemporary events with detachment -- just humans being humans again.

This is a respectable perspective in itself, but together with Economism and Gresham's Law, it becomes a license to say absolutely anything with apparent theoretical backing. Have things changed for the worse? Clearly Economism and Gresham's Law in action -- score for Team Nock! Have things stayed the same? Well, if you'd spent your youth reading the ancients in a bucolic paradise like Nock did, you'd know things always stay the same -- score for Team Nock, again! (In Nock's world, things never get better, so we are spared from having to invent another principle to cover that possibility.)

I've saved the final plank of Nockism for last because it's the most inflammatory, and I wanted to make it clear that I'm not just yelling at Nock because I'm mad at him for this one particular opinion. The sixth plank is that only a small fraction of people are "psychically human." The rest are subhuman ("psychically anthropoid," as Nock awkwardly phrases it). This is not, as far as I can tell, directly connected to any (e.g.) racist outlook; Nock is an equal opportunity dehumanizer.

Largely this just seems like playing with semantics: Nock redefines the term "human" so that one must possess a certain specified level of intelligence, moral fiber, etc. to be "human," then notes (perhaps correctly) that most people do not meet the standard he has specified. So what?

Well, the main consequence of this view is to license a general incuriosity about people. Nock is not an incurious man in general -- he seems to read all kinds of interesting stuff (I read Septimus on his recommendation, and I am grateful!) -- but he has little to no interest in trying to understand why other people do what they do. Most people aren't even psychically human, their minds are turned by Economism, they have failed to learn the lessons of history, etc., etc., and so of course their behavior makes no sense. This places Nock in a kind of self-confirming bubble: only those people with similar outlooks even scan as human to him, and he can completely ignore the idea that there might be people who substantially disagree with him and are nonetheless in possession of all the same intellectual and moral faculties (or more!).

So we are in this bubble for 325 pages (it felt like about twice as many to me). Things happen, Nock opines pompously, some appropriate subset of the six planks is trotted out ad hoc, repeat. Again, and again, and again, and again.

Where is the politics in this, one might wonder. After all, isn't Nock mainly famous as a forerunner of libertarianism, Objectivism, and the like? Well, Nock certainly doesn't like "the State." But his complaints about it are vague and diffuse, if frequent, and the moment he starts to say anything coherent and principled about politics he immediately starts rambling about one or more of the six planks again. The apparent conflict between his libertarianism and his hatred for "Economism" is never even discussed. Nock hates the (apparent) values of the bourgeoisie; he hates the fact that (say) popular publishing houses put out a lot of trashy fiction appealing to the lowest common denominator; but he has no answer to the question of how this sort of thing is to be avoided in the kind of society he likes.

Indeed, all of the waffle about "Economism" feels less like a political outlook and more like the result of a culture clash. Nock wants to be in a bubble, a walled garden, filled only with elite "psychically-human" beings like himself. But technological advancement keeps throwing popular culture in his face. Look at all these terrible books, printed in huge quantities! Economism! Well, but trashy books have been printed since the invention of the printing press -- it's just become harder and harder to ignore them. More generally, what bothers Nock is that money and moneymaking are rubbing their grubby hands in his face. It's the classic aristocratic attitude. But people have always wanted money; it is just that maintaining an aristocratic walled garden has become more difficult.

This review has probably been very boring, because it's mostly been a rant about Nock's worldview, and if you haven't read the book, why should you care? I apologize -- I just needed to let off some steam after reading so much of this crap. That all said, Nock is is a very skilled writer, an entertaining curmudgeon (for 10 pages at a time, at least), and an interesting historical figure. His views, though hilariously confused, are interesting as specimens of a certain style of thinking. This book is freely available online, and if it sounds at all interesting I recommend reading the first 100 pages or so. Just -- you really don't need to read the whole thing. Trust me.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many years ago, I belonged to a debating society, which, among other activities, sponsored formal dinners at which there was much drinking and then singing, from an official songbook of thoroughly not-politically correct songs. Among them was one, sung to the tune of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," titled "God Rot Ye Libertarians." It went, “God rot ye libertarians, you fill us with dismay / Your atheistic tendencies, your anarchistic ways / Your flaunted immorality leads innocents astray / But you’ll get yours on Judgment Day, Judgment Day / Yes, you’ll get yours on Judgment Day!” I don’t know whether Albert Jay Nock will get his on Judgment Day, but the song could certainly have been written for him, and a wise man would not put a lot of money on Nock being grouped with the sheep.

Still, I can’t totally make up my mind whether Nock was merely a jerk and very much superfluous, or a genius of penetrating intellect whose insights we should still study. I would say both, but most of what seem at first glance like new insights evaporate upon any reflection at all. To the extent Nock is remembered today, it’s for two things. First, for his book "Our Enemy, The State," published in 1935, which is a type of anarchist cookbook, an entry in the American ideological debate between those who view society like Thomas Paine and those who view society like Edmund Burke (or who otherwise are willing to countenance government as at least sometimes inherently legitimate). In many ways, Nock was an updated Paine—a strong believer that government began in rapine and while some governments may be legitimate as being derived from the actual consent of the governed, such consent had to be constantly renewed. But in practice, consent was never so renewed, because governments, however formed, almost immediately became and remained rent-seekers doing the bidding of the powerful to expropriate the not-powerful. Nock buttressed this with an extremely bleak vision of the natural tendencies and abilities of the majority of humanity, a vision that required maximum independence from rule in order to allow for any possible flourishing of the few “psychically human” individuals.

The second thing for which Nock is remembered is an essay he wrote in 1936 for the "Atlantic," titled "Isaiah’s Job", in which he addressed conservatives with a re-telling of the story of Isaiah. In his interpretation, God told the prophet that his job was not speaking to the people as a whole, but to a hidden and unidentifiable Remnant, a group that would carry the prophet’s message through the current and succeeding barren generations, until in a new time the ground would be fertile again and the message could be sown to bear fruit. This has been an attractive message to conservatives in the decades since, whether libertarians like Nock or other flavors of conservatives, who have therefore maintained the memory of Nock, because as their societal position erodes, it both flatters their vanity as keepers of the flame and gives them promise that their vision will ultimately triumph—without them having to actually do anything.

And it’s that disinterest in actually doing anything that also most characterizes Nock. Oh, he was doubtless extremely intelligent. This book, which is a mendacious pseudo-memoir with a philosophical framework and overlay, certainly shows that. The book alternates Nock’s analysis and thoughts, many of which could not be spoken by a public figure today, with supercilious disdain for actually doing anything about things Nock thinks should be otherwise. It is this that makes Nock’s self-characterization of “superfluous” accurate.

The book is loosely organized around two axes—the course of Nock’s life, and topics of interest to him. He was born in 1870, and was raised in Brooklyn, though in his early teens he moved to a northern Michigan logging town. Quite early on, at least according to Nock, he developed a cynical and jaundiced (my words, not his) focus on his fellow man, along with a strong belief that law was over-rated as a driver of the good society, and “taste and manners” under-rated. In Nock’s ideal world, every person would be free to do essentially as he pleased, but would be restricted by good taste and good manners. Not that Nock had any interest in lifting a finger to create or inspire his ideal world; he was convinced that the path for our society was downwards, regardless of what he or anyone else did, and was content to snipe and sigh. For Nock, in general and in this book, is very much focused on his, and thus our, times being a “rebarbarisation,” and the futility of convincing the “mass man” of anything, or of anything good arising from the “mass man”—and certainly not the triumph of good taste and good manners.

In fact, Nock repeatedly explicitly states that the “mass man” is not really human, which strikes me in light of the 20th Century a most dangerous position. Throughout the book, Nock divides humans into two groups. This is perhaps the overriding theme of the book; variations on it appear, on average, at least once every two pages. One group is “psychically human”; these people are amenable to education, that is, to attain “intelligence and wisdom” through “formative knowledge.” They have “the ability to see things as they are.” The other group is not psychically human, but “psychically anthropoid,” is only amenable to training, that is, to obtaining “sagacity and cleverness” through “instrumental knowledge,” and is generally socially deficient, among other things being, unsurprisingly, “bitterly resentful of superiority.” This second group is much, much the larger of the two.

For this “insight,” Nock repeatedly thanks the architect Ralph Adams Cram, advocate of neo-Gothic style, who in his day (he died in 1942) was well known for his social criticism. I went and dug out the Cram essay that Nock references, from 1932 in Mencken’s "The American Mercury" (thanks, Internet!) Cram’s point is that just as (he says) people prior to 10,000 B.C. or so were not actually human, most people today are not human. “The just line of demarcation should be drawn, not between Neolithic Man and the anthropoid ape, but between the glorified and triumphant human being and the Neolithic mass which was, is now, and ever shall be.” (I am sure that the religious phrasing echoes are intended as a deliberate blasphemy.) It is impossible to overstate the degree to which Nock adopts and worships this pernicious distinction among humans. “Neolithic man” is most everyone, certainly everyone Nock doesn’t like, and they are not really human, which he reminds us constantly.

What precisely that means for Nock isn’t immediately obvious, other than these non-humans drag down the rest of humanity, who otherwise would presumably be luxuriating in the Republic of Taste and Manners. A few conclusions he admits do flow directly, the most obvious being that democracy is stupid. “I could see how ‘democracy’ might do very well in a society of saints and sages led by an Alfred or an Antoninus Pius. Short of that, I was unable to see how it could come to anything but an ochlocracy of mass-men led by a sagacious knave.” But just as obvious a conclusion is that homo superior should have the right to dominate and enslave “Neolithic man.” If Nock thought that, and it’s hard to see how he couldn’t have (although he was too lazy to dominate or enslave anyone himself), he kept his mouth shut on the topic. Mostly, he criticizes the social impact of the mass of humanity’s bad taste and low manners. So, for example, speaking of the execrable quality of modern fiction, in particular as it describes relations between men and women, Nock finds this low quality not surprising at all, given the spread of literacy and the worthlessness of most people. “The neolithic masses of mankind are psychically incapable of experiencing the emotions of sex at any but the lowest level, and having become dimly literate, they would naturally require the level of depicted experience to be not above that of the actuality with which they are acquainted.” Again, the centrality of dehumanization to any philosophy strikes me as, at best, an easily misused approach, and one that already in 1943 should have obviously been very problematic in light of modern collectivist behavior, something Nock was already pre-disposed against, but here effectively aligns himself with.

Throughout the book, Nock mixes references to events in his life, or rather to how he lived his life, with philosophical asides. It’s impossible to reconstruct his life from the facts stated in the book, though, which is doubtless as Nock intended it, since as he says in the second sentence, “Personal publicity is utterly distasteful to me.” But Nock did not reckon with the Internet, so now it is easy to determine that Nock’s father was an Episcopal priest, a fact highly relevant given Nock’s open hostility to religion—and that Nock himself was an Episcopal priest for ten years, an astounding fact and also wholly omitted from this book, along with the fact that he played minor-league baseball for a time. (By the time of this book, though, he appears to have been a singularly unreflective and simplistic agnostic.) Other omissions that, in context, make parts of this autobiography mendacious include his fathering two children with a wife, all three of whom he abandoned. Thus, the main interest of the book is Nock’s philosophical musings, since any stated autobiographical facts may or may not be true.

Nock’s writing is stellar. There is not a single wasted word and every word is carefully and excellently chosen. Nock was an enormously erudite man, extremely well read and he clearly spent a great deal of his life (he lived mostly in Europe) thinking clearly. My only complaint about the writing itself is that he frequently uses epigrams and quotations in foreign languages: French, German, Latin, Greek. Of course, at the time he wrote, any educated reader could comprehend all of those. But not today, and not me (I can puzzle out some German, and less Latin, but no French, much less Greek). Similarly, Nock endlessly refers to people I have never heard of, including a wide range of utterly forgotten 19th Century Frenchmen, as a type of shorthand, assuming the reader will be able to fill in the gaps. And I am sure I missed many of his literary references—for example, he cites Turgenev in several places, but it took Wikipedia to tell me that the “superfluous man” was a common literary conceit of mid-19th Century Russian fiction, of which conceit Turgenev was the main exponent, so Nock’s title is a multi-layer play on words. I suppose this just proves Nock’s point about the difference between education and training, but it makes some of his points harder to comprehend and, unfortunately, lessens the punch of his arguments to a modern audience.

Among other philosophical positions expounded in this book, Nock believed that (a) literacy was grossly over-rated, and universal literacy was a destructive goal, or at best worthless; (b) essentially all wars, and all modern wars of the United States (and others) were immoral exercises of imperialism ginned-up to serve the politically connected and powerful; (c) the driving force of American society is “economism,” a hostile neologism Nock coined deeming America “interpreted the whole of human life in terms of the production, acquisition and distribution of wealth,” rather than seeking the higher life of the mind (I doubt if Nock and Ayn Rand would have gotten along); (d) all modern political struggles are “simply a tussle between two groups of mass-men, one large and poor, the other small and rich, and as judged by the standards of a civilized society, neither of them more meritorious or promising than the other,” and “the object of the tussle was the material gains accruing from control of the State’s machinery”; and therefore (e) “Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavouring.”

There are some undeniably true statements, well put, in the book. Speaking of his strictly classical education, Nock notes“[W]e did come out with a fairly clear notion that the deliberate acceptance of appearances, the conscious exclusion of reality, is a distinct failure in integrity, a moral failure.” It is this focus on reality that could have made Nock’s thought excellent; it is his overly bleak view of humans that makes it ultimately profitless. Or, “Nine-tenths of the value of classical studies lies in their power to establish a clear commonsense, matter-of-fact view of human nature and its activities over a continuous stretch of some twenty centuries. Hence the mind which has attentively canvassed this record is much more than a disciplined mind; it is an experienced mind.” The problem is that Nock uses this true statement to wash his hands of anything happening today, with some variation of “oh well, it’s all happened before, and it’ll all happen again.” That may work as a tagline for Battlestar Galactica, but it’s not so helpful in a work of political philosophy.

Nock uses his acid pen on most political movements of the time. On Liberals (by which Nock means Progressive reformers): “As casuists, they make Gury [an obscure French Jesuit] and St. Alfonso dei Liguori look like bush-leaguers. On every point of conventional morality, all the Liberals I have personally known were very trusthworthy. They were great fellows for the Larger Good, but it would have to be pretty large before they would alienate your wife’s affections or steal your watch. But on any point of intellectual integrity, there is not one of them I would trust for ten minutes in a room alone with a red-hot stove, unless the stove were comparatively valueless.” Nock himself was a dilettante Georgist, a now-obscure movement that called for all taxes to be based on land value. With this, as all things, he did little to advance his beliefs, on the excuse that “I decided that if progressive evolution was to make [Georgist ideas] practicable in fifty thousand years, it would have to step a great deal livelier than there was any sign of its doing.”

The book is chock full of similar clever, mostly malicious, turns of phrase, many of which are just as applicable to their targets today. “I often thought of Sir Henry Wotton, back in the sixteenth century, saying that ‘an ambassador is a man of virtue sent to lie abroad for his country; a news-writer is man without virtue who lies at home for himself.’ For many years I wondered how people could be got to serve the trade of journalism, but never really understood it until some eighteen or twenty years ago I read Count Tolstoy’s analysis of the prostitute Maslova’s view of her trade . . . .” Much perceptive vision of the real is packed into this passage, all applicable today. What else is, say, Brian Williams, but a lying whore of an unlettered tradesman, rather than what he imagines he is, an honest, upstanding member of an educated profession?

But we are always brought back to Nock’s bad points. He hates families, even though he had one (about which, as I say, he lies by omission in this book), saying “I have a great horror of children.” He explicitly claims that if one has a family, “he has to reconcile himself to stultifying and despicable courses of conduct which, if he were free to do so, he would refuse even to consider. He must stay within the economic system and uphold it; and thus the demands of family are responsible for the atrophy of many fine talents, and for the progressive moral dim-out which darkens many lives.” No wonder he abandoned his own family. But what Nock nowhere mentions is that his own ability to lead this pure life of the mind was funded by a group of rich donors. So, really, in the end, who was the prostitute?

[Bakunin · Rating 2 out of 5]

The subtitle to this memoir could be: how I learned to stop worrying and slouch toward Bethlehem. This is the intellectual autobiography of an elitist who doesn't care about public (or indeed his reader's) opinion. His erudition (classically educated as he was) had made him archaic, superfluous, a remnant from a past decade.

Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945) was an influential libertarian (proto-anarchocapitalist you might say) who inspired Ayn Rand and William F Buckley (among other people). I was therefore keen to read his autobiography (which is more of an intellectual biography if anything else) to read his reflections on the state of world.

There is something Utopian (which oddly enough was the very thing Nock often criticized) to his writing. Maybe Utopian is not the right word but perhaps self-righteousness comes closer to describing the general sense of the text. He is also one of those few (among whom I would count HL Mencken) who seem to be very much against American culture and the idea of progress. Like others gr-reviewers have noted, his premises often stem from the fact that a large majority of people are intellectual inferior and that they will therefore act like animals. This is why democracy is doomed to fail. I found this aspect the most repulsive element of the book and a reason why I almost stopped reading it. He even goes as far as to call them subhuman.

What I found most thrilling about the book were his views on history (as a fan of realpolitik he sees parallels between the modern and the ancient world, something I will have to look into as Kissingers view is that realpolitik was born in 1648) as well as his wonderful language. The books general tone is one of uncaring elitism (which is both positive and negative) and is full of references to literature and philosophy from all eras. At these points reading the memoir was like having an intelligent conversation with an erudite friend. Alas this all too often paved way for a monotonous rant (which fought hard to retain my attention).

I would like to find a more sympathetic and cogent description of the philosophy which he tries to outline in the book. The following quote seems to parallell the work of Friedrich Hayek: "I grew up in the conviction that in a truly civilized society the sanctions of taste and manner would have a compelling force at least equal to those of law, religion and morals" (p. 18) However as modernity paves way for collectivism "(men) and events were taken, as they now are, as phenomena virtually isolated, virtually improvised, with nothing behind them but their immediate exciting cause." There is a very strong sense of Kultur in the book as he describes the differences between French, English and American culture. Losing this sense of identity brings about doom as the basic fabric of our mutual understanding seems to be ruptured and therefore we slouch towards our more basic instincts.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in libertarian thought during the late 19th and early 20th century.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book of ideas that loosely relate to the life of Albert Jay Nock, a libertarian writer, man of letters and prophet of doom. A fairly private man, his memoirs were pretty barebones. He doesn't say anything about his wife and children, nor does he mention his time as an Episcopal priest. He talks about his childhood and education, growing up at the dawn of the 20th century. He talks about his publications, books he read and his opinions on war, women's liberation and politics.
There were several things I liked about this book. Nock is unabashedly intellectual, quoting directly in Latin, French, and German as well as ancient Greek, script and all. He has brutally high expectation of his reader as far as background knowledge of ideas, books and letters. He was educated in the classics and felt that was the only way to become truly educated, rather than just trained for the society of "Economism," his word for materialism. He is unequivocally anti-statist and champions the rights of individuals to be left alone. However, he is very pessimistic about the future of the individual, the United States, and the whole of Western Civilization.
The major problem I had with his book was that all of his ideas were based on the premise that very few people were born with the mental capacity to act like anything but animals. His is the most blatant example of bare-knuckled elitism that I have ever encountered. As well as being anti-government he is also anti-church. He sees both the state and organized religion as being institutions run by people with corrupt and selfish motives which cause them to try to control people. As far as personal religion goes, he believes that the only reasonable position is to be firmly agnostic.
All in all, I am glad I read this book, and would recommend it to others who are interested in libertarian and conservative thought. It starts out strong and grows rather tedious but finishes well and gives you a lot to think about. The overall impression I got from the man himself, however, was on the whole rather unpleasant. I'm sure he wasn't much fun at parties.

[Joe]

Comment:

AJ Nock somewhere asked 'How would you know if you were living in a dark age?'
(I forget both where he said it and the exact quote.)
I often think of that question when I watch the news...
Rape and torture are now policy and, even where this is not the case, the world more and more believes in naked Power.
Yes, there always has been power. But one time, not very long ago, it was thought (I should have typed 'hoped') that the exercise of power could somehow lead to greater freedom.
When I was young, liberals and socialists thought this. In Merleau-Ponty's bon mot, they were all searching for a "violence that recedes with the future."
(Again, probably not the exact quote.)
It was never found. Broadly speaking, there were three histories of freedom when I was young: socialist, liberal, and libertarian. Regarding the danger of state power, the last was far more correct than the others.
No, Violence does not wane over time. Violence may be episodic; but it does not contain within itself the ability to become anything else.
Ever.

[Kwame · Rating 4 out of 5]

A powerful book. As my dad would say "This is some heavy shit, potna, you ain't ready for this bwoh. This is grown folks reading, rookie" lol. Nook deemed himself superfluous because he did couldn't accommodate his mind to the interest of the gross national product or the purposes of the nation state. A self-educated man, raised in Brooklyn and fond of dictionaries, Nook acquired the habit of reading Greek and Latin at the age of eight. His memoir is less an account of his life than it is a history of thought. A must read!!!

[Zachary Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nock's memoirs are an engagingly written series of observations of life in the early 20th century that are sure to provoke much thought. I found him a bit too pessimistic about the possibility of human improvement but I agree that human improvement is largely a matter of individual initiative. I also found his discussion of religion to be almost entirely in agreement with my own views on the subject.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometime in the late nineteenth century, enough switches flipped in the heads of enough of the Western bourgeoisie that a general societal freakout occurred. That class of society, then at the height of its powers, and almost certainly more powerful than any group had ever been in human history, suddenly came to believe itself beset by dangers and in the grips of irreversible decline. To the extent that this was true, their attitudes towards the situation helped bring it about. I tend to date this freakout to the revolt and suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, but more than just politics went into it. The pace of change in general — political, social, economic, technological — caught up to the people supposedly in charge, and when they realized they weren’t as in charge as they thought… a lot of things we see in culture, from corn flakes (invented to keep boys from masturbating, a concern of the freakout period) to the slaughters in the trenches of WWI, can, arguably, be attributed to the freakout.

Albert Jay Nock was born in 1870, just as the freakout was starting (maybe), and died in 1945, just as the freakout’s (maybe) ultimate fruit, the Second World War, ended. He was in position to watch the whole thing and give his peculiar takes. That he is known today, to the extent he’s known at all, as one of the godfathers of American libertarianism is both a shame, and also his own fault. He was more than that, but that he became that posthumously comes down to his failings. Libertarianism, for its part, became one of the coping strategies for other eras of crack-up, the aftermath of the sixties and that of the early twenty-first century (assuming we decide not to lump them in together).

What Nock was was a genuine man of letters, and “Memoirs of a Superfluous Man” is in most respects the story of his learning to be such, and what he did once he became one. In this way, it tracks alongside “The Education of Henry Adams,” and Nock cites his fellow cultural pessimist at several points in the text, though he doesn’t try for anything like Adams’ experiments with prose structure, or his gravitas. That cuts both ways. It is nice that Nock has something of a sense of humor and is admirably direct; but he can be direct in some garbage directions and ultimately this work, while fascinating, has flaws that drag it beneath the (extremely high) standard Adams set. Later for that.

Nock grew up in Brooklyn and in an unnamed Great Lakes town, in what appear to be what we would call “upper middle class” circumstances or above. If he ever needed to worry about making a living, or ever had to seriously curtail a lifestyle of travel and good eating, he doesn’t report it. He describes an idyllic childhood of good wholesome fun with little governance from the adult world. He goes away to school and becomes “classically educated.” He is taught Latin, Greek, math, and left to his own devices for most of the rest. In many respects, that is the pivot of his whole story.

Classical education has meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. To Nock, it meant the key to history. The Greeks and the Romans tried everything in their roughly two thousand years. They learned all one needed to learn about how societies function. Everything else is either just technical improvement, or balderdash (not sure if Nock used the word, but he would use that kind of word). The human condition is what it is, and hasn’t changed since the days of Plato, or much before then either.

Bertolt Brecht, the kind of poet Nock (who could read German) would probably dismiss out of hand, wrote: “I would happily be wise./The old books teach us what wisdom is:/To retreat from the strife of the world/To live out the brief time that is your lot/Without fear/To make your way without violence/To repay evil with good —/The wise do not seek to satisfy their desires,/But to forget them./But I cannot heed this:/Truly I live in dark times!” Other than the forgetting desires bit — Nock has an earthy enjoyment of sex and food — “the old books” taught Nock more or less exactly that. But unlike Brecht’s narrator in “To Posterity,” he keeps on heeding. That cushion of family money probably helps, as does the option to be on the other side of the Atlantic from a lot of the risky business.

How to explain the conditions of the 1870-1945 (i.e. almost exactly Nock’s lifespan) freakout from a classical perspective? Nock never lays it out programmatically, exactly, in what is, after all, a personal memoirs. The two problems he cites most often are “economism” and “statism,” which mostly means treating the progress of either economy or state capacity as good things in and of themselves. Nock can believe this because, as becomes more and more open as the book goes on, Nock has a limited understanding of what constitutes “human.” That’s a nice way of saying he believes most people are less than human. Nock takes from the classics that culture is, essentially, for the elite. Most people can’t benefit from it- one of the claims he throws out there like a rock (and here, Nock is very much a father of libertarianism, a troll’s politics) is the notion that mass literacy is unhelpful, in fact hurtful in that it drives out good literature. The story of history is the story of elites producing culture, the masses enjoying some of the benefits in a passive way, and then for some reason, a combination of uppity masses and either weak or traitorous elites opening the gates and letting the barbarians in.

“What’s to stop the elite from just exploiting the masses, then?” Well, “nothing” is the real answer, but Nock would say something about how laws and politics are thin protections in any event, and really what makes positive change are morals and manners. Morals and manners, in turn, are the products of society and its refinement. Allow society to produce its own brilliance (in the way free marketeers, like many of the people who today think, wrongly, Nock would give them the time of day, think markets can do) and it will take care of things. But hand that power over to the state and you get rule by armed thugs and the society goes to shit. Where “economism” enters into this — where it comes from, why anyone chose to practice it if they had everything going so well in the fifteen-hundreds or early nineteenth century, which seem to be Nock’s historical happy places — is a bit of a mystery. Nock doesn’t come out and blame the Jews, like Henry Adams came close to doing, but you can see how followers might.

As you can probably tell, I don’t believe in any of this. And it wears very thin towards the end, when we leave Nock’s more interesting, younger experiences and basically go into a period where he’s an established journalist and essayist, and details how right he’s been about everything for the last forty years. But for the first two thirds or so of the book- let’s put it this way. In many respects, the saving grace of this memoirs is that Nock is not as much of a classicist as he thinks he is. Sure, he can pepper his works with untranslated (I have an old copy, not the new, hand-holding editions published by libertarian propaganda outfits, and am just fine with that) Greek and Latin and talk as though — even believe — that modern culture is trash, etc. But he’s still an American, a product of what he himself calls an entirely “economistic” culture, a child of the bourgeoisie, not even the ersatz aristocracy that gave us Henry Adams.

If he were just that classicist applying his (mediocre, pre-Nietzsche) classicism to his times, that wouldn’t be worth much, probably. As it stands, his Americanism, and his embeddedness in his times, both (further) warps his ideas and also means he can say some things that are specific to a time and place, and provide insights into those times and places, as well as into politics and culture more generally. Among other things, it’s a bit of a laugh when, along with the lessons imparted by the classics, Nock declares that things like Gresham’s Law (“bad money drives out good”) and something he calls Epstean’s Law (after a friend who may or may not be a time traveling Jeffrey), that basically means everyone is lazy, are basic, ahistorical principles of human life. That’s some good old American dumbassery, right there. That’s one of the basic points Nietzsche tries to get across about classical civilization: they were different enough from us that the way a given user of their thought tries to wedge them into their situation tells us more, in many respects, than what the classics have to say about any given situation.

So what does the juxtaposition of classicism and good old American urdummheit — Nock spends a lot of time telling us about his American forebears, and indulges in a fair amount of Americana-nostalgia, for a guy who also pooh-poohs our “civilization” or lack thereof — tell us about Nock and his times? Well, for one thing, this “civilization” vs “state” vs “society” business is important, less for any insight provided by using any of these floating signifiers and more for how some people, in Nock’s day and our own, understand historical change. You don’t have to believe that “society” is an independent actor, opposed to the state, and the sole source of human goodness to think that changes in social behavior — manners, mores, arts, etc — are determinative (though it probably helps). As silly as it may sound to my mostly materialist, radical readership, not only is that a thing a fair number of intellectuals, from conservatives and liberals to even some utopian socialists, believe, but it is also something like common sense to a shockingly high number of people, if you talk much outside of said materialist/radical circles. This is bad (though sometimes generative) thought. But we can’t ignore it. Powerful people (and powerful amounts of less powerful people) believe it and guide their actions by it. And there’s a grain of truth- what we could call “social microphysics” can be important. Some of the excesses of the woke left can probably be attributed to the ways they are waking up to that fact, with little in the way of guidance…

There’s also the question of education. I think Nock does hit on a tendency to think of knowledge as only being good for strict utilitarian purposes. You learn what you need to learn to serve a function. I guess I wind up echoing that, too, when I don’t mean to, by saying there is a purpose to learning things that aren’t directly “useful” i.e. will allow you to serve a purpose. I felt what he said about a classical education teaching him how to think critically, in a way learning how to be a socially usefully widget wouldn’t do. I just differ on some important points: I do think everyone benefits from education and critical thinking, and I don’t think the Greeks and Romans had some monopoly on teaching about the basic elements of life. I actually think learning critical history — of the whole world — does better what Nock says classical education does, but I guess I’m biased.

While we’re at it, is there much of a point to reading this book beyond what we might learn from it? Well, to my surprise, I found there was. Among other things, classical education seemed to have done pretty well for Nock the writer. Until he gets really pedantic in the back third, his prose quality carried me along. He vividly invokes his social environments, even as you squint at some of his claims. Among other things, he gets across the feel of “reform” circles — he was a follower of Henry George (up until his cultural pessimism swallowed him), a fact some of his libertarian epigones today might have a hard time really swallowing — in the early twentieth century brilliantly… that is, of others trying desperately to negotiate the freakout. In contrast to some other readers, I love books that send me to Wikipedia — which I carry in my pocket, after all — to look up their references. It points to a whole world, now almost lost. One of the ironies of reading this is that Nock thought that truth floated free of context, but those who would try to apply his thought bowdlerize it mercilessly to fit it into their very different contexts… as Nock presumably did to the Greeks and Romans. And so it goes. That is culture, that is civilization, and that is part of why I play this game. ****’

[Reed Schwartz · Rating 4 out of 5]

contemporary conservatives should stop wasting time on books about "chronic lyme" and go back to writing about how the mass man is literally subhuman (and that Henry George was right)

[DROPPING OUT · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can I give a book ten stars? I guess not, but if I could, this book would merit eleven!

I must thank Seth for recommending this to me last year. I bought a copy (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007) and began reading it last evening. Seth, I cannot thank you sufficiently.

Albert Jay Nock (1873-1945) was a maverick journalist who willingly called himself a "radical," meaning he favored a return to individual responsibility and liberty, as opposed to "statism" (as espoused, in his day, by President Roosevelt, and by President Obama in ours). He was a gadfly in his day, and, Lord, could we use the likes of him today!

This is hardly an autobiography in the standard sense, but, rather personal and intellectual growth in the last quarter of the 19th century.

His ability at self-deprecating (without false-modesty) understatement is absolutely refreshing.

This is the only book I can remember reading, and catching myself unaware with mouth agape.

********************************************************************

YES! It took me over two months to read this wonderful books. That is because I rationed it out over time - I did not want it to end.

I read somewhere that Lenin made a practice of re-reading the entire works of Shakespeare every few years because of Shakespeare's understanding of human nature. I think an annual reading of Alfred Jay's Nock Memoirs merits the same.

The more I read, the more prescient I saw Nock was. Although he died almost 65 years ago, he accurately described what america has become today.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quotes:

Every person of any intellectual quality develops some sort of philosophy of existence.

Whatever a man may do or say, the most significant thing about him is what he thinks.

One of the most offensive things about the society in which I later found myself was its monstrous itch for changing people.

As a French writer lately remarked, American society is the only one which has passed directly from barbarism into decadence without once knowing civilisation.

When the sanctions of law, religion and morals broke down through persistent misapplication to matters of conduct quite outside their purview, the sanctions of taste and manners had become too frail and anæmic to be of any practical good.

It is one of my oddest experiences that I have never been able to find any one who would tell me what the net social value of a compulsory universal literacy actually comes to when the balance of advantage and disadvantage is drawn, or wherein that value consists.

All Souls College, Oxford, planned better than it knew when it limited the number of its undergraduates to four; four is exactly the right number for any college which is really intent on getting results.

We were all supposed to respect our government and its laws, yet by all accounts those who were charged with the conduct of government and the making of its laws were most dreadful swine; indeed, the very conditions of their tenure precluded their being anything else.

There was always plenty to do that was legitimate and more interesting than anything likely to land us in trouble, so why get in trouble? This was all there was to it; this was the sum of our ethical imperative.

I have often noticed that the most slovenly people are those who are most accustomed to having things done for them.

The only body of men in America who have the faintest notion of what education really means are the Jesuits.

An equalitarian and democratic régime must by consequence assume, tacitly or avowedly, that everybody is educable.

[The] final end and aim of education [is] the ability to see things as they are.

The more thoroughly his ability to see things as they are is cultivated, the more his superfluity is enhanced.

Within the last half-century in England, France and Germany, the State had been continually absorbing through taxation more and more of the national wealth, continually assuming one new coercive, regulative or directive function after another. In the United States the same process had begun to be speeded up to a headlong rapidity. Everywhere these wholesale confiscations of social power were going on; everywhere social power was being depleted, and everywhere State power being increased at its expense.

It is easier to seize wealth than to produce it; and as long as the State makes the seizure of wealth a matter of legalised privilege, so long will the squabble for that privilege go on.

A man’s country is where the things he loves are most respected. Circumstances may have prevented his ever setting foot there, but it remains his country.

I wonder how many such men in America would know that Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so-many trade-names for collectivist Statism, like the trade-names for tooth-pastes which are all exactly alike except for the flavouring.

The idea that there is something to live for besides the production, acquisition and distribution of wealth—this idea died a slow, hard death in France.

The elementary truth which was so clear to the mind of Mr. Jefferson [is] that in proportion as you give the State power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you; and that the State invariably makes as little as it can of the one power, and as much as it can of the other.

Society’s tacit assumption is that all normal persons are qualified for matrimony, and this is not so.

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 pretence of reconciling the State and liberty.”

The only time I was ever a millionaire was when I spent a few weeks in Germany in 1923. I was the proud possessor of more money than one could shake a stick at, but I could buy hardly anything with it… One might suppose that a glance at this state of things would show the whole world that money is worth only what it will buy, and if it will not buy anything it is not worth anything. In other words, one might suppose people would be set thinking, not at all about money, but about commodities.

The general preoccupation with money led to several curious beliefs which are now so firmly rooted that one hardly sees how anything short of a collapse of our whole economic system can displace it. One such belief is that commodities—goods and services—can be paid for with money. This is not so. Money does not pay for anything, never has, never will. It is an economic axiom as old as the hills that goods and services can be paid for only with goods and services.

Another strange notion pervading whole peoples is that the State has money of its own; and nowhere is this absurdity more firmly fixed than in America. The State has no money. It produces nothing. Its existence is purely parasitic, maintained by taxation; that is to say, by forced levies on the production of others. “Government money,” of which one hears so much nowadays, does not exist; there is no such thing. One is especially amused at seeing how largely a naïve ignorance of this fact underlies the pernicious measures of “social security” which have been foisted on the American people.

Money has been largely diverted from its function as a mere convenience, a medium of exchange, a sort of general claim-check on production, and has been slily knaved into an instrument of political power.

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.
“Nowadays the individual is born into the State, and the secular registration of birth is the national rite of baptism. With tender solicitude the State follows the individual through life, teaching him in patriotic schools the national catechism, and commemorating his vital crises by formal registration not only of his birth, but likewise of his marriage, of the birth of his children, and of his death.” Carlton J. H. Hayes

“He created man part divine, part bestial, and the two elements have been at war within the individual ever since. When the bestial side gets the better of it for the moment, as it will every now and then, and you go wrong, don’t bother over repenting and nagging yourself about it. Let it go,—forget it,—to hell with it!—and put your energy harder than ever on building up the divine side. Don’t try to repress the bestial side. Repression is negative, enervating. Put all your work on the positive job, and you can afford to let the bestial side take its chances.” Edward Epstean

“The primary and sole foundation of virtue, or of the proper conduct of life, is to seek our own profit.” Baruch Spinoza

Really, when one thinks of it, what a preposterous thing it is to put the management of a nation, a province, even a village, in the hands of a man who can not so much as manage a family!

If every jobholder in Washington were driven into the Potomac tonight, their places would be taken tomorrow by others precisely like them.

[Matt Carpenter · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book, Albert Jay Nock describes his life, philosophy, and American culture in the early 1900's. His writing is crisp and his vocabulary outstanding, as you would expect from a classically educated gentleman. While not a autobiography in the normal sense, he combines his intellectual ideas with the story of his life, and thoughts about other well-known men of his age. As a refined anarchist, he should be better known among Libertarians and conservatives. While too rambling at times, his writing is erudite and unsentimental. Reading him is an education in itself.

[Max Bodach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nock's an interesting writer and memoirist, and he's fun to read mostly because his opinions (particularly on the State, man, and religion) are so bad. However, he's a reminder of what libertarians could be if they actually had some culture and self-respect. His comments on education, though elitist, are very good and his own educational journey is instructive.

[Mad Russian the Traveller · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Judy]

Quirky, well written but has not aged well with me.

[Craig Scott · Rating 1 out of 5]

dated ideas and musings

[JP · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my absolute favorites. Nock is the self-educated man who thinks with logic, seeks importance, and acts, within his environment, on that which is important; and he is an elitist. Nock learned Greek and Latin on his own with limited direction from his father. He describes the law of diminishing returns in education: "Socrates chatting with a single protagonist meant one thing, and well did he know it. Socrates lecturing to a class of fifty would mean something woefully different, so he organised no classes and did no lecturing. Jersualem was a university town, and in a university every day is field-day for the law of diminishing returns. Jesus stayed away from Jerusalem, and talked with fishermen here and there, who seem to have pretty well got what he was driving at; some better than others, apparently, but on the whole pretty well. And so we have it that unorganised Christianity was one thing, while organised Christianity has consistently been another."[return][return]Regarding the popular classical works (Caesar, Homer, Virgil, Cicero), Nock felt this was the "dullest, dreariest, most unrewarding task I ever set my hand to." Instead the "scraps" used in his learning Greek and Latin taught him affairs of ordinary life and experience which made him see "men and women of antiquity ... not as heroes, but as people exaclty like us, each with twenty-four hours a day to get through somehow or other and for the most part getting throguh them quite as we do," while the "great orator was a good deal of a stuffed shirt." [return][return]"Nine-tenths of the value of classical studies lies in their power to establish a clear common-sense, matter-of-fact view of human nature and its activities over a continuous stretch of some twenty centuries." "Too often a routing of elementary Greek and Latin was forced upon ineducable children." "I have seen many a graduate student who had gone to Germany to study under some great classicist, like a colour-blind botanist going to a flower-show with a bad cold in his head; he came back a a doctor of philosophy, knowing a great deal about his subject, I dare say, but not knowing how to appreciate or enjoy it." [return][return]In discussing the industrial revolution and ensuing prosperity, he brings out the this-cannot-last fears that seemed to underly the thoughts of many. Economism was the only philosophy; the "whole of human life in terms of the production, acquisition and distribution of wealth." "I sometimes thought of the rich lumbermen whom I had known so well, and on the whole had rather liked. Now I ws looking at the great avatars of their practical philosophy, the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Fricks, Hills, Huntingtons, of the period. I asked myself whether any amount of wealth would be worth having if - as one most efficiently must - if one had to become just like these men in order to get it. To me, at least, it would not; I should be a superfluous man in the scuffle for riches."[return][return]Nock continues onward with constantly interesting insight, including 3 simple laws that explain so many human trends. They're beautiful. Want to know? Read the book.

[Fred R · Rating 2 out of 5]

At first I enjoyed it as fresh old Americana, but the precious tone soon began to wear on me. Nock has the over-confident egotism of an auto-didact, and his general pronouncements seem to me almost entirely lacking in merit. It is fine to point out that the State grows by swallowing up Society, but when you wish to tear down Society as well, your position becomes, for me, merely frivolous.

I endorse his position on education (that all are not equally equipped for its demands), but he is even too elitist for me, to the point of writing off most of humanity as sub-human. I can't follow him there.

I liked very much his description of his childhood.

[Ronald · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book should be required reading before any American is permitted to vote or run for office. At bottom it is about human nature and the mistakes of people and governments which cannot or will not see things as they are. Being slightly uneducated, I had never heard of the guy until last year while reading Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadence." You can look him up on Wikipedia to read his biography and a list of his writings. All I can say is the book was great and defies traditional labels familiar to those like me who grew up getting little to no education in public schools. For me, it was less a memoir than a manifesto. Superb writing and superb criticism.

[Roman Skaskiw · Rating 5 out of 5]

A nuanced sensibility and profound critique of education, government and society. I think I understand his pessimism and intellectual isolation. A beautiful book from the most well read person I've ever encountered.

I loved this book so much that I ended up talking about it for almost three hours. Check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--gj5...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pdwo...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K5oy...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XtJr...

[Jörn Dinkla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book about life, philosophy, political thought and culture in the USA from 1880 to 1943. I lived my whole live in germany and it is very interesting for me to get first hand information about the history of the USA. This makes so much more sense than the story that is told in the mainstream media (that it is a pure capitalistic country). Sometimes the book is a little tedious, but overall it is a must read.

[Jeff Rottman · Rating 2 out of 5]

A little too dry for me. Interesting views on education though.

[Jonathan]

None

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A life-changing book. Perhaps the best thing I read in 2014.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

A remarkably enjoyable curmudgeon

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm reading the Kindle version.

[Giorgi Odoshashvili]

Truly the old Right one!