I Just Watched Enemy of the State Again
Our Enemy, the Land
What does one need to know almost politics? In some means, Nock has summed it all up in this astonishing book, the influence of which has grown every year since its publication.
This edition is supplemented past a sweeping introduction by Butler Shaffer, a scholar who has written many books in the Nockian tradition.
Nock was a prominent essayist at the tiptop of the New Deal. In 1935, hardly whatever public intellectuals were making much sense at all. They pushed socialism. They pushed fascism. Anybody had a plan. Hardly anyone considered the possibility that the state was not fixing lodge but destroying it bit past scrap.
And so Albert Jay Nock came forwards to write what needed to be written. And he ended up penning a classic of American political commentary, one that admittedly must be read past every educatee of economics and government.
Consider his opening ii paragraphs:
If we expect below the surface of our public affairs, we tin can discern i fundamental fact, namely: a great redistribution of power between order and the State. This is the fact that interests the student of civilization. He has merely a secondary or derived involvement in matters like cost-fixing, wage-fixing, inflation, political banking, "agricultural aligning," and like items of Land policy that fill the pages of newspapers and the mouths of publicists and politicians. All these can exist run up under one caput. They have an immediate and temporary importance, and for this reason they monopolize public attending, but they all come up to the aforementioned thing; which is, an increase of State ability and a corresponding subtract of social power.
It is unfortunately none as well well understood that, only equally the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what order gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; at that place is no other source from which Land ability tin can exist drawn. Therefore every assumption of Country power, whether past gift or seizure, leaves society with and so much less power; there is never, nor tin can at that place be, any strengthening of Land power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social ability.
The theory is skilful plenty and strong plenty for the forging of an unabridged apparatus of libertarian idea, which he does hither. But then he pushes the envelope. He discusses American history in a way that you will never read in the civics texts.
He praises the Articles of Confederation as the closest model of American liberty. And he blasts the men who hammered out the Constitution every bit nothing but usurpers engaged in a insurrection d'etat. Far from heralding the drafters, he exposes them as public creditors, land speculators, money lenders, and industrialists looking for privilege. They tossed out the Articles and used unscrupulous methods to ram the Constitution down the public'southward throat.
It was in this stage of American history, Nock says, that the state was unleashed. Next came the party arrangement, and the dynamics of statism that causes "every intervention by the State" to enable another so that "the Land stands ever gear up and eager to make" interventions through cant and lies.
Ane realizes many of import points about Nock when reading this. First, he was vivid, original, and courageous. Second, he hated politics — indeed he hated politics so much that he wanted a order that was completely free of it. This is why he is often described as anarchist. Tertiary, he surely was one of the great stylists of the English language language in the history of 20th century writing.
Those who accept read Nock know that at that place is something virtually his writing that tugs very deeply on one'south conscience and soul. This volume will linger in your mind as you read the daily headlines. He makes his points then well that they go unforgettable.
In then many ways, it is a tragedy that years accept gone by when this book has been unavailable. Just hither it is again, just as hot, just a revealing, as it was in 1935. Information technology is the ultimate handbook of the political dissident. If y'all aren't one still, you may find that Nock is a very persuasive recruiter into his informed army that makes up the remnant who know.
References
The Caxton Printers, Cadwell, Idaho. 1950
carpenterupecent47.blogspot.com
Source: https://mises.org/library/our-enemy-state-2
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