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This collection was selected and arranged by Robert M. Thornton, who writes of it:
We are not out to save the world. Neither is our aim to idolize a man or endorse every idea embraced by AJN. Nock had a way of setting ideas in motion and then keeping out of their way.
In a note by Jacques Barzun, he writes of Cogitations from Albert Jay Nock:
Here is a small book full of Nock's thoughts, as fresh as they were when first minted. It is not all of Nock, and the effect is less than the sum from which they came. But it is a man thinking, which the republic needs more than it thinks — ambiguity intended.
Meet the Author
Albert Jay Nock
View Albert Jay Nock bio and works
Albert Jay Nock (October 13, 1870–August 19, 1945) was an influential American libertarian author, educational theorist, and social critic of the early and middle twentieth century. Murray Rothbard was deeply influenced by him, and so was the whole generation of free market thinkers of the 1950s.
American essayist Albert Jay Nock celebrates the life and work of the great English sociologist and libertarian Herbert Spencer.
Albert Jay Nock, in this seminal essay, discusses his gradual realization that the state is not what it claims to be: "The State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime that I spoke of a moment ago, and it makes this monopoly as strict as it can. It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien. There is, for example, no human right, natural or constitutional, that we have not seen nullified by the United States government. Of all the crimes that are committed for gain or revenge, there is not one that we have not seen it commit—murder, mayhem, arson, robbery, fraud, criminal collusion, and connivance. On the other hand, we have all remarked the enormous relative difficulty of getting the State to effect any measure for the general welfare. "
[This essay first appeared in the American Mercury in March 1939.] As well as I can judge, the general attitude of Americans who are at all interested in foreign affairs is one of astonishment...
References
The Nockian Society, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, 1985