Albert Jay Nock, perhaps the most brilliant American essayist of the 20th century, and certainly among its most important libertarian thinkers, set out to write his autobiography but he ended up doing much more. He presents here a full theory of society, state, economy, and culture, and does so almost inadvertently.
His stories, lessons, observations, and conclusions pack a very powerful punch, so much so that anyone who takes time to read carefully cannot but end up changed in intellectual outlook. One feels that one has been let in a private club of people who see more deeply than others. This is truly an American classic.
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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.
"The State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime … and it makes this monopoly as strict as it can. It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale."
"If you give the State power to do something for you, you give it an exact equivalent of power to do something to you."
NY: Harper Brothers, 1943
