[This article originally appeared in the College of Nursing Art and Science Hyogo Bulletin, Vol. 14, 2007.]

The Problem Stated: Is "Nockian" a scientific or a literary term?

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1944) was an outstanding representative of early twentieth century libertarian thought and advocacy. Even today the libertarian movement, impacted though it is by the subsequent thought of Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), Murray Rothbard (1926–1995), Ayn Rand (1905–1982) and others, pays a nostalgic tribute to Nock as an early advocate and belletrist.

This paper is an inquiry into whether and to what extent Nock may be considered more than just a brilliant writer and journalist. To what extent may we consider Nock a social scientist? The question probably would not have bothered Nock himself in the least, but it is important to raise in the light of contemporary libertarian theory. Libertarianism is the political philosophy that maintains that a free and just society is incompatible with any form of coercion. While almost all political thinkers consider private coercion (e.g., murder, larceny) to be criminal, libertarians would extend this prohibition on the use of force to public (especially state) agencies as well.

At present the libertarian movement is to some extent in disarray, caught between radicalism and pragmatism, left and right, anarchism and minarchism, and considered by some to be a spent force in its pure form. Does Nock still have anything to say that is better than contemporary theorists have to offer?

It is a safe contention that Nock is still the most humanistic of the libertarians, if humanism is considered in the broad sense defined by Irving Babbitt.[1] However, this very humanism would seem to exclude Nock from consideration as a social scientist, let alone a member of the economics profession, often presumed to be the most rigorous of the social science fields.

To see Nock as an economist we would have to reorganize knowledge in such a way that economics became a branch of the human sciences. This is a step at which even some members of the Austrian school, among the least positivistic economists, might balk. The problem is not that Austrians, in eschewing positivism, are careful to proceed within carefully constructed logical categories, for this is a procedure that Nock would certainly concur with. Rather, the nub of the distinction between Nockian argumentation and Austrian deduction is the latter's rigorous separation of psychology and human action theory. When considered under the canon of "antipsychologism," Nock's discourse seems unscientific. However, this very antipsychologism, as important as it is for grounding catallactics in a pure theory of human action, vitiates economics as the basis for a general sociology. If the desideratum of libertarian theory is a general sociology, rather than harping on the truism that "the market works," then a return to social theory in the grand style of Albert Jay Nock would seem to be in order.

The political economy of Albert Jay Nock has things to say that are both vital to understanding the apocalyptic tendencies of modern society as well as the perennial predicaments of the human race. It is unfortunate that he has come to be considered, in his own words, "a superfluous man," for the ideas that Nock exposited were anything but irrelevant or trivial. That he has come to be seen as no more than a rhetorician or journalist of the Old Right, is in part a result of that ideology splitting up into the two antagonistic movements of conservativism and libertarianism respectively.

This split has been amply covered by several writers (e.g., Justin Raimondo). However, within the libertarian movement itself Nock has been sidetracked due to an intellectual shift precipitated by the arrival of European free-market economists in America in a period roughly coincident with Nock's death. This produced the "Austrian turn" in American libertarian theory, and ultimately banished Nock to the folksy company of Mark Twain (1835–1910) and H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) as protolibertarian journalists.

Indeed, the very readability of Nock has stood in the way of his thought being considered as being of continuing relevance to leading-edge social theory. To be sure, Nock coated his sour view of human failings with a sweet and affable style, and it is understandable that people in general would enjoy the surface and throw away the core. On the other hand, it is not acceptable to exclude a thinker from serious consideration in social science on the grounds of alleged psychologism until the antipsychologistic canon has proved relevant.

In the process of assessing Nock's continuing relevance, it will be necessary to make a critical examination of the approaches that economics has made to the humanities, and why many are justly alarmed whenever strictly observational canons are discarded in favor of the contents of human thought, whether individual or collective. However, I will first try to extract the bare bones of Nock's political economy from his lucid prose, hoping to limn the outlines of his social theory and its relationship to both previous and subsequent economic and sociological thinking.

Pre-Austrian Libertarian social theorist

I. Influences

Nock had no training in the social sciences considered as a specialized field, even such training as would have been available to him around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. He did get a sound education in the classics and languages, which gave him a good empirical background for reflecting on contemporary politics in the light of history. In his biography he gives ample explanation of those factors which inclined him towards the individual as well as keeping the state always analytically separate from society. Thus when he came across the works of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) it seems to have been more of a confirmation of what he already suspected rather than a "conversion" to the principles of radical liberalism. In addition to Spencer, Nock was evidently familiar with the works of John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), from which he no doubt absorbed the basics of classical economics as it existed up to around 1870.

His astute observations on history seem to stem from his reading of the memoirs of statesmen such as John Adams (1735–1826) and, notably, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) rather than from historians or sociologists. In an indirect way this reading would have put him in contact with the thought of social philosophers and economists, such as the French "Physiocrats."

Apart from Spencer, the only other theoretician who had a major influence on Nock was Henry George, the leading advocate of the single-tax movement. Again, as with Spencer, this was not an academic influence, but rather the economic articulation of a reform movement that was gathering strength in America at the beginning of the 20th century. Another thinker who had a decisive effect on Nock was Charles Beard (1874–1948), again not a theorist but an economic historian who linked land speculation to the development of American constitutional government. When we look at these combined influences as a totality, we are hardly surprised to see in the kind of worldview that was sympathetic to Nock an emphasis on personal and property rights, an indebtedness to the basic principles of classical economics, a willingness to see history in terms of class conflict, and a belief in evolution combined with a skepticism of its "progressive" nature in the near term.

What we do not see in Nock, and what many post-Austrian libertarians will cavil at, is any sustained involvement or interest in marginal utility theory. I have not been able to determine to what extent Nock was aware of the work of Carl Menger (1840–1921) or his successors, but tentatively I would suspect that it was by hearsay, if that. So much for what was lacking that might have helped. What is present but may have hurt is the influence on Nock, late in life, of Ralph Adams Cram (1863–1942), architect and social thinker. It might be tempting to try to exculpate Nock from Cram's influence, in the same fashion that Randians have attempted to distance Ayn Rand from Nietzsche. But laying the anthropological speculations of Cram aside, let's look at the outline of political economy that can be extracted from Nock's own works.

II. Nockian Political Economy: The Three Laws

While Nock never wrote any systematic treatise on political economy or social science, he was very candid about the worldview that formed the basis of his social criticism, as found in the articles and books he published on political and historical topics. Although the principles which he adhered to were embedded in entertaining polemics, they were not merely ad hoc but exhibit an internal coherence which go a long way towards the elucidation of social facts. In particular he enunciated three laws which he alleged to be universal in the constitution of human society.

Nock writes towards the end of his life (1944) in Memoirs of a Superfluous Man,

"I was indescribably fortunate in getting, as early as I did, a clear sense of the bearing which three great laws of the type known as 'natural' have on human conduct. I say fortunate, for it was by good luck alone, and not my own deserving, that I got this sense. By luck I stumbled on the discovery that Epstein's law, Gresham's law, and the law of diminishing returns operate as inexorably in the realm of culture; of politics of social organization, religious or secular as they do in the realm of economics. This understanding enabled me to get the hang of many matters which far better men than me have found hopelessly puzzling, and to answer questions to which otherwise I would have found no answer." (Nock 1944, pp. 133–4)

The first of these, Epstein's Law, is the inherent tendency of human beings to satisfy their wants through the easiest means available. The second, Gresham's Law, asserts that less valuable items will push items of greater value out of circulation. The third is the law of diminishing returns, which declares that every successive unit applied to a given end will have less utility than the one that has gone before it.

The first of these laws Nock claimed as his own formulation (named after a friend of his) but the latter two were formulas already familiar to economics, although given a somewhat different role in Nockian sociology. Nock claimed that these three laws explained the most salient social problem of his day (and by extension ours as well). That problem, as Nock saw it, was the failure of the Western democratic movement to fulfill its aim of creating a just and livable civilization. In Nock's mind the democratic movement had not abolished, but rather abetted, what he saw as the two great evils of modernity, "economism" and "statism." Economism is the tendency to reduce all human ends to epiphenomena of wealth accumulation. Statism is the tendency to surrender social power (custom, traditional sanctions, moral sense) to state power (legislation and coercion).

If the three laws are the lynchpin upon which Nockian political economy hangs, then class theory is the mechanism by which these laws are translated into social facts. Unlike many non-Marxists, Nock was not afraid to boldly appeal to class analysis as an explanation of social facts. This was, of course, quite different from appealing to the interests of a specific class.

For one thing, he recognized that most loose talk about "class" was nothing more than a projection of what Nietzsche called "resentment." He was not in favor of what, from a Marxist point of view, might have been called a classless society. As long as different classes could coexist without exploitation Nock had no objection. Rather, the salient social fact, as Nock saw it, was the use of state power by one or more classes to exploit the rest. This, to him, lay at the heart of modern society's many injustices.

Furthermore Nock's notion of class was not a hypostasized entity that resulted from ineluctable historical forces. It was simply a category of people who happened to have certain economic interests in common. As such, it was rather loose around the edges, for classes might overlap and some individuals and organizations might not necessarily have a clear grasp of what class they were primarily associated with. However, the potential class interest might be mobilized by a core group, a "cabal" with a well-thought-out program of political action in mind.

This core group would come into existence whenever an opportunity to use state policy to the advantage of their class presented itself.

Nock drew a distinction between political and economic means as alternate, and opposing, ways to govern social and productive relations. Whenever a class substituted state power for social power, pursuing enrichment at the expense of other classes by the use of tariffs, imposts, embargos, rationing, wage-fixing, etc., the society was governed by political means. In Nock's view all contemporary societies were governed by political means. A non-exploitative society governed by economic means was to be considered either a hypothetical construct or a dim memory of pre-state societies.

The ubiquity of political governance was in turn founded on the three laws, which Nock had distilled from the history of political economy and his own observations. In particular, Epstein's Law, which showed that people in the mass would take the path of least resistance in order to increase their well-being, dictated that political means would triumph over economic means in a democratic society. Given the choice of increasing production or voting a subsidy to one's income (and that of one's fellow class members), the choice was obvious.

However, Epstein's Law does not apply to naked transfers of power and wealth, such as would easily be recognized as an ordinary criminal act. Rather, the legitimacy of the exploitation is justified by conceptually overlaying society with an institution called "the State," which impersonates society through the pretense of organizing the social whole, this idea having rooted itself as a mental habit characteristic of the population at large.

$15 "A non-exploitative society governed by economic means was to be considered either a hypothetical construct or a dim memory of pre-state societies."

As Nock writes in Our Enemy the State,

"It is a commonplace that the persistence of an institution is due solely to the state of mind that prevails towards it, the set of terms in which men habitually think about it. So long, and only so long, as those terms are favorable, the institution lives and maintains its power and when for any reason men generally cease thinking in those terms, it weakens and becomes inert." (Nock 1935 HI, Pt. 2)

Note in this passage Nock's appeal to collective mental representations on the part of the population at large. We will examine subsequently how this kind of discourse raises questions among methodologically rigorous libertarian theorists on the grounds of (1) methodological individualism, and (2) antipsychologism.

Nock continues:

"Thus it is that what we are attempting to do in this rapid survey of the historical progress of certain ideas, is to trace the genesis of an attitude of mind, a set of terms in which now practically everyone thinks of the State and then to consider the conclusions towards which this psychical phenomenon unmistakably points. Instead of recognizing the State as 'the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men,' the run of mankind, with rare exceptions, regards it not only as a final and indispensable entity, but also as, in the main, beneficent. The mass-man, ignorant of its history, regards its character and intentions as social rather than anti-social and in that faith he is willing to put at its disposal an indefinite credit of knavery, mendacity and chicane, upon which its administrators may draw at will. Instead of looking upon the State's progressive absorption of social power with the repugnance and resentment that he would naturally feel towards the activities of a professional-criminal organization, he tends rather to encourage and glorify it, in the belief that he is somehow identified with the State, and that therefore, in consenting to its indefinite aggrandizement, he consents to something in which he has a share — he is pro tanto, aggrandizing himself." (Ibid.)

Again note Nock's appeal to a "psychical tendency" as the salient support of the state system, a procedure that would seem to lay him open to charges of philosophical idealism. However, the laws of human nature that Nock appeals to are self-evident, even though his use of them makes his theories wander off in directions different from those taken up by later libertarian theorists, such as Rand and Rothbard, who were wary of discouraging their followers by saying anything that could be construed as deterministic or pessimistic.

Furthermore, Nock sees human motives as playing themselves out in terms of control of the factors of production. This element of economic realism Nock acquired not from Marx but from Henry George, leader of the single-tax movement, who saw economic exploitation as tightly bound to land monopolies. Nock combined this Georgist political economy with Beard's analysis of the establishment of the American state and generalized these into an overall explanation of statism:

"Bearing in mind that the state is the organization of the political means — that its primary intention is to enable the economic exploitation of one class by another we see that it has always acted on the principle already cited, that expropriation [of rights in land] must precede exploitation. There is no other way to make the political means effective. The first postulate of fundamental economics is that man is a land-animal, deriving subsistence wholly from the land." (Nock 1935, chap. 4, sec. i)

III. The Three Laws Exemplified through Historical Case Studies: The French and American Revolutions of the late 18th century

Nock's method in political economy was neither abstractly theoretical nor uncritically historical. Rather we see in his works an interplay between abstract laws and their working out in a historical context. In Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, he shows how the schematic of the three laws was manifested in the progress (or rather regress) of the French Revolution. At first the actors in this drama were motivated by idealism rather than political competition:

"In response to an urgent social demand, a revolutionary régime was set up in France in 1789. At the outset it was backed and promoted by men of far-seeing intelligence, including a good part of the aristocracy. They charted the revolution's course, and made a good job of it. Taine says truly that the French aristocrats were never so worthy of power as when they were on the point of losing it. The thing to be remarked is that the primary interest of these men and the primary intention of the revolution were social." (Nock 1944, p. 165)

However, as the revolution institutionalized itself into a New Regime rather than simply an anti-Old Regime movement, the laws of political process began to come into operation.

Then at the moment when the revolution became a going concern, Epstein's law brought in a waiting troop of political adventurers whose interest