“The stronger the American State is allowed to grow, the higher its record of criminality will grow, according to its opportunities and temptations.”—Albert Jay Nock, “The Criminality of the State”
Albert Jay Nock, in spite of his anti-state essays, was not an anarchist. He was closer to being a classical liberal in wanting to keep the state as small as possible, but not vanquished. In Our Enemy, the State he tells us:
There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man’s needs and desires can be satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means.
Expanding on this, he writes:
[Franz] Oppenheimer defines the State, in respect of its origin, as an institution “forced on a defeated group by a conquering group, with a view only to systematizing the domination of the conquered by the conquerors, and safeguarding itself against insurrection from within and attack from without. This domination had no other final purpose than the economic exploitation of the conquered group by the victorious group.”
It’s sobering, and profoundly shameful, to realize social reality consists of two groups—the bullied and the bullies, one producing with the other living in grand style off their production through coercion or the threat thereof. The question, “Is the state necessary?” becomes “Is theft necessary”?
Nock also believed it was futile to educate the public about the nature of the state, since he regarded most people as willingly dependent and non-intellectual. In his essay “Isiah’s Job,” he scolds a “learned acquaintance” about his goal of educating the masses on sound economic doctrine and making it his life’s mission:
I mustered courage to say that he had no such mission and would do well to get the idea out of his head at once; he would find that the masses would not care two pins for his doctrine, and still less for himself, since in such circumstances the popular favorite is generally some Barabbas.
The essay was published in 1936 when people had been suffering from the Depression and looking to the state—in particular President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal—to grant them deliverance. Since the most educated brains had declared capitalism a failure and had warned of a communist takeover, the beloved FDR gave them government by decree and cartelization of the economy. Roosevelt’s anti-capitalist measures were meant to save capitalism, in case you are wondering why so little of it exists today. FDR became the new Barabbas in the guise of a savior.
Nock saw the state as constantly encroaching on social power, by which he meant individuals in their capacity to get along with one another voluntarily. As an example of social power he cites how volunteers responded to the Johnstown Flood of May 31, 1889, when a dam broke 14 miles upstream from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, killing 2,208 people from a population of 30,000:
When the Johnstown flood occurred, social power was immediately mobilized and applied with intelligence and vigour. Its abundance, measured by money alone, was so great that when everything was finally put in order, something like a million dollars remained. If such a catastrophe happened now, not only is social power perhaps too depleted for the like exercise, but the general instinct would be to let the State see to it.
Voting, for Nock, was little more than a ritual for legitimizing state power. The common man might be willing to be bossed around, but he votes, and—to that extent—he hopes for a better boss or less bossing. It would appear we are then ruled by his votes, rather than the state directly. While this is true to some extent, it overlooks the state’s control of elections. Why for instance is “None of the Above” never an election choice? Why don’t we see a ballot entry for eliminating the Income Tax or the Department of Education or the Federal Reserve?
Relying instead on the promises of politicians goes nowhere. Once in office they can and have acted contrary to what got them elected, as demonstrated by the Democratic Party platform of 1932 that called for “eliminating extravagance” in government, a balanced budget, and the preservation of “a sound currency.” Some young MAGA voters are finding they didn’t get what they voted for either.
Nock’s 1939 essay on foreign affairs, “The Criminality of the State,” makes his view of the state eminently clear, beyond its stark title. “All our institutional voices,” he writes, “—the press, pulpit, forum—are pitched to the note of amazed indignation at one or another phase of the current goings-on in Europe and Asia.” He continues:
This leads me to believe that our people generally are viewing with wonder as well as repugnance certain conspicuous actions of various foreign States; for instance, the barbarous behavior of the German State towards some of its own citizens; the merciless despotism of the Soviet Russian State; the ruthless imperialism of the Italian State. . . .
I am cordially with them on every point but one. I am with them in repugnance, horror, indignation, disgust, but not in astonishment. The history of the State being what it is, and its testimony being as invariable and eloquent as it is, I am obliged to say that the naive tone of surprise wherewith our people complain of these matters strikes me as a pretty sad reflection on their intelligence. Suppose someone were impolite enough to ask them the gruff question, “Well, what do you expect?”—what rational answer could they give? I know of none.
He then offers a recommendation that should have been adopted if we had had a state-independent media—an oxymoron of the first order. It’s Nock’s answer on how to fight the gang in charge of our lives:
Polite or impolite, [“What do you expect?”] is just the question which ought to be put every time a story of State villainy appears in the news. It ought to be thrown at our public day after day, from every newspaper, periodical, lecture platform, and radio station in the land; and it ought to be backed up by a simple appeal to history, a simple invitation to look at the record.
Imagine, if you can, the legacy media attacking Israel and its backers for its genocide in Gaza. Clearly, it’s not just totalitarian states that are engaged in savagery.
The totalitarian State is only the State; the kind of thing it does is only what the State has always done with unfailing regularity, if it had the power to do it, wherever and whenever its own aggrandizement made that kind of thing expedient.
He makes it clear that “‘democratic’ State practice is nothing more or less than State practice. It does not differ from Marxist State practice, Fascist State practice, or any other.”
Conclusion
Nock’s war on the state was always to keep it from growing, not to shut it down completely. But hampering the state would require a vigilance and personal attributes in rare supply among the electorate, which he acknowledged. Perhaps because he didn’t understand the power and incentives of an unhampered free economy he was unable to call for the state’s elimination.
