To Francine

When you are old enough to read this book there will be a Society and there will be a State, and both will take their character from the reigning ideas of the times. I suspect that these ideas, planted in the American mind before you were born, will be so different from those expressed in this book that you may have some difficulty in understanding how your grandfather “got that way.” That could provide you with some good, clean fun—trying to reconstruct a long-lost pattern of thought.

Foreword

IT IS HARD to think of an age which, with less reason, has been more smugly self-satisfied than ours. The orthodoxies of the most solidly established high religious ages, founded as they were upon a belief in the transcendent sources of truth, have always been safeguarded by their very belief in the transcendent from the idolatry of man’s worship of himself and his established habits. The power of kings and the pride of prelates remained intrinsically limited by the common acceptance of truths to which all men were subject.

Acknowledgment

THIS ESSAY is the result of conversations with Albert Jay Nock, author of Our Enemy the State, some fifteen years ago. His book was then out of print and the publishers were considering a reissue; for commercial reasons they held that it should be expanded. I had been suggesting to him the need of revision and expansion for quite another reason.

Introduction

WHAT HISTORY will think of our times is something that only history will tell. But it is a good guess that it will select collectivism as the identifying characteristic of the twentieth century. For, even a quick survey of the developing pattern of thought during the past fifty years shows up the dominance of one central idea: that Society is a transcendent entity, something apart from and greater than the sum of its parts, possessing a suprahuman character and endowed with like capacities.

The Rise and Fall
of Society

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5