Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

Alber J. Nock delivers Memoirs of a Superfluous Man with detachment, wit, and humor like no one else I have read. Though written as an autobiography, it deals less with happenings and more with ideas. It is an autobiography of thought. Mr. Nock discusses his early life in a cultural melting pot, his first and later impressions of politics, views on eduacation including a criticism of universal literacy, his work with an independent newspaper, and his hopes and doubts for the future. Mr. Nock's major themes are for liberal arts style education and decentralized government. Though a few ideas may be debateable, they are quite interesting, and the prose with which they are written make this book a pleasure to read. I highly recommend this book.

[...]Nock understood a truth that is nearly unspeakable now, in the wake of the disastrous era of Big Government, that although the West in general pays great obeisance to the idea of Freedom, and America in particular is, at least theoretically, founded upon the primacy of the idea, most people (the mass-men) do not give a fig about it. And since in a democracy the masses will wield power, the prospects for the West appeared pretty bleak : Considering mankind's indifference to freedom, their easy gullibility and their facile response to conditioning, one might very plausibly argue that collectivism is the political mode best suited to their disposition and their capacities. Under its regime the citizen, like the soldier, is relieved of the burden of initiative and is divested of all responsibility, save for doing as he is told. He takes what is allotted to him, obeys orders, and beyond that he has no care. Perhaps, then, this is as much as the vast psychically-anthropoid majority are up to, and a status of permanent irresponsibility under collectivism would be most congenial and satisfactory to them. Given a just and generous administration of collectivism this might very well be so; but even on that extremely large and dubious presumption the matter is academic, because of all political modes a just and generous collectivism is in its nature the most impermanent. each new activity or function that the State assumes means an enlargement of officialdom, an augmentation of bureaucracy. In other words, it opens one more path of least resistance to incompetent, unscrupulous and inferior persons whom Epstean's law has always at hand, intent only on satisfying their needs and desires with the least possible exertion. Obviously the collectivist State, with its assumption of universal control and regulation, opens more of these paths than any other political mode; there is virtually no end of them. Hence, however just and generous an administration of collectivism may be at the outset, and however fair its prospects may then be, it is immediately set upon and honeycombed by hordes of the most venal and untrustworthy persons that Epstean's law can rake together; and in virtually no time every one of the regime's innumerable bureaux and departments is rotted to the core. In 1821, with truly remarkable foresight, Mr. Jefferson wrote in a letter to Macon that 'our Government is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation first [i.e., centralisation] and then corruption, its necessary consequence.' It will of course be argued, with the perfection of twenty-twenty hindsight, that Nock (and Jefferson and Jefferson's other conservative heirs) overstated the case and fell pray to hysterics. We are after all in the midst (hopefully not at the end) of what has been a twenty year pause in the process o

But even if this pause in the march of Collectivization should prove to be of long-lasting duration, it should not be seen as a refutation of Nock's ideas, but as a tribute to them. For if Nock's arguments seem self-evident to us now, it is all too easy to forget how truly superfluous they seemed in 1943. Nock, who was writing before even Hayek's Road to Serfdom had been published, is one of the incredibly small group of men who kept alive the idea of freedom and who resisted the, at the time seemingly inevitable, force of collectivization. If his most dire predictions did not come true it is not solely because he overestimated the opposition, but because a powerful counterrevolution eventually rose up, structured around ideas like his, and it is in this regard that modern conservatism owes him a tremendous, almost completely unacknowledged, debt.

A consummate stylist, essayist, biographer and critic Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945), in this his crowning work, surveys, from the twilit retrospection of Olympian old age, the tidal shift in American culture and politics over his lifetime from a republic of stout yeoman Jeffersonian democracy - to the now-familiar world of the total state and total war. Nock's vast learning and startling, eccentric insights into virtually every sphere of human endeavor make him seem a spirit from another world.

...and this was his crowning glory, instinct with the serene twilit retrospection of his final hour. It is a book, in the words of one critic, "too good to be true." And, in spite of its title, Albert Jay Nock's MEMOIRS OF A SUPERFLUOUS MAN bears only the faintest resemblance to the memoir genre to which we are now accustomed. The sublimely cultivated Nock (1870-1945), essayist, social critic, diarist, and biographer, was very likely the most supremely differentiated American literary personality of the first half of this century, and in his twilit retrospection Nock provides as intellectually moving a summa of his response to the character of his times as we have any right to expect. As we pass, via Nock's MEMOIRS, through the vanished world of his late-Victorian youth and classical education, and see through his eyes the deep tidal evolution of our countrymen away from their earlier rootedness in stout yeoman independence, and towards the accelerating conformity induced by the Faustian bargain we have struck with mass-market materialist democracy, dominated by the gangsterish brutality of the modern centralized state, we find to our unceasing delight that Nock has left untouched no significant dimension of life: manners, morals, religion, culture, literature, politics, history, marriage, and, toward the end, even death itself - each is thrown in turn into the sharpest and most surprising relief by a mind so accustomed to viewing all questions "sub specie aeternitatis" (under the aspect of eternity), that no reader can come from even an initial absorption by this book without emerging with a view of the world forever cleansed and purified of everything not essential to living the humane life. And the learning which informs Nock's writing is a marvel unto itself: memoirs of the French Renaissance, the social life of Greek and Roman antiquity, the conversations of Goethe with Eckermann, centuries of theological debate, not to mention personal contact with many of the shrewdest and most worldly figures of his own time - all are pressed into service with a lightness of touch that our ponderously drilled battalions of Ph.D.'s can never hope to emulate. And the delicate, skeptical humor with which Nock relates every germane anecdote and reflection puts him light years above the grim ideological polemicists of our century, whose stock in trade is too often passed off as "serious" social criticism. Along with Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, John Jay Chapman (another neglected American genius whose works repay the inevitable absorption following astonished, belated discovery), and Finley Peter Dunne, Nock provides an indispensable chapter in what cultural historian Jacques Barzun has called "the great American tradition of the judicious eccentric." Be warned, though: after reading his MEMOIRS, you may find your cultural habits changed forever. You will never again be tempted to acquire an opinion of Henry Kissinger's (