Albert Nock
Albert Jay Nock — Henry George: Unorthodox
American - Will Lissner's bio of Nock, appended to Nock's article on
George
Back in the dark days of 1932, when a despairing world and its culture were
being torn asunder by a major catastrophe, the worst economic depression
ever known, a man who is foremost among America's few living exponents of
belles-lettres
wrote in his diary under the date of Oct. 27; "Now that Roosevelt
has dug up W. G. Sumner and the Yale Press shows signs of life, enough
to republish
his writings; I should think someone might soon be rediscovering Henry
George. If so, he will find that George was one of the first half-dozen
minds of the
nineteenth century, in all the world."
The man who set that down in his characteristically small, fine hand, an
essayist and historian who is one of the chief catalyzers of the intellectual
ferments
of our time, was noting no passing fancy. The idea returned to him and
on Oct. 31 he recorded: "I have been looking over the biography of Henry
George, by his son Harry, a pains-taking sort of book. The best one can say
for it
is that it is competent. There should be a better one, for George was undeniably
a great man."
Not only was Albert Jay Nock, the chronicler just quoted, thinking of these
things. In New York the editors of Scribner's Magazine had the
same notion and they commissioned Mr. Nock to do the job. The essayist
went abroad
the following February and through the Spring lived in his beloved low
countries, breaking his stay at last for a junket through France and Spain
into Portugal.
With his papers full of commissions, some of which he would not do, some
he might do and a few he would do if time, and the business of living fully,
permitted,
the assignment from Scribner's caused him no preoccupation. But the personality
of George kept popping up: at Port Cros, watching a schooner put off ten
tons of coal on March 31, he mused: "All by hand labor, with the help
of one donkey. I wonder whether most of our labor-saving devices have really
saved
anything worth saving ... Henry George attacked this problem, in 'Progress
and Poverty', and solved it, but his solution, being valid, will not
be accepted in a hurry."
Through his friends he was keeping in close touch with hectic America. Henry
L. Mencken wrote him, after the fiasco of the World Economic Conference: "'The
republic proceeds towards hell at a rapidly accelerating tempo." Nock
was not profoundly stirred; he spent the next day at the Lisbon Museum. But
the idea of re-creating Henry George was still rankling him. On June 9 he wrote
in the diary: "Overnight at Porto, on the way to Vidago, where I hope
to find a pleasant place to stop awhile and write 'an overdue paper for
Scribner's on Henry George."
Soon he was in Vidago where "one sees miserable dwellings, occupied by
people absolutely lost in poverty and filth, built of magnificent huge granite
blocks after the Roman fashion"; in Vidago among a Portuguese people whom
he found, nevertheless "without a single exception, the kindest people
I have ever seen." On June 15 he noted. "Working steadily at quite
high pressure on my article for Scribner's on Henry George, so the days pass
very quickly. I hope it will call attention to him, though I suppose nothing
will do so effectively as long as Americans are what they are" or until
tremendous hardship puts an end to their being drugged and doped by nostrums
dealt out to them by demagogues and scoundrels." In his idyllic refuge
--"what a superb climate and what grand scenery" he remarked of Vidago
-- America became remote to him; "one can hardly convince oneself while
here, that it exists." But George, along of all his environment, persisted
and on June 26, Mr. Nock recorded: "I am done with Henry George, and shall
leave here tomorrow. What a great man he was, and how well he managed to get
himself misjudged and forgotten! I suppose, Scribner's, people will pull a
long face over getting a really serious piece of work -- I often think of that
dreadful person, Bok, writing to Lyman Abbott for 'a short, snappy life of
Christ.'" The aftermath was typical of the man; on July 29 he noted: "ScrIbner's
people seem satisfied with my piece on Henry George, and say it will come
out in November, so I suppose all the single-taxers in the country will
curse me
afresh."
That is how "Henry George, Unorthodox American" came to be written,
as anyone can see for himself in Mr. Nock's "A Journal of These Days:
June 1932-December 1933" (Morrow, 1934.) But to understand how this tabloid
biography came to be the unique study it is, even when one compares it with
the admirable similar studies by Broadus Mitchell and Rexford G. Tugwell, one
must recall Mr. Nock's career. He took his bachelor's degreeat St. Stephen's
College, where he steeped hirnse1f in the classical languages and their literatures.
With Francis Neilson he wrote "How Diplomats Make War" (1915; 2d
Ed., 1916). From 1920 to 1924, he edited the old Freeman in company with Neilson,
Suzanne Lafollette and others equal1y notable, setting unexcelled standards
in periodical journalism. During that period he wrote "The Myth of a Guilty
Nation" under the pseudonym of Historicus (1922) and edited "The
Selected Works of Charles F. Browne (Artemus Ward)" (1924), in the
latter work establishing the native humorist as the social satirist he
was.
A scholar's life-time job found fruit in his "Jefferson" (1926 ).
He followed this with a collection, "On Doing the Right Thing and Other
Essays" (1928). Then, with Catherine Rose Wilson, he wrote "Francis
Rabelais, the Man and His Work" (1929), first fruit of another lifetime
interest. With Miss Wilson, he edited the Urquhart-Le Matteaux translation
of the works of "Francis Rabelais" (2 vols., 1931), concluding a
monumental work of scholarship with his book, "A Journey Into Rabelais's
France" (1934). Meanwhile he had served as visiting professor of American
history and government at Saint Stephen's and had published, under the pseudonym
of Journeyman, "The Book of Journeyman" (1932) together with a noteworthy
structure on an institution close to him, "The Theory of Education" (1932).
The contradiction between state and society, in which Ludwig Gumplowicz
and Franz Oppenheimer had interested him long before, resulted in a work
as significant
in a social sense as "Rabelais" and "Jefferson" had been
in literary and historical senses, "Our Enemy the State" (1935).
He followed this with "Free Speech and Plain Language" (1937).
Throughout all these dates a stream of essays on contemporary themes poured
from his pen,
to find critical and keenly appreciative hearings among the readers of
The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Mercury and similar
literary
papers.
What we have, then, in "Henry George, Unorthodox American," is
a living portrait of one unusual citizen of the world by another.
Dan Sullivan: Are you a Real
Libertarian, or a ROYAL Libertarian?
The English free-trader Cobden
remarked that "you who free the
land will do more for the people than we who have freed trade."
Indeed, how can anyone speak of free trade when the trader has to pay
tribute to some favored land-entitlement holder in order to do
business?
This imperfect policy
of non-intervention, or
laissez-faire, led straight to a most hideous and dreadful economic
exploitation; starvation wages, slum dwelling, killing hours,
pauperism, coffin-ships, child-labour -- nothing like it had ever been
seen in modern times...People began to say, if this is what State
abstention comes to, let us have some State intervention.
But the state had intervened; that
was
the whole trouble. The State had established one monopoly--the
landlord's monopoly of economic rent--thereby shutting off great hordes
of people from free access to the only source of human subsistence, and
driving them into factories to work for whatever Mr. Gradgrind and Mr.
Bottles chose to give them. The land of England, while by no means
nearly all actually occupied, was all legally
occupied; and this State-created monopoly enabled landlords to satisfy
their needs and desires with little exertion or none, but it also
removed the land from competition with industry in the labor market,
thus creating a huge, constant and exigent labour-surplus. [Emphasis
Nock's] --Albert J. Nock, "The Gods' Lookout" February 1934 ...
The red, red herring
Royal libertarians are fond of confusing the classical liberal
concept of common land ownership, particularly as espoused by land
value tax advocate Henry George, with socialism. Yet socialists have
always been contemptuous of George and of the distinction between
land monopoly and capital monopolies. However, Frank Chodorov and
Albert J. Nock (the original editors of s) were both
advocates of George's economic remedies as well as lovers of
individual liberty.
The only reformer
abroad in the world in my time who
interested me in the least was Henry George, because his project did
not contemplate prescription, but, on the contrary, would reduce it to
almost zero. He was the only one of the lot who believed in freedom, or
(as far as I could see) had any approximation to an intelligent idea of
what freedom is, and of the economic prerequisites to attaining
it....One is immensely tickled to see how things are coming out
nowadays with reference to his doctrine, for George was in fact the
best friend the capitalist ever had. He built up the most complete and
most impregnable defense of the rights of capital that was ever
constructed, and if the capitalists of his day had had sense enough to
dig in behind it, their successors would not now be squirming under the
merciless exactions which collectivism is laying on them, and which
George would have no scruples whatever about describing as sheer
highwaymanry. --Albert J. Nock "Thoughts on Utopia"... Read the whole piece
Fred E. Foldvary — The
Ultimate Tax Reform:
Public Revenue from Land Rent
Several prominent libertarians have recognized land value or rent as the
source of public finance most compatible with liberty. Albert Jay Nock, for
example,
distinguished between the improper political means of obtaining wealth,
such as from arbitrary taxation, and the proper economic means, from enterprise.
He regarded public revenue from land rent as within the economic means,
since
the “monopoly of economic rent, on the other hand, gives exclusive rights
to values accruing from the desire of other persons to possess that property;
values which take their rise irrespective of any exercise of the economic means
on the part of the holder.”25 (He used the term “monopoly” in
its classical meaning, in which a new entrant cannot increase the supply,
hence together, the landowners have a monopoly.) ... read the whole document
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