INTRODUCTION

By Suzanne La Follette

A FRIEND who saw a great deal of Albert Jay Nock during his long sojourns in Belgium once said to me, “I don’t know how he does it; but when you’re with Albert Nock you find yourself coming out with things you didn’t know you had it in you to say.”

This effect of certain rich personalities on those privileged to associate with them is not easy to explain; more especially since not all rich personalities produce it. Perhaps it is brought about by a spiritual courtesy; a tolerant expectancy; possibly, more than anything else, by a willingness to help the truth along without encumbering it with themselves, to use an expression which Albert Nock was fond of quoting. Nock, for example, was temperamentally incapable of taking you down, when you mentioned a good idea that had just come to you, with, “Of course. That is exactly what I said in my last article.” (In all the years I knew him, I never once heard him quote himself.) He tacitly granted your right to independent discovery and discussed your offering on its merits.

But why speculate on a quality so elusive as the gift of stimulating people to be better than they are? It is wiser merely to bear witness; as Edward Epstean did (that racy character and friend of the Freeman staff to whom “Epstean’s Law” is playfully ascribed in these essays). When the Freeman was about to cease publication after four wonderful and financially unprofitable years, he remarked to Albert Nock:

“You’ve done a great deal for all those young people.”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever done anything for them except let them alone,” said Nock.

“Yes, I understand,” answered Epstean. “But if someone else had been letting them alone, it would have been a very different story.”

Yet I don’t think Albert Nock was primarily interested in people. He was much too fastidious; a true intellectual aristocrat. Indeed, there were even some who thought him an intellectual snob, and little did he care, for he was indifferent to gossip about himself and never gossiped about others. People qua people rather appalled him, and the ascendancy of mass man in modern society and the councils of government filled him with the horror that emerges from these essays. There frequently crept into his work after Freeman days more than a touch of his disdain for the cheapness and vulgarity of the life that followed World War One. I remember once suggesting—it was in the late twenties—that it was likely to antagonize those whom otherwise he might persuade. He said he thought I was probably right, but I think my lament left him essentially indifferent.

He was interested in ideas (“The idea,” he once wrote, “is forever the fact”). He was interested in intelligent and civilized people. And he was above all interested in ability. The nearest he ever came to boasting was in his claim to instinctive recognition of ability. Character, he would say, eluded him; he could not judge it; but on ability no one could fool him.

He was not only interested in ability; he sought it out and encouraged it. He gave it a chance to develop by letting it alone in his own very special way. Not as a conscious service to society or his country or even to the beneficiary. It was, I suppose, the teacher’s instinct in him; the instinct to serve truth. But he never tried to impose his truth on his pupil. Rather, he was concerned to put the pupil in the way to find truth for himself—as if he had revised the Biblical saying, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” to read, “Ye shall be free in order that ye may know the truth.” Nor was he looking for gratitude. “You don’t try to repay the help that is given you,” he would say. “You pass it along to others.”

He passed along to “those young people” freedom to develop in their own way, to find their own truth. He himself had a gift for grasping the importance of truths so obvious that almost everyone overlooks them. One of these—the one that more than anything else made him a great editor—was that any organization is people, and that no organization can be better or other than the people who compose it. His interest as an editor was in the people who produced the magazine. I remember an impromptu talk he made to the staff one day at lunch, after the Freeman had been publishing six months. He had not worried about the quality of the magazine, he told us, for if the people engaged in an enterprise were happy and growing in their work, the enterprise was bound to reflect their spiritual state. He felt that the people connected with the Freeman were happy in their work, and growing in it; and so long as that was true the magazine could not be other than excellent.

The reader of this little book will find expressed in it again and again this awareness that organizations are people. As the Freeman’s guiding spirit he put it to good service. He brought together a group of people whom he considered able, and ensured the health of the organization by the simple method of letting them alone.

I have dwelt at this length upon Albert Nock’s relations with “those young people” of the Freeman because it seems to me that his editorship of that magazine which he made so remarkable is an index to the character and influence of a very remarkable man; a man who was a libertarian not only in theory but in practice, and who—mirabile dictu—wanted liberty for others as much as for himself; who clearly realized, indeed, that without liberty man is a slave no matter how many subsidies and services officious overlords may impose upon him.

Liberty was the touchstone by which he tested the quality of social life: the relations between man and man, man and society, man and the state. It is faith in liberty which inspires these essays (for whose preservation we owe a great debt to Mrs. Evans and the Misses Robinson and Winsor), as in fact it inspired everything he wrote. He rejected the Welfare State because he knew that the ministrations of its swarming bureaucracy interfere with the individual’s pursuit of happiness—“Can any individual be happy when he is continually conscious of not being his own man?” And also because he knew that the arrogation to itself of the power to regulate the conduct of the citizen interferes with the legitimate functions of the state, which are two: “first freedom; second, justice.” In other words, the state’s business is to let people alone, and to coerce them only in the measure necessary to ensure their letting one another alone.

It was this passion for liberty—for letting people alone—which filled him with abhorrance of the ubiquitous Peeping Tom curiosity about personal lives. It is well expressed in the essay on “The Purpose of Biography,” with its severe strictures on the vulgar sensationalism of much that is accepted today as serious biographical writing. And his own biographical essay on Henry George excellently illustrates his idea of biographical method; a method which rigorously excludes all personal data not relevant to the public character and history of the subject. No doubt if biographers conformed to his canon of admissible evidence the public appetite, and the market, for biography would decline. But there is equally no doubt that public taste and the quality of historical writing would benefit immeasurably.

I do not mean to give the impression that Albert Nock was in any sense a propagandist or a fanatic. Were I to try, the range of interest, the mellowness and urbanity revealed in this book would amply disprove me. But I think I am not wrong in ascribing the lucidity of his thought and even of his style to his profound understanding of the meaning of freedom and the wealth of its implications.

So little was there of the propagandist in him that he never seemed much interested in the fate of his work. He once wrote me a remarkable letter of advice in which he expressed succinctly his idea of a writer’s duty to himself: “Write what you want to write, as well as you can, and then forget it.” He was not eager for fame; he had a greater ambition. He aspired to excellence, and well did he know how few and obscure, in these times, are its devotees. He wrote comparatively little, as a sensitive writer must in an age whose tastes and mores are the opposite of his own. But he wrote that little “as well as he could,” and that was well indeed; so well that while there are still a few who love freedom, wisdom, excellence of thought and style, those few will be his readers. And they are the only readers he would want.