ИПИ Библиотека

"Albert Jay Nock, perhaps the most brilliant American essayist of the 20th century, and certainly among its most important libertarian thinkers, set out to write his autobiography but he ended up doing much more. He presents here a full theory of society, state, economy, and culture, and does so almost inadvertently.
His stories, lessons, observations, and conclusions pack a very powerful punch, so much so that anyone who takes time to read carefully cannot but end up changed in intellectual outlook. One feels that one has been let in a private club of people who see more deeply than others. This is truly an American classic." - Publication Information NY: Harper Brothers, 1943

"Taking his inspiration from those Russians who seemed superfluous to their autocratic nineteenth-century society and sought inspiration in the private sphere, even to the point of writing largely for their desk drawers, Nock made the essential point: ransack the past for your values, establish a coherent worldview, depend neither on society nor on government insofar as circumstances permitted, keep your tastes simple and inexpensive, and do what you have to do to remain true to yourself. He borrowed from ancient Greece, Thomas Jefferson, Matthew Arnold, and especially from Rabelais, but not from banks. He voted for Marcus Aurelius and Charles Dickens, but not for Franklin D. Roosevelt. He felt that as far as society was concerned, he was superfluous; no one had the slightest use for the intellectual goods he had to offer. He felt society on the whole superfluous to his needs. It wallowed in materialist values, intellectually irresponsible hypotheses, and political nostrums. Vote for Voltaire: cultivate your garden and allow democratic citizens to go to hell in ways best suited to themselves."
—Robert M. Crunden, The Superflous Men (1977, 1999)

Albert Jay Nock

Albert Jay Nock (1872-1945), author, editor, educator, humanist, and literary philosopher was a prolific writer of essays. For four years he was the Editor of one of the greatest of American periodicals, the short-lived journal The Freeman. He published perhaps a dozen volumes culminating in the Memoirs, his magnum opus. Nock's learning was prodigious; his literary ken extraordinary.

He was an influential American libertarian author, educational theorist, and social critic of the early and middle 20th century. Murray Rothbard was deeply influenced by him, and so was the whole generation of free-market thinkers of the 1950s.