Our Enemy, The State by Albert J. Nock
Part 6
Such has been the course of our experience from the beginning,
and such are the terms in which its stark uniformity has led us to think of the State.
This uniformity also goes far to account for the development of a peculiar moral innovation with regard to the State,
State, exactly parallel to that which prevailed with regard to the Church in the Middle Ages.
The Church controlled the distribution of certain privileges and immunities, and if
one approached it properly, one might get the benefit of them. It stood as something
to be run to in any kind of emergency, temporal or spiritual, for the satisfaction of ambition
and cupidity, as well as for the more tenuous assurances it held out against various forms
As long as this was so, the anomalies were more-or-less contentedly acquiesced in, and thus a chronic moral enervation, too negative to be called broadly cynical, was developed towards the vast overbuilding of its material structure.
A like enervation pervades our society with respect to the State and for like reasons.
It affects especially those who take the state's pretensions at face value and regard it as
a social institution whose policies of continuous intervention are wholesome and necessary.
And it also affects the great majority who have no clear idea of the state but merely
accept it as something that exists and never think about it except when some intervention
bears unfavorably upon their interests.
There is little need to dwell upon the amount of aid thus given to the state's progress
in self-aggrandizement, or to show in detail or by illustration the courses by which this
spiritlessness promotes the state's steady policy of intervention, exaction and over-building.
Every intervention by the state enables another, and this in turn another and so on indefinitely,
When the state stands ever ready and eager to make them, often on its own motion, often
again wangling plausibility for them through the spacious suggestion of interested persons.
Sometimes the matter at issue is in its nature simple, socially necessary and devoid of any
character that would bring it into the purview of politics. For convenience, however, complications
When complications are erected on it, then presently someone sees that these complications are exploitable and proceeds to exploit them.
Then another and another, until the rivalries and collisions of interest thus generate, issue in a more or less general disorder.
When this takes place, the logical thing, obviously, is to recede and let the disorder be settled in the slower and more troublesome way through the operation of natural laws.
But in such circumstances, recession is never for a moment thought of. The suggestion would
be put down as sheer lunacy. Instead, the interests unfavorably affected, little aware
perhaps how much worse the cure is than the disease, or at any rate little caring, immediately
call on the State to cut in arbitrarily between cause and effect, and clear up the disorder
The State then intervenes by imposing another set of complications upon the first. These in turn are found exploitable. Another demand arises, another set of complications, still more intricate, is erected upon the first too. And the same sequence is gone through again and again, until the recurrent disorder becomes acute enough to open the way for a shocking political adventurer to come forward and, always alleging necessarily
The necessity, the tyrant's plea, to organize a coup d'etat.
But more often the basic matter at issue represents an original intervention of the state, an
original allotment of the political means. Each of these allotments, as we have seen,
is a charter of highwaymenry, a license to appropriate the labor products of others without
compensation. Therefore it is in the nature of things that when such a license is issued,
The State must follow it up with an indefinite series of interventions to systematize and
regulate its use.
The State's endless progressive encroachments that are recorded in the history of the tariff,
their impudent and disgusting particularity, and the prodigious amount of apparatus necessary
to give them effect, furnish a conspicuous case in point.
Another is furnished by the history of our railway regulation.
It is nowadays of the fashion, even among those who ought to know better, to hold rugged
individualism and laissez-faire responsible for the riot of stockwatering, rebates, rate
cutting, fraudulent bankruptcies and the like, which prevailed in our railway practice after
the Civil War, but they had no more to do with it than they have with the procession
of the equinoxes.
The fact is that our railways, with few exceptions, did not grow up in response to any actual
economic demand, they were speculative enterprises enabled by state intervention by allotment
of the political means in the form of land-grants and subsidies, and of all the eagles alleged
against our railway practice, there is not one but what is directly traceable to this
primary intervention.
So it is with shipping, there was no valid economic demand for adventure in the carrying
trade, in fact every sound economic consideration was dead against it, it was entered upon through
state intervention, instigated by shipbuilders and their allied interests, and the mess engendered
by their manipulation of the political means is now the ground of demand for further and
further coercive intervention.
So it is with what, by an unconscionable stretch of language, goes by the name of farming.
There are very few troubles so far heard of as normally besetting this form of enterprise,
but what are directly traceable to the state's primary intervention in establishing a system
of land tenure which gives a monopoly right over rental values as well as over use values.
As long as that system is in force, one coercive intervention after another is bound to take
2 Thus we see how ignorance and delusion concerning
the nature of the state combine with extreme moral debility and myopic self-interest, what
Ernest Rennan so well calls la bassesse de l'homme intresse, to enable the steadily accelerated
conversion of social power into state power that has gone on from the beginning of our
or Political Independence.
It is a curious anomaly.
State power has an unbroken record of inability to do anything efficiently, economically,
disinterestedly or honestly.
Yet when the slightest dissatisfaction arises over any exercise of social power, the aid
of the agent least qualified to give aid is immediately called for.
Does social power mismanage banking practice in this or that special instance?
Then let the State, which never has shown itself able to keep its own finances from
sinking promptly into the slough of misfeasance, wastefulness and corruption, intervene to
supervise or regulate the whole body of banking practice, or even take it over entire. Does
social power in this or that case bungle the business of railway management? Then let the
The State, which has bungled every business it has ever undertaken, intervene and put its
hand to the business of regulating railway operation.
Does social power now and then send out an unseaworthy ship to disaster, then let the
State, which inspected and passed the morrow castle, be given a freer swing at controlling
the routine of the shipping trade?
The Social Power here and there exercise a grinding monopoly over the generation and
distribution of electric current, then let the state, which allots and maintains monopoly,
come in and intervene with a general scheme of price fixing which works more unforeseen
hardships than it heals, or else let it go into direct competition, or, as the collective
is surged, let it take over the monopoly bodily.
Ever since society has existed, says Herbert Spencer, this appointment has been preaching,
put not your trust in legislation. And yet the trust in legislation seems hardly diminished.
But it may be asked, where we are to go for relief from misuses of social power, if not
to the State. What other recourse have we? Admitting that under our existing mode of
political organization we have none, it must still be pointed out that this question rests
on the old inveterate misapprehension of the State's nature, presuming that the State is
a social institution, whereas it is an anti-social institution. That is to say, the question
rests on an absurdity. It is certainly true that the business of government in maintaining
Meaning, freedom and security, and to secure these rights, is to make a recourse to justice
costless, easy and informal. But the state, on the contrary, is primarily concerned with
injustice and its primary function is to maintain a regime of injustice. Hence, as we see daily,
its disposition is to put justice as far out of reach and to make the effort after justice
is as costly and difficult as it can.
One may put in a word that while government is by its nature concerned with the administration
of justice, the state is by its nature concerned with the administration of law, law which
the state itself manufactures for the service of its own primary ends.
Therefore, an appeal to the state based on the ground of justice is futile in any circumstances.
For whatever action the State might take in response to it would be conditioned by the State's own paramount interest, and would hence be bound to result, as we see such action invariably resulting, in as great injustice as that which it pretends to be correct, or as a rule greater.
The question thus presumes, in short, that the state may on occasion be persuaded to act out of character. And this is levity.
But passing on from this special view of the question, and regarding it in a more general way, we see that what it actually amounts to is a plea for arbitrary interference with the order of nature,
of Nature, and arbitrary cutting in to avert the penalty which nature lays on any and every
form of error, whether willful or ignorant, voluntary or involuntary, and no attempt at
this has ever yet failed to cost more than it came to.
Any contravention of natural law, any tampering with the natural order of things, must have
its consequences, and the only recourse for escaping them is such as entails worse consequences.
Nature wrecks nothing of intentions, good or bad. The one thing she will not tolerate is disorder and she is very particular about getting her full pay for any attempt to create disorder.
She gets it sometimes by very indirect methods, often by very roundabout and unforeseen ways, but she always gets it.
Things and actions are what they are and the consequences of them will be what they will be. Why then?
Then, Should We Desire to be Deceived?
It would seem that our civilization is greatly given to this infantile addiction, greatly
given to persuading itself that it can find some means which nature will tolerate whereby
we may eat our cake and have it, and it strongly resents the stubborn fact that there is no
such means.
It will be clear to anyone who takes the trouble to think the matter through that under a regime
of natural order, that is to say under government, which makes no positive interventions whatever
on the individual, but only negative interventions on behalf of simple justice, not law, but
justice, misuses of social power would be effectively corrected, whereas we know by
by Interminable Experience that the state's positive interventions do not correct them.
Under a regime of actual individualism, actual free competition, actual laissez-faire, a regime
which, as we have seen, cannot possibly coexist with the state, a serious or continuous misuse
of social power would be virtually impracticable.
I shall not take up space with amplifying these statements because, in the first place,
this has already been done by Spencer in his essays entitled The Man versus the State,
and in the second place, because I wish above all things to avoid the appearance of suggesting
that a regime such as these statements contemplate is practicable, or that I am ever so covertly
encouraging anyone to dwell on the thought of such a regime.
Perhaps some eons hence, if the planet remains so long habitable, the benefits accruing to
conquest and confiscation may be adjudged over costly, the state may in consequence
be superseded by government, the political means suppressed, and the fetishes which give
nationalism and patriotism their present execrable character may be broken down.
But the remoteness and uncertainty of this prospect makes any thought of it fatuous,
in any concern with it futile. Some rough measure of its remoteness may perhaps be gained by
estimating the growing strength of the forces at work against it. Ignorance and error, which
the state's prestige steadily deepens, are against it. La bassesse de l'homme in tres,
steadily pushing its purposes to greater lengths of turpitude, is against it. Moral
What combination of influences more powerful than this can one imagine, and what can one imagine possible to be done in the face of such a combination?
To the sum of these, which may be called spiritual influences, may be added the overweening
physical strength of the state, which is ready to be called into action at once against any
affront to the state's prestige. Few realize how enormously and how rapidly in recent years
the state has everywhere built up its apparatus of armies and police forces. The state has
It is now known to every intelligent person that there can be no such thing as a revolution as long as this advice is followed. In fact, there has been no revolution in the modern world since 1848. Every so-called revolution has been followed.
has been merely a coup d'etat.
All talk of the possibility of a revolution in America is in part perhaps ignorant, but
mostly dishonest.
It is merely the interested clamors and sophistry of persons who have some sort of axe to grind.
Even Lenin acknowledged that a revolution is impossible anywhere until the military
We have all seen demonstrations of a disarmed populace and local riots carried on with primitive weapons, and we have also seen how they ended, as in Homestead, Chicago, and the mining districts of West Virginia, for example. Cox's army marched on Washington, and it kept off the grass.
Taking the sum of the state's physical strength with the force of powerful spiritual influences
behind it, one asks again what can be done against the state's progress in self-aggrandizement?
Simply nothing.
So far from encouraging any hopeful contemplation of the unattainable, the student of civilized
man will offer no conclusion but that nothing can be done.
He can regard the course of civilization only as he would regard the course of a man in
a narrowboat on the lower reaches of the Niagara, as an instance of nature's unconquerable
intolerance of disorder, and in the end an example of the penalty which she puts upon
any attempt at interference with order. Our civilization may at the outset have taken
have taken its chances with the current of statism either ignorantly or deliberately.
It makes no difference. Nature cares for nothing whatever about motive or intention, she cares
only for order, and looks to see that her repugnance to this order shall be vindicated,
and that her concern with the regular orderly sequences of things and actions shall be upheld
in the outcome. Emerson, in one of his greatest moments of inspiration, personified cause
The
Attempt to Nullify or Divert or in any wise break upon their sequences must have its own reward.
Such, says Professor Ortega-Agasset, was the lamentable fate of ancient civilization.
A dozen empires have already finished the course that ours began three centuries ago.
The lion and the lizard keep the vestiges that attest their passage upon earth, vestiges
of cities which in their day were as proud and as powerful as ours, Tadmor, Persepolis,
Luxor, Baalbek, some of them indeed forgotten for thousands of years and brought into memory
again only by the excavator, like those of the Mayas and those buried in the sands of
the Gobi.
The sites which now bear Narbonne and Marseille have borne the habitat of four successive
civilizations, each of them, as St. James says, even as a vapor which appeareth for
a little time and then vanisheth away. The course of all these civilizations was the
same. Conquest, Confiscation, the erection of the state, then the sequences which we
have traced in the course of our own civilization, then the shock of some eruption which the
The Social Structure was too far weakened to resist, and from which it was left too disorganized
to recover, and then the end.
Our pride resents the thought that the great highways of New England will one day lie deep
under layers of encroaching vegetation, as the more substantial Roman roads of Old England
have lain for generations, and that only a group of heavily overgrown hillocks will be
What we and our more nearly immediate descendants shall see is a steady progress in collectivism running off into a military despotism of a severe type. Closer centralization, a steadily growing bureaucracy, state power and faith in state power increasing, social power and faith in social power diminishing, the state absorbing a continually larger proportion of the national income, production languishing, the state increasing in social power diminishing,
are in consequence taking over one essential industry after another, managing them with
ever-increasing corruption, inefficiency and prodigality, and finally resorting to a system
of forced labor. Then, at some point in this progress, a collision of state interests,
at least as general as that which occurred in 1914, will result in an industrial and
and financial dislocation too severe for the asthenic social structure to bear, and from
this the state will be left to the rusty death of machinery, and the casual anonymous forces
of dissolution will be supreme.
3. But it may be quite properly asked, if we in common with the rest of the Western
The human world has gone so far in statism as to make this outcome inevitable.
What is the use of a book which merely shows that it is inevitable?
By its own hypothesis, the book is useless.
Upon every evidence it offers, no one's political opinions are likely to be changed by it, no
one's practical attitude towards the state will be modified by it, and if they are, according
According to the book's own premises, what good could they do?
Assuredly I do not expect this book to change anyone's political opinions, for it is not
meant to do that.
One or two perhaps here and there may be moved to look a little into the subject matter on
their own account, and thus perhaps their opinions would undergo some slight loosening
or some constriction.
But this is the very most that would happen.
In general, too, I would be the first to acknowledge that no results of the kind which we agree
to call practical could accrue to the credit of a book of this order, were it a hundred
times as cogent as this one. No results, that is, that would in the least retard the state's
progress in self-aggrandizement and thus modify the consequences of the state's course.
There are two reasons, however, one general and one social. Why, the publication of such
The general reason is that when any department of thought a person has or thinks he has a view of the plain intelligible order of things, it is proper that he should record that view publicly, with no thought whatever of the practical consequences or lack of consequences likely to ensue upon his doing.
He might indeed be thought bound to do this as a matter of abstract duty, not to crusade
or propagandize for his view or seek to impose it upon anyone, far from that, not to concern
himself at all with either its acceptance or its disallowance, but merely to record
it. This, I say, might be thought his duty to a natural truth of things. But it is at
That all events is right, it is admissible.
The special reason has to do with the fact that in every civilization, however generally
prosaic, however addicted to the short time point of view on human affairs, there are
always certain alien spirits who, while outwardly conforming to the requirements of the civilization
around them, still keep a disinterested regard for the plain intelligible law of things,
Irrespectable of any practical end.
They have an intellectual curiosity, sometimes touched with emotion, concerning the august
order of nature.
They are impressed by the contemplation of it, and like to know as much about it as they
can, even in circumstances where its operation is ever so manifestly unfavorable to their
best hopes and wishes.
For these, a work like this, however in the current sense impractical, is not quite useless,
and those of them it reaches will be aware that for such as themselves, and such only,
it was written.
The End
A printed copy of this book can be purchased or a PDF downloaded from the Ludwig von Mises
Mr. Nock included many footnotes in the book, and these are only available in the printed editions.