The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach.
In the beginning, there was Henry George.
Henry George was born September 2, 1839, in Philadelphia, the second of ten children in a not overly prosperous family.
and Family. His formal education ended when he was 14 years old. A little less than a
year later, at the age of 15, he went to sea. He didn't care much for the experience, however,
and when his ship returned to Philadelphia 14 months later, he stayed ashore for nearly
two years, serving an apprentice ship at a printing establishment. Then, at 18, he went
to see again. He never really intended to stick out the entire voyage, however. He jumped
ship in San Francisco and looked around for a job that would make use of his newly acquired
skills as a typesetter. He found work soon enough in the local newspaper business, first
as a typesetter and printer, then as a reporter and editorial writer, finally as an editor
and Proprietor.
For four years, 1871 to 1875, he was editor and part owner of the San Francisco Daily
Evening Post.
It was about the time the Evening Post closed its doors in the mid-1870s, when George was
in his mid-30s, that he at last gave in to the impulse to write a book, making the argument
for an idea that had come to him a few years earlier, near the beginning of the decade.
George had decided at that time that the reason poverty persists even in the midst of great
wealth is that absentee owners were skimming off huge profits on undeveloped land, whose
price had been driven up not by any improvements put there by the owners, but by the mere proximity
of other developed land and of various commercial enterprises.
Seize this unearned wealth, George proposed, and use it to fund government.
The single tax, his proposal came to be called, because, according to George, no other taxes
would be necessary to pay the full cost of legitimate governmental activity.
In George's view, very little governmental activity was legitimate.
The sphere of government begins, he wrote, where the freedom of competition ends, since
Interference in no other way can equal liberty be assured, but within this line I have always
opposed governmental interference.
I have been an active, consistent and absolute free trader and an opponent of all schemes
that would limit the freedom of the individual.
He held the rights of property to be absolute, he said, except, of course, for the right
to own land.
Property and land, he wrote, is as indefensible as property in man.
And according to the chapter on him in Charles Madison's useful 1947 book Critics and Crusaders,
A Century of American Protest, George argued that in the end, genuine free trade involved
the abolition of all tariffs and taxes.
Henry George was, in effect, a limited government libertarian, a minarchist, except for his
his views on land and the single tax. The book he wrote in the late 1870s and published
in 1879 when he was 40 years old was called Progress and Poverty, an Inquiry into the
Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth, The Remedy.
It was a tremendous success, a huge best seller. It sold some 3 million copies in a United
States Inhabited by Fewer Than 50 Million People. It's as though a book published today were
to sell 18 million copies. Progress and poverty made George financially comfortable for the
first time in his life. It launched a movement, the so-called Georgist or Single Tax Movement,
which attained considerable influence in American politics in the 1880s and 90s. George himself
ran for mayor of New York in 1886 and came in second, third place went to the 28-year-old
Republican candidate, Theodore Roosevelt. It was widely believed and widely brooded
about that George had really come in first, and that Tammany Hall had stolen the election
by buying votes and by throwing ballots for George into the East River. George ran again
was written a decade later, but died of a stroke during the campaign on October 29, 1897 in New York City at the age of 58.
Meanwhile, Georgist mayors were elected, or were soon to be elected, in other cities.
Toledo, Cincinnati, Cleveland. At least one Georgist was elected to Congress.
George's books were read by, and exercised an intellectual influence upon, not a few
people who were either already famous, like Leo Tolstoy, or later came to fame of one
kind or another, Clarence Darrow, Henry Ford, Aldous Huxley, Albert J. Nock.
It is the last of these figures, Albert J. Nock, who is the real central character of
our present story.
Nock was born in 1870 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, at just about the time Henry George was conceiving
the idea that would become progress and poverty.
Nock's father was an Episcopal minister.
His mother was a descendant of John Jay.
He grew up mainly in Brooklyn and was educated at home up to the age of 14 when he was sent,
in the mid-1880s, at about the time Henry George was making his first run for mayor
of New York, to a four-year prep school near Peoria, Illinois.
From there, he went to St. Stephen's College, an Episcopal college in Annandale-on-Hudson,
New York, about a hundred miles up the Hudson River from New York City.
Since the mid-1930s, St. Stephen's has been known as Bard College, in honor of its founder,
John Bard, who had established it in 1860 as a training school for Episcopal clergymen.
For a few years after his graduation from St. Stephen's in 1892, Albert J. Knox seems
to have toyed with the idea of an academic career.
He stuck around Annandale, took graduate courses, taught introductory courses in Latin and German.
By 1895, however, he was in Divinity School in Connecticut.
In 1897, he was ordained an Episcopal minister.
In 1898, he reported to his first church, St. James Memorial in Titusville, Pennsylvania.
For the next 12 years, Nock worked as a clergyman in Titusville, Blacksburg, Virginia and Detroit.
He married and fathered two sons.
Then, at the age of 40 in 1910, he left his wife and children and moved to New York, where
he took a job as an editor on a monthly called The American Magazine.
Knock really wasn't cut out to be a minister.
Though he was outwardly rather formal and traditional in his manner, and though he tended
to favor the traditional and even somewhat sedate in the arts, the symphonies of Franz
Josef Haydn, for example, his mind was free-thinking and radical, unafraid to question any orthodoxy,
unafraid to challenge any shibboleth, however sacred.
The evidence suggests that Knock may have donned his clerical collar in an effort to
to please his mother, who had wanted him to follow in his father's footsteps.
In any case, once he summoned the courage to take that collar off and follow his own
secret passion, he headed straight for the world that had been his secret refuge for
the previous two decades, the world he'd long been reading about and longing for, the world
of ideas and public affairs, the world that was the natural home of all those who saw
that human beings were capable of improvement, and understood that the way to improve them
was to reform their societies.
Nock had become a Georgist sitting in his dormitory room, and later his parsonage, reading.
Now he would go and live among fellow Georgists, if he could find any, and if not, then at
least among people who ached, as he did, for reform, for improvement in the way people
lived.
In the American magazine, between 1910 and 1915, Nock worked with John Reed, Lincoln
Steffens and Ida Tarbell.
He wrote articles pushing progressive causes and programs.
According to his biographer, Michael Resen, Nock thought of himself in these years as
a humanitarian and progressive, as well as an individualist.
And individualist or not, like other progressives of the period, he was, as Resen puts it,
Inamored of the potential effectiveness of organizing and planning toward constructive
ends, despite also being suspicious of the state, institutions and vast organizations.
It was in the year 1914, two years before he voted for Woodrow Wilson for president,
that NOC, in Resn's words, came out for compulsory service for every boy and girl between the
in the ages of 17 and 21.
But the service would be devoted to agriculture, not war.
The conscripts would fight against nature instead of men, against floods, grasshoppers
and mosquitoes.
They would undertake massive reclamation projects, immense areas of dry soil brought under irrigation,
reforestation of the entire northwest, reclamation of the lower Mississippi and power development.
It was a vision to make the TVA pale by comparison. And, of course, it could all easily be financed
by the single tax.
Between 1915 and 1920, Nock freelanced for various magazines and briefly held a full-time
job as a member of the editorial staff of the nation. Then, for four years, beginning
in 1920, he was editor of the legendary Georgist weekly, The Freeman. When The Freeman closed
Throughout its doors, it was back to freelancing, now mainly for the American Mercury, Harpers
and the Atlantic Monthly, plus writing books and, now and then, as demanded, lecturing
and teaching.
Nock died on August 19, 1945, just two months short of his 75th birthday.
Throughout these years, Nock was reading and thinking, and his reading and thinking was
is more and more calling into question many of the assumptions that had long informed
his political beliefs.
The more he read about history, for example, the more he noticed that, as he later put
it, the state is the poorest instrument imaginable for improving human society.
It is slow, extravagant, inefficient, wasteful, unadaptive, stupid, and, at least by tendency,
corrupt.
Confidence in Political Institutions and Political Nostrums is ludicrously misplaced.
These facts help to account, certainly, for what Nock called the notorious failure of
reforming and revolutionary movements in the long run.
But might it not also suggest that his hopes of finding a way to improve human beings and
human society were groundless?
No matter how you looked at it, it was worrisome.
Yet, as late as the early 1930s, according to Knox memoirs, I still believed that the
masses of mankind are indefinitely improvable.
By around 1935, however, he had become convinced that this belief would not withstand scrutiny.
I ended, he wrote, by striking my colors as gracefully as possible, parted company with
the theologians, with Mr. Jefferson, with Price, Priestley, Condorcet, Rousseau, Madame
and went over to the opposition with head unbowed and withers still unrung.
Nock had already decided in the late 1920s that around the same time he began calling
himself an anarchist that spending his days commenting on current issues as he had been
doing for nearly 20 years was a waste of time.
It is not so important at the moment, he wrote, to try to make people take up with this, that
or the other view, as it is to establish the questions that must be considered before any
competent view can be formulated.
These questions are sunk now in an immense depth of ignorance, and until they are brought
up and at least clearly presented, I don't believe the moralist has any chance at all.
The questions that must be considered before any competent view can be formulated.
One such question was, what is the nature of the state? Where did it come from? If the
state was, in fact, useless for the purpose of improving human society, what was it in
fact good for? So he wrote a book. It's called Our Enemy the State. It came out in 1935 after
being delivered as a series of lectures at Knox's newly renamed alma mater, Bard College.
It contains a chapter which attempts to explain the economic origins of the American Revolution
by drawing on the theories of land ownership of Henry George, but apart from that relatively
small imperfection, Our Enemy the State is a true libertarian classic, one of those books
you simply must read if you have any serious interest at all in the libertarian idea.
The state, Nock wrote, did not originate in the common understanding and agreement of
society.
It originated in conquest and confiscation.
Its intention, far from contemplating freedom and security, contemplated nothing of the
kind.
It contemplated primarily the continuous economic exploitation of one class by another.
And it concerned itself with only so much freedom and security as was consistent with
with this primary intention, and this was, in fact, very little.
Its primary function or exercise was maintaining the stratification of society into an owning
and exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class.
The order of interest that it reflected was not social but purely anti-social, and those
who administered it, judged by the common standard of ethics or even the common standard
of Law as applied to private persons were indistinguishable from a professional criminal class.
The positive testimony of history, Nock wrote, is that the state invariably had its origin
in conquest and confiscation.
No primitive state known to history originated in any other manner, and no primitive state
could possibly have had any other origin.
Moreover, the sole invariable characteristic of the state is the economic exploitation
of one class by another.
Not quotes the German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, who described the typical primitive state,
in respect of its origin, as an institution forced on a defeated group by a conquering
group, with a view only to systematizing the domination of the conquered by the conquerors,
and Safeguarding itself against insurrection from within and attack from without.
This domination had no other final purpose than the economic exploitation of the conquered
group by the victorious group.
Any considerable economic accumulation, Nock wrote, or any considerable body of natural
resources is an incentive to conquest.
The primitive technique was that of raiding the coveted possessions, appropriating them
entire and either exterminating the possessors or dispersing them beyond convenient reach.
Very early, however, it was seen to be in general more profitable to reduce the possessors
to dependents and use them as labor motors.
This modified technique has been in use almost from the beginning, and everywhere, its first
The State, Nock wrote, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social.
It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no
rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him.
It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself
above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.
In essence, then, taking the state wherever found, striking into its history at any point,
one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries
from those of a professional criminal class.
After all, Nock argued, there are two and only two means of making a living in this
world.
There's the economic means, earning it, and there's the political means, seizing it from
someone else who has earned it.
The state, Nock said, was the organization of the political means.
Does this sound familiar somehow?
Does it sound perhaps like the rhetoric of Mr. Libertarian, Murray R. Rothbard?
Knock had an immense influence on Rothbard. He also had an immense influence, apparently,
on another major figure in the contemporary libertarian movement, Ayn Rand. According
to Anne C. Heller, whose biography of Rand, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, was published
about a year ago, it was the theory Knock had adapted from Franz Oppenheimer that inspired
Rand to write The Fountainhead. In that novel, Heller writes, Rand is channeling
RAND'S FACINATING CONTRIBUTION TO THIS FORMULATION IS HER DEPICTION OF THE PSYCHOLOGY.
Rourke's political man is her second-hander, his economic man is her individualist hero,
reliant on his own ego as the fountainhead of productivity and value.
In Rourke's self-defense at trial, he says, the creator's concern is the conquest of nature,
the parasite's concern is the conquest of men.
At University of Virginia, historian Jennifer Burns reports in her 2009 book, Goddess of
the Market, Ayn Rand of the American Right, that when Rand met Knock in the early 1940s,
at a time when the fountainhead was still an unfinished manuscript, she found him fatalistic
and gloomy, inclined to give up and willing to, as she put it, surrender the world to
the enemies of individual liberty.
Perhaps Nock knew something Rand didn't.
She herself, a few years down the line, would counsel her followers that, it is earlier
than you think, that many years of educating the populace would have to precede any attempt
to achieve political liberty in the United States.
As Nock himself had put it at least 30 years earlier, even a successful revolution would
accomplish nothing.
The people would be as thoroughly indoctrinated with statism after the revolution as they
were before, and therefore the revolution would be no revolution but a coup d'état
by which the citizen would gain nothing but a mere change of oppressors.
There have been many revolutions, and this has been the sum of their history.
They amount to no more than an impressive testimony to the great truth that there can
be no right action except there be right thinking behind it.
But instead of recognizing the state as the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious
and decent men, the run of mankind, with rare exceptions, regards it not only as a final
and indispensable entity, but also as, in the main, beneficent.
And as long as the easy, attractive, superficial philosophy of statism remains in control of
For the citizen's mind, no beneficent social change can be effected, whether by revolution or by any other means.
Such were the ideas that made Albert J. Nock one of the major figures in the 20th century branch of the libertarian tradition,
even if they were his ideas, only during the last 20 years or so of his life.
This is Jeff Rigondyne.