WEBVTT NOTE Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:12.000 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach. 2 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:17.000 In the beginning, there was Henry George. 3 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:27.000 Henry George was born September 2, 1839, in Philadelphia, the second of ten children in a not overly prosperous family. 4 00:00:27.000 --> 00:00:32.720 and Family. His formal education ended when he was 14 years old. A little less than a 5 00:00:32.720 --> 00:00:39.680 year later, at the age of 15, he went to sea. He didn't care much for the experience, however, 6 00:00:39.680 --> 00:00:44.680 and when his ship returned to Philadelphia 14 months later, he stayed ashore for nearly 7 00:00:44.680 --> 00:00:50.840 two years, serving an apprentice ship at a printing establishment. Then, at 18, he went 8 00:00:50.840 --> 00:00:57.040 to see again. He never really intended to stick out the entire voyage, however. He jumped 9 00:00:57.040 --> 00:01:02.600 ship in San Francisco and looked around for a job that would make use of his newly acquired 10 00:01:02.600 --> 00:01:08.380 skills as a typesetter. He found work soon enough in the local newspaper business, first 11 00:01:08.380 --> 00:01:14.280 as a typesetter and printer, then as a reporter and editorial writer, finally as an editor 12 00:01:14.280 --> 00:01:15.900 and Proprietor. 13 00:01:15.900 --> 00:01:23.020 For four years, 1871 to 1875, he was editor and part owner of the San Francisco Daily 14 00:01:23.020 --> 00:01:24.720 Evening Post. 15 00:01:24.720 --> 00:01:30.760 It was about the time the Evening Post closed its doors in the mid-1870s, when George was 16 00:01:30.760 --> 00:01:36.880 in his mid-30s, that he at last gave in to the impulse to write a book, making the argument 17 00:01:36.880 --> 00:01:42.900 for an idea that had come to him a few years earlier, near the beginning of the decade. 18 00:01:42.900 --> 00:01:48.340 George had decided at that time that the reason poverty persists even in the midst of great 19 00:01:48.340 --> 00:01:55.420 wealth is that absentee owners were skimming off huge profits on undeveloped land, whose 20 00:01:55.420 --> 00:02:02.340 price had been driven up not by any improvements put there by the owners, but by the mere proximity 21 00:02:02.340 --> 00:02:07.260 of other developed land and of various commercial enterprises. 22 00:02:07.260 --> 00:02:13.260 Seize this unearned wealth, George proposed, and use it to fund government. 23 00:02:13.260 --> 00:02:19.740 The single tax, his proposal came to be called, because, according to George, no other taxes 24 00:02:19.740 --> 00:02:25.940 would be necessary to pay the full cost of legitimate governmental activity. 25 00:02:25.940 --> 00:02:30.940 In George's view, very little governmental activity was legitimate. 26 00:02:30.940 --> 00:02:36.340 The sphere of government begins, he wrote, where the freedom of competition ends, since 27 00:02:36.340 --> 00:02:42.380 Interference in no other way can equal liberty be assured, but within this line I have always 28 00:02:42.380 --> 00:02:45.220 opposed governmental interference. 29 00:02:45.220 --> 00:02:51.180 I have been an active, consistent and absolute free trader and an opponent of all schemes 30 00:02:51.180 --> 00:02:54.180 that would limit the freedom of the individual. 31 00:02:54.180 --> 00:02:59.700 He held the rights of property to be absolute, he said, except, of course, for the right 32 00:02:59.700 --> 00:03:02.060 to own land. 33 00:03:02.060 --> 00:03:06.980 Property and land, he wrote, is as indefensible as property in man. 34 00:03:06.980 --> 00:03:14.220 And according to the chapter on him in Charles Madison's useful 1947 book Critics and Crusaders, 35 00:03:14.220 --> 00:03:21.460 A Century of American Protest, George argued that in the end, genuine free trade involved 36 00:03:21.460 --> 00:03:25.700 the abolition of all tariffs and taxes. 37 00:03:25.700 --> 00:03:32.040 Henry George was, in effect, a limited government libertarian, a minarchist, except for his 38 00:03:32.040 --> 00:03:38.320 his views on land and the single tax. The book he wrote in the late 1870s and published 39 00:03:38.320 --> 00:03:45.800 in 1879 when he was 40 years old was called Progress and Poverty, an Inquiry into the 40 00:03:45.800 --> 00:03:53.200 Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth, The Remedy. 41 00:03:53.200 --> 00:03:59.880 It was a tremendous success, a huge best seller. It sold some 3 million copies in a United 42 00:03:59.880 --> 00:04:05.680 States Inhabited by Fewer Than 50 Million People. It's as though a book published today were 43 00:04:05.680 --> 00:04:12.520 to sell 18 million copies. Progress and poverty made George financially comfortable for the 44 00:04:12.520 --> 00:04:19.560 first time in his life. It launched a movement, the so-called Georgist or Single Tax Movement, 45 00:04:19.560 --> 00:04:26.900 which attained considerable influence in American politics in the 1880s and 90s. George himself 46 00:04:26.900 --> 00:04:34.020 ran for mayor of New York in 1886 and came in second, third place went to the 28-year-old 47 00:04:34.020 --> 00:04:39.880 Republican candidate, Theodore Roosevelt. It was widely believed and widely brooded 48 00:04:39.880 --> 00:04:45.680 about that George had really come in first, and that Tammany Hall had stolen the election 49 00:04:45.680 --> 00:04:51.900 by buying votes and by throwing ballots for George into the East River. George ran again 50 00:04:51.900 --> 00:05:02.900 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. 51 00:05:02.900 --> 00:05:08.900 Meanwhile, Georgist mayors were elected, or were soon to be elected, in other cities. 52 00:05:08.900 --> 00:05:14.900 Toledo, Cincinnati, Cleveland. At least one Georgist was elected to Congress. 53 00:05:14.900 --> 00:05:20.520 George's books were read by, and exercised an intellectual influence upon, not a few 54 00:05:20.520 --> 00:05:27.020 people who were either already famous, like Leo Tolstoy, or later came to fame of one 55 00:05:27.020 --> 00:05:34.140 kind or another, Clarence Darrow, Henry Ford, Aldous Huxley, Albert J. Nock. 56 00:05:34.140 --> 00:05:39.360 It is the last of these figures, Albert J. Nock, who is the real central character of 57 00:05:39.360 --> 00:05:41.140 our present story. 58 00:05:41.140 --> 00:05:47.500 Nock was born in 1870 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, at just about the time Henry George was conceiving 59 00:05:47.500 --> 00:05:51.460 the idea that would become progress and poverty. 60 00:05:51.460 --> 00:05:53.820 Nock's father was an Episcopal minister. 61 00:05:53.820 --> 00:05:56.620 His mother was a descendant of John Jay. 62 00:05:56.620 --> 00:06:02.900 He grew up mainly in Brooklyn and was educated at home up to the age of 14 when he was sent, 63 00:06:02.900 --> 00:06:08.340 in the mid-1880s, at about the time Henry George was making his first run for mayor 64 00:06:08.340 --> 00:06:13.340 of New York, to a four-year prep school near Peoria, Illinois. 65 00:06:13.340 --> 00:06:19.100 From there, he went to St. Stephen's College, an Episcopal college in Annandale-on-Hudson, 66 00:06:19.100 --> 00:06:24.020 New York, about a hundred miles up the Hudson River from New York City. 67 00:06:24.020 --> 00:06:30.060 Since the mid-1930s, St. Stephen's has been known as Bard College, in honor of its founder, 68 00:06:30.060 --> 00:06:36.740 John Bard, who had established it in 1860 as a training school for Episcopal clergymen. 69 00:06:36.740 --> 00:06:43.200 For a few years after his graduation from St. Stephen's in 1892, Albert J. Knox seems 70 00:06:43.200 --> 00:06:46.860 to have toyed with the idea of an academic career. 71 00:06:46.860 --> 00:06:53.580 He stuck around Annandale, took graduate courses, taught introductory courses in Latin and German. 72 00:06:53.580 --> 00:06:58.300 By 1895, however, he was in Divinity School in Connecticut. 73 00:06:58.300 --> 00:07:02.260 In 1897, he was ordained an Episcopal minister. 74 00:07:02.260 --> 00:07:10.160 In 1898, he reported to his first church, St. James Memorial in Titusville, Pennsylvania. 75 00:07:10.160 --> 00:07:16.640 For the next 12 years, Nock worked as a clergyman in Titusville, Blacksburg, Virginia and Detroit. 76 00:07:16.640 --> 00:07:19.060 He married and fathered two sons. 77 00:07:19.060 --> 00:07:25.620 Then, at the age of 40 in 1910, he left his wife and children and moved to New York, where 78 00:07:25.620 --> 00:07:30.720 he took a job as an editor on a monthly called The American Magazine. 79 00:07:30.720 --> 00:07:33.460 Knock really wasn't cut out to be a minister. 80 00:07:33.460 --> 00:07:38.280 Though he was outwardly rather formal and traditional in his manner, and though he tended 81 00:07:38.280 --> 00:07:43.640 to favor the traditional and even somewhat sedate in the arts, the symphonies of Franz 82 00:07:43.640 --> 00:07:51.540 Josef Haydn, for example, his mind was free-thinking and radical, unafraid to question any orthodoxy, 83 00:07:51.540 --> 00:07:55.420 unafraid to challenge any shibboleth, however sacred. 84 00:07:55.420 --> 00:08:00.120 The evidence suggests that Knock may have donned his clerical collar in an effort to 85 00:08:00.120 --> 00:08:04.960 to please his mother, who had wanted him to follow in his father's footsteps. 86 00:08:04.960 --> 00:08:09.660 In any case, once he summoned the courage to take that collar off and follow his own 87 00:08:09.660 --> 00:08:15.060 secret passion, he headed straight for the world that had been his secret refuge for 88 00:08:15.060 --> 00:08:20.900 the previous two decades, the world he'd long been reading about and longing for, the world 89 00:08:20.900 --> 00:08:27.180 of ideas and public affairs, the world that was the natural home of all those who saw 90 00:08:27.180 --> 00:08:32.140 that human beings were capable of improvement, and understood that the way to improve them 91 00:08:32.140 --> 00:08:34.780 was to reform their societies. 92 00:08:34.780 --> 00:08:41.240 Nock had become a Georgist sitting in his dormitory room, and later his parsonage, reading. 93 00:08:41.240 --> 00:08:46.940 Now he would go and live among fellow Georgists, if he could find any, and if not, then at 94 00:08:46.940 --> 00:08:53.100 least among people who ached, as he did, for reform, for improvement in the way people 95 00:08:53.100 --> 00:08:54.340 lived. 96 00:08:54.340 --> 00:09:00.940 In the American magazine, between 1910 and 1915, Nock worked with John Reed, Lincoln 97 00:09:00.940 --> 00:09:03.460 Steffens and Ida Tarbell. 98 00:09:03.460 --> 00:09:07.940 He wrote articles pushing progressive causes and programs. 99 00:09:07.940 --> 00:09:12.620 According to his biographer, Michael Resen, Nock thought of himself in these years as 100 00:09:12.620 --> 00:09:17.460 a humanitarian and progressive, as well as an individualist. 101 00:09:17.460 --> 00:09:23.660 And individualist or not, like other progressives of the period, he was, as Resen puts it, 102 00:09:23.660 --> 00:09:28.940 Inamored of the potential effectiveness of organizing and planning toward constructive 103 00:09:28.940 --> 00:09:36.420 ends, despite also being suspicious of the state, institutions and vast organizations. 104 00:09:36.420 --> 00:09:42.840 It was in the year 1914, two years before he voted for Woodrow Wilson for president, 105 00:09:42.840 --> 00:09:49.180 that NOC, in Resn's words, came out for compulsory service for every boy and girl between the 106 00:09:49.180 --> 00:09:52.140 in the ages of 17 and 21. 107 00:09:52.140 --> 00:09:56.100 But the service would be devoted to agriculture, not war. 108 00:09:56.100 --> 00:10:02.060 The conscripts would fight against nature instead of men, against floods, grasshoppers 109 00:10:02.060 --> 00:10:03.600 and mosquitoes. 110 00:10:03.600 --> 00:10:10.940 They would undertake massive reclamation projects, immense areas of dry soil brought under irrigation, 111 00:10:10.940 --> 00:10:17.820 reforestation of the entire northwest, reclamation of the lower Mississippi and power development. 112 00:10:17.820 --> 00:10:25.500 It was a vision to make the TVA pale by comparison. And, of course, it could all easily be financed 113 00:10:25.500 --> 00:10:28.180 by the single tax. 114 00:10:28.180 --> 00:10:34.860 Between 1915 and 1920, Nock freelanced for various magazines and briefly held a full-time 115 00:10:34.860 --> 00:10:40.340 job as a member of the editorial staff of the nation. Then, for four years, beginning 116 00:10:40.340 --> 00:10:47.440 in 1920, he was editor of the legendary Georgist weekly, The Freeman. When The Freeman closed 117 00:10:47.440 --> 00:10:52.760 Throughout its doors, it was back to freelancing, now mainly for the American Mercury, Harpers 118 00:10:52.760 --> 00:10:58.800 and the Atlantic Monthly, plus writing books and, now and then, as demanded, lecturing 119 00:10:58.800 --> 00:11:00.420 and teaching. 120 00:11:00.420 --> 00:11:08.500 Nock died on August 19, 1945, just two months short of his 75th birthday. 121 00:11:08.500 --> 00:11:13.160 Throughout these years, Nock was reading and thinking, and his reading and thinking was 122 00:11:13.160 --> 00:11:17.960 is more and more calling into question many of the assumptions that had long informed 123 00:11:17.960 --> 00:11:19.880 his political beliefs. 124 00:11:19.880 --> 00:11:24.960 The more he read about history, for example, the more he noticed that, as he later put 125 00:11:24.960 --> 00:11:30.880 it, the state is the poorest instrument imaginable for improving human society. 126 00:11:30.880 --> 00:11:38.440 It is slow, extravagant, inefficient, wasteful, unadaptive, stupid, and, at least by tendency, 127 00:11:38.440 --> 00:11:39.440 corrupt. 128 00:11:39.440 --> 00:11:45.360 Confidence in Political Institutions and Political Nostrums is ludicrously misplaced. 129 00:11:45.360 --> 00:11:50.600 These facts help to account, certainly, for what Nock called the notorious failure of 130 00:11:50.600 --> 00:11:54.320 reforming and revolutionary movements in the long run. 131 00:11:54.320 --> 00:12:00.000 But might it not also suggest that his hopes of finding a way to improve human beings and 132 00:12:00.000 --> 00:12:02.680 human society were groundless? 133 00:12:02.680 --> 00:12:05.560 No matter how you looked at it, it was worrisome. 134 00:12:05.560 --> 00:12:11.840 Yet, as late as the early 1930s, according to Knox memoirs, I still believed that the 135 00:12:11.840 --> 00:12:15.760 masses of mankind are indefinitely improvable. 136 00:12:15.760 --> 00:12:22.440 By around 1935, however, he had become convinced that this belief would not withstand scrutiny. 137 00:12:22.440 --> 00:12:28.160 I ended, he wrote, by striking my colors as gracefully as possible, parted company with 138 00:12:28.160 --> 00:12:34.080 the theologians, with Mr. Jefferson, with Price, Priestley, Condorcet, Rousseau, Madame 139 00:12:34.080 --> 00:12:41.540 and went over to the opposition with head unbowed and withers still unrung. 140 00:12:41.540 --> 00:12:46.880 Nock had already decided in the late 1920s that around the same time he began calling 141 00:12:46.880 --> 00:12:52.860 himself an anarchist that spending his days commenting on current issues as he had been 142 00:12:52.860 --> 00:12:56.740 doing for nearly 20 years was a waste of time. 143 00:12:56.740 --> 00:13:02.300 It is not so important at the moment, he wrote, to try to make people take up with this, that 144 00:13:02.300 --> 00:13:08.980 or the other view, as it is to establish the questions that must be considered before any 145 00:13:08.980 --> 00:13:11.900 competent view can be formulated. 146 00:13:11.900 --> 00:13:16.780 These questions are sunk now in an immense depth of ignorance, and until they are brought 147 00:13:16.780 --> 00:13:23.360 up and at least clearly presented, I don't believe the moralist has any chance at all. 148 00:13:23.360 --> 00:13:29.980 The questions that must be considered before any competent view can be formulated. 149 00:13:29.980 --> 00:13:35.500 One such question was, what is the nature of the state? Where did it come from? If the 150 00:13:35.500 --> 00:13:40.820 state was, in fact, useless for the purpose of improving human society, what was it in 151 00:13:40.820 --> 00:13:49.340 fact good for? So he wrote a book. It's called Our Enemy the State. It came out in 1935 after 152 00:13:49.340 --> 00:13:55.740 being delivered as a series of lectures at Knox's newly renamed alma mater, Bard College. 153 00:13:55.740 --> 00:14:01.660 It contains a chapter which attempts to explain the economic origins of the American Revolution 154 00:14:01.660 --> 00:14:07.280 by drawing on the theories of land ownership of Henry George, but apart from that relatively 155 00:14:07.280 --> 00:14:13.800 small imperfection, Our Enemy the State is a true libertarian classic, one of those books 156 00:14:13.800 --> 00:14:20.740 you simply must read if you have any serious interest at all in the libertarian idea. 157 00:14:20.740 --> 00:14:25.900 The state, Nock wrote, did not originate in the common understanding and agreement of 158 00:14:25.900 --> 00:14:27.020 society. 159 00:14:27.020 --> 00:14:30.460 It originated in conquest and confiscation. 160 00:14:30.460 --> 00:14:35.780 Its intention, far from contemplating freedom and security, contemplated nothing of the 161 00:14:35.780 --> 00:14:36.780 kind. 162 00:14:36.780 --> 00:14:43.660 It contemplated primarily the continuous economic exploitation of one class by another. 163 00:14:43.660 --> 00:14:49.220 And it concerned itself with only so much freedom and security as was consistent with 164 00:14:49.220 --> 00:14:54.040 with this primary intention, and this was, in fact, very little. 165 00:14:54.040 --> 00:15:00.380 Its primary function or exercise was maintaining the stratification of society into an owning 166 00:15:00.380 --> 00:15:05.700 and exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class. 167 00:15:05.700 --> 00:15:11.600 The order of interest that it reflected was not social but purely anti-social, and those 168 00:15:11.600 --> 00:15:17.160 who administered it, judged by the common standard of ethics or even the common standard 169 00:15:17.160 --> 00:15:24.480 of Law as applied to private persons were indistinguishable from a professional criminal class. 170 00:15:24.480 --> 00:15:30.640 The positive testimony of history, Nock wrote, is that the state invariably had its origin 171 00:15:30.640 --> 00:15:33.480 in conquest and confiscation. 172 00:15:33.480 --> 00:15:39.360 No primitive state known to history originated in any other manner, and no primitive state 173 00:15:39.360 --> 00:15:42.920 could possibly have had any other origin. 174 00:15:42.920 --> 00:15:49.580 Moreover, the sole invariable characteristic of the state is the economic exploitation 175 00:15:49.580 --> 00:15:52.200 of one class by another. 176 00:15:52.200 --> 00:15:58.680 Not quotes the German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, who described the typical primitive state, 177 00:15:58.680 --> 00:16:04.740 in respect of its origin, as an institution forced on a defeated group by a conquering 178 00:16:04.740 --> 00:16:11.800 group, with a view only to systematizing the domination of the conquered by the conquerors, 179 00:16:11.800 --> 00:16:17.960 and Safeguarding itself against insurrection from within and attack from without. 180 00:16:17.960 --> 00:16:24.160 This domination had no other final purpose than the economic exploitation of the conquered 181 00:16:24.160 --> 00:16:27.640 group by the victorious group. 182 00:16:27.640 --> 00:16:33.800 Any considerable economic accumulation, Nock wrote, or any considerable body of natural 183 00:16:33.800 --> 00:16:37.340 resources is an incentive to conquest. 184 00:16:37.340 --> 00:16:42.420 The primitive technique was that of raiding the coveted possessions, appropriating them 185 00:16:42.420 --> 00:16:49.460 entire and either exterminating the possessors or dispersing them beyond convenient reach. 186 00:16:49.460 --> 00:16:54.900 Very early, however, it was seen to be in general more profitable to reduce the possessors 187 00:16:54.900 --> 00:16:58.900 to dependents and use them as labor motors. 188 00:16:58.900 --> 00:17:04.380 This modified technique has been in use almost from the beginning, and everywhere, its first 189 00:17:04.380 --> 00:17:15.820 The State, Nock wrote, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. 190 00:17:15.820 --> 00:17:21.700 It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no 191 00:17:21.700 --> 00:17:26.680 rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. 192 00:17:26.680 --> 00:17:33.380 It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself 193 00:17:33.380 --> 00:17:40.340 above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing. 194 00:17:40.340 --> 00:17:47.220 In essence, then, taking the state wherever found, striking into its history at any point, 195 00:17:47.220 --> 00:17:54.300 one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries 196 00:17:54.300 --> 00:17:58.220 from those of a professional criminal class. 197 00:17:58.220 --> 00:18:04.020 After all, Nock argued, there are two and only two means of making a living in this 198 00:18:04.020 --> 00:18:05.020 world. 199 00:18:05.020 --> 00:18:10.180 There's the economic means, earning it, and there's the political means, seizing it from 200 00:18:10.180 --> 00:18:12.480 someone else who has earned it. 201 00:18:12.480 --> 00:18:18.300 The state, Nock said, was the organization of the political means. 202 00:18:18.300 --> 00:18:20.900 Does this sound familiar somehow? 203 00:18:20.900 --> 00:18:26.620 Does it sound perhaps like the rhetoric of Mr. Libertarian, Murray R. Rothbard? 204 00:18:26.620 --> 00:18:32.820 Knock had an immense influence on Rothbard. He also had an immense influence, apparently, 205 00:18:32.820 --> 00:18:38.300 on another major figure in the contemporary libertarian movement, Ayn Rand. According 206 00:18:38.300 --> 00:18:44.500 to Anne C. Heller, whose biography of Rand, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, was published 207 00:18:44.500 --> 00:18:50.620 about a year ago, it was the theory Knock had adapted from Franz Oppenheimer that inspired 208 00:18:50.620 --> 00:18:56.180 Rand to write The Fountainhead. In that novel, Heller writes, Rand is channeling 209 00:18:56.180 --> 00:19:24.180 RAND'S FACINATING CONTRIBUTION TO THIS FORMULATION IS HER DEPICTION OF THE PSYCHOLOGY. 210 00:19:24.180 --> 00:19:31.340 Rourke's political man is her second-hander, his economic man is her individualist hero, 211 00:19:31.340 --> 00:19:36.660 reliant on his own ego as the fountainhead of productivity and value. 212 00:19:36.660 --> 00:19:43.940 In Rourke's self-defense at trial, he says, the creator's concern is the conquest of nature, 213 00:19:43.940 --> 00:19:48.300 the parasite's concern is the conquest of men. 214 00:19:48.300 --> 00:19:54.880 At University of Virginia, historian Jennifer Burns reports in her 2009 book, Goddess of 215 00:19:54.880 --> 00:20:02.000 the Market, Ayn Rand of the American Right, that when Rand met Knock in the early 1940s, 216 00:20:02.000 --> 00:20:07.920 at a time when the fountainhead was still an unfinished manuscript, she found him fatalistic 217 00:20:07.920 --> 00:20:14.200 and gloomy, inclined to give up and willing to, as she put it, surrender the world to 218 00:20:14.200 --> 00:20:17.400 the enemies of individual liberty. 219 00:20:17.400 --> 00:20:20.180 Perhaps Nock knew something Rand didn't. 220 00:20:20.180 --> 00:20:25.120 She herself, a few years down the line, would counsel her followers that, it is earlier 221 00:20:25.120 --> 00:20:31.280 than you think, that many years of educating the populace would have to precede any attempt 222 00:20:31.280 --> 00:20:34.860 to achieve political liberty in the United States. 223 00:20:34.860 --> 00:20:40.840 As Nock himself had put it at least 30 years earlier, even a successful revolution would 224 00:20:40.840 --> 00:20:42.420 accomplish nothing. 225 00:20:42.420 --> 00:20:47.420 The people would be as thoroughly indoctrinated with statism after the revolution as they 226 00:20:47.420 --> 00:20:52.980 were before, and therefore the revolution would be no revolution but a coup d'état 227 00:20:52.980 --> 00:20:57.380 by which the citizen would gain nothing but a mere change of oppressors. 228 00:20:57.380 --> 00:21:01.880 There have been many revolutions, and this has been the sum of their history. 229 00:21:01.880 --> 00:21:07.020 They amount to no more than an impressive testimony to the great truth that there can 230 00:21:07.020 --> 00:21:12.100 be no right action except there be right thinking behind it. 231 00:21:12.100 --> 00:21:18.020 But instead of recognizing the state as the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious 232 00:21:18.020 --> 00:21:24.740 and decent men, the run of mankind, with rare exceptions, regards it not only as a final 233 00:21:24.740 --> 00:21:30.220 and indispensable entity, but also as, in the main, beneficent. 234 00:21:30.220 --> 00:21:36.460 And as long as the easy, attractive, superficial philosophy of statism remains in control of 235 00:21:36.460 --> 00:21:46.460 For the citizen's mind, no beneficent social change can be effected, whether by revolution or by any other means. 236 00:21:46.460 --> 00:21:54.460 Such were the ideas that made Albert J. Nock one of the major figures in the 20th century branch of the libertarian tradition, 237 00:21:54.460 --> 00:22:01.460 even if they were his ideas, only during the last 20 years or so of his life. 238 00:22:01.460 --> 00:22:08.460 This is Jeff Rigondyne.