A Stroll with Albert Jay Nock (Comments) (Critical Essay) (Biography‪)‬

ALBERT JAY NOCK (1870-1945) was never a household name even in his own lifetime but his memory has been kept green in the half century since his death. His Mr. Jefferson (1926), Our Enemy, The State (1935), and Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943) have never been long out of print. In 1991 Jacques Barzun wrote about the double pleasure of reading Nock "for what he says and for the way he says it." Nock's work was "social and intellectual criticism at its best" and Barzun wrote optimistically that he "will surely climb in due course to his proper place in the American pantheon." Charles Hamilton noted that Nock "contributed some powerful and lasting criticism of the state of humane life in America." Nock was not a voluminous writer, wrote his friend, Frank Chodorov, but "had a rare gift of editing his ideas so that he wrote only when he had something to say and he said it with dispatch." Hendrik Willem van Loon exclaimed that Nock was "possessed of a rare genius for the handling of words." And finally, H. L. Mencken, no slouch himself as a prose stylist, declared that Nock "thinks in charming rhythm. There is never any cacophony in his sentences as there is never any muddling in his ideas. It is accurate, it is well ordered, and above all, it is charming." Albert Jay Nock was not a reformer and found offensive any society with a "monstrous itch for changing people." He had "a great horror of every attempt to change anybody; or I should rather say, every wish to change anybody; for that is the important thing." Whenever one "wishes to change anybody, one becomes like the socialists, vegetarians, prohibitionists; and this, as Rabelais says, 'is a terrible thing to think upon.'" The only thing we can do to improve society, he declared, "is to present society with one improved unit." Let each person direct his efforts at himself or herself, not others; or as Voltaire put it, "Il faut cultiver notre jardin."