State power does not diminish

OUR ENEMY, THE STATE by Albert Jay Nock. Discussing literary provocateur Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens once wrote, it is essential “to know how conservative as well as how radical he can be.” A leading critic of America's military-industrial-complex, Vidal is a self-described “patriot of the Old Republic,” a phrase which must discomfort some of the progressives in his audience. Nonetheless, Vidal’s salvos against Bush II, neo-conservatism, and the Iraq war are widely read on the left and his subtly titled Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta and Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got To Be So Hated are both international bestsellers. Vidal is best known, however, for his historical novels exploring the figures and events that gave these States their imperial flavor: Hamilton and the Federalists' centralization of power, Lincoln's war to preserve the Union, Roosevelt I and his “white man's burden,” etc.

There is something particularly American about such deeply intertwined radicalism and conservatism. Jefferson personified it; Mark Twain possessed it in spades. Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945), the Old Right journalist, critic, and author who is at once the heir to both the republicanism of Jefferson and the individualist anarchism of Lysander Spooner, fits the bill perfectly as well.

Published in 1935 in the midst of New Deal collectivism, Our Enemy, The State is Nock's brilliant attempt to get at the true nature of statism. He distinguishes between “Government,” which is the legitimate protector of individual rights (“beyond this it does not go”), and “State,” which originates in conquest and confiscation and, “by way of innumerable and most onerous positive interventions,” legally advantages some at the expense of others.

State power does not diminish, Nock observes, and every enhancement of State power necessarily comes at the expense of social power. Furthermore, as Nock quotes from James Madison, the State incessantly utilizes “the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government.” Consider the Orwellian language and scandalous passage of the USA PATRIOT Act for a recent example.

Some readers will no doubt be surprised at Nock's extensive reliance on Charles A. Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, a much-debated book arguing that the naked economic interests of the Framers produced the Constitution. This brings us back to the Vidal principium: that deep mix of radicalism and conservatism that blurs tidy political labels. I leave Beard's conclusions, which have been substantially challenged and undermined, particularly by Forrest McDonald's Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution, for another time.

The State, Nock writes, “is an anti-social institution, administered in the only way an anti-social institution can be administered, and by the kind of person who, in the name of things, is best adapted to such service.” We would have far better breeds of both radicalism and conservatism if more young radicals and conservatives kept this fundamental insight in mind.