A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Nock online

The Ludwig von Mises institute has made several of the works of the great anarchist writer Albert Jay Nock available on line (via Tory Anarchist). These are mostly out of print and hard to find works, so it’s quite a resource.

Nock’s Our Enemy, the State is a classic and, while Nock was considered a man of the Left at the time, he came to have an influence on American libertarian/conservative thought. If I remember correctly, Nock was friends with William F. Buckley’s father. Though it’s hard to imagine the anti-war, anti-statist Nock finding the conservatism of today too congenial.

See also Nock’s “Anarchist’s Progress” here.

One response to “Nock online”

  1. A couple of Nock quotes:

    “As I understand the term, it is of the very essence of democracy that the individual citizen shall be invested with the inalienable and sovereign right to make an ass of himself.”

    “Economism can build a society which is rich, prosperous, powerful, even one which has a reasonably wide diffusion of material well-being. It can not build one which is lovely, one which has savour and depth, and which exercises the irresistible attraction that loveliness wields. Perhaps by the time economism has run its course the society it has built may be tired of itself, bored by its own hideousness, and may despairingly consent to annihilation, aware that it is too ugly to be let live any longer.”

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