The Book of Journeyman is a collection of Nock’s essays originally written for The New Freeman. It is quintessential Nock.
For example, on “Lawyer’s Law” (pp. 9-10) he quips:
The Russians are the best off of almost any people in the world in one respect, which is that their laws are not made for them by lawyers. Hence they have very few laws, and those few are easily intelligible. I was reading the translation of one the other day, and remarked its simplicity and ease. One could not read any clause of it without knowing not only what it meant, but the only thing it could mean. The trade guild of lawyers that governs this country gets up laws in such shape that only lawyers have time to decipher them, and so numerous that it takes a lot of lawyers to go around. Thus the guild works for its own benefit instead of the public’s, which is a curious state of things. Russia has a healthy tradition towards lawyers, dating from Peter the Great. On a visit to England, he was dumfounded at seeing so many of them about, and said, “Why, there are only two lawyers in my whole kingdom, and I intend to hang one of them the minute I get back.”
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Albert Jay Nock (October 13, 1870–August 19, 1945) was an influential American libertarian author, educational theorist, and social critic of the early and middle twentieth century. Murray Rothbard was deeply influenced by him, and so was the whole generation of free market thinkers of the 1950s.
Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1930, 1967
