Our Enemy, the State
by Albert Jay Nock
This year the theme of the Institute’s Supporters Summit was “Our Enemy, the State.” What better book review for this issue of The Misesian, then, than a discussion of Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, the State, first published in 1935? In what follows, I’ll talk about some of the insights in that book.
Nock draws a distinction between the state and society, though sometimes he describes this distinction as between the state and government. What he means by the latter term is not altogether easy to discern, but the basic point he wants to make is clear. This is that there are two ways in which people in a community can coexist. One is by peaceful cooperation, and the other is by taking what others have produced. He calls the first way the “economic means” and the second the “political means.”
By Nock’s definition, the state is necessarily parasitic: “The State, then, whether primitive, feudal or merchant, is the organization of the political means. . . . It is unfortunately none too well understood that just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn.”
He is alive to the objection that under his theory the state is parasitic by definition, making it an open question whether the state as people ordinarily understand it is like this, and his response is that his definition is confirmed by history. All states in fact have begun this way: “The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origins in confiscation. No primitive State known to history could possibly have any other origin.”
You might think that because people don’t like having what they produce taken away from them, they would try to overthrow the state and replace it with a voluntary society; but, Nock claims, this is not so. Rather cynically, he maintains that people almost always take the “easy way,” and it is generally much easier to take what others have produced than to produce it yourself. For that reason, opponents of an existing state will aim to take it over rather than to replace it with a peaceful society: “Now, since man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion, he will employ the political means whenever he can: exclusively, if possible; otherwise, in association with the economic means.”
People in the United States think that our “democracy,” with political parties in opposition to one another, offers a bulwark against state oppression, but Nock denies this. The parties agree on nearly all policies, with only minor differences.
He says about this situation: “Our nominally republican system is naturally built on an imperial model, with our professional politicians standing in the place of the praetorian guards; they meet from time to time, decide what can be ‘got away with’ and how, and who is to do it; and the electorate votes according to their prescriptions.”
Some people look to the Constitution as a guardrail against the oppressive state, so that at least some oppressive acts will be ruled unconstitutional, but Nock argues cogently against this view. A constitution must always be interpreted, and it is the officials of the state who do the interpreting. It is hardly to be expected that the state’s officials will interpret the Constitution in a way that derogates from the state’s power. In this connection, Nock makes a comment that will be of interest to those who do not view Abraham Lincoln with the customary reverence he is today accorded: “Lincoln overruled the opinion of Chief Justice Taney that suspension of the habeas corpus was unconstitutional, and in consequence the mode of the State was, until 1865, a monocratic military despotism. . . . A strict constitutionalist might indeed say that the constitution died in 1861, and one would have to scratch one’s head pretty diligently to refute him.”
You might object that most people think it is morally wrong to steal. Wouldn’t this stop them, in many cases, from doing the stealing involved in taking over the state? Nock answers in a most interesting and insightful way. He suggests that people have become so used to living under a state that they accept its activities as legitimate. They thus don’t regard what the state is doing as theft.
In this connection, he compares the state with the church around 1500: “It is interesting to observe that in the year 1935 the average individual’s incurious attitude toward the phenomenon of the State is precisely what his attitude was towards the phenomenon of the Church in the year, say, 1500. . . . It does not appear to have occurred to the Churchcitizen of that day, any more that it occurs to the State-citizen of the present, to ask what sort of institution it was that claimed his allegiance.”
Nock’s account of the state is of great value, but I am inclined to think that at times he applies his account in an overly rigid way. He says: “The condition of public affairs in all countries, notably our own, has done more than bring under review the mere current practice of politics, the character and quality of representative politicians, [and] the relative merits of this-or-that form or mode of government. It has served to suggest that finality does not lie with consideration of species but of genus. It does not lie with consideration of the characteristic marks that differentiate the republican State, monocratic state, constitutional, collectivist, totalitarian, Hitlerian, Bolshevist, what you will. It lies with consideration of the State itself.” In other words, the differences among states do not really matter compared to the ultimate fact that they are all states. Political refugees of Hitler or Stalin in America would perhaps see things differently.
But although it is difficult to accept Nock’s account in all its starkness, it has the merit of making us see things in an unexpected way. In our zeal to oppose totalitarianism, we should never forget the oppressive nature of the state itself.
