Abstract
Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) was a news magazine writer and social critic who wrote, among other things, a book called Theory of Education in the United States. For Nock, an anarchist who favored laissez-faire capitalism, state education was an impermissible intrusion on individual liberty less suited to true education than to training good workers. Yet, influenced by Matthew Arnold, Nock was equally skeptical that private enterprise could provide the kind of truly good (because rigorous and scholastic) education Nock believed customers would not want.
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Notes
- 1.
Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism : A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, 1st ed. (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007), chap. 1.
- 2.
Murray Rothbard, The Betrayal of the American Right, 1st ed. (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007), 31, epub edition. See also Justin Raimondo, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, 2nd ed. (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2008).
- 3.
Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy the State (New York: William Morrow, 1935), 15.
- 4.
Albert Jay Nock, “Anarchist’s Progress,” in On Doing the Right Thing and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928), 150.
- 5.
Albert Jay Nock, “Life, Liberty, and …,” in The Disadvantages of Being Educated and Other Essays (Tampa, FL: Hallberg, 1996), 33–34; Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State (Caldwell, ID: Caxton, 1940).
- 6.
Nock, “Life, Liberty, and …,” 32.
- 7.
Albert Jay Nock, “On Doing the Right Thing,” in On Doing the Right Thing and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928), 173.
- 8.
Robert M. Crunden, The Mind and Art of Albert Jay Nock (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1964), 63–67.
- 9.
Herbert Spencer, “From Freedom to Bondage,” in The Man Versus the State (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008), 248, http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/330. See also Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1850), http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/273.
- 10.
Nock, “On Doing the Right Thing,” 173.
- 11.
Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (New York: Harper, 1943), 47.
- 12.
Albert Jay Nock, “The Value of Useless Knowledge,” in The Disadvantages of Being Educated and Other Essays (Tampa, FL: Hallberg, 1996), 85.
- 13.
Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993).
- 14.
Nock, “The Value of Useless Knowledge,” 85.
- 15.
Albert Jay Nock, On Doing the Right Thing and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928), 77; Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London: Smith Elder, 1869), 112.
- 16.
Albert Jay Nock, “A Cultural Forecast,” in On Doing the Right Thing and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928), 79–80.
- 17.
Nock, “A Cultural Forecast,” 85.
- 18.
Nock, “A Cultural Forecast,” 87.
- 19.
Nock, “A Cultural Forecast,” 87–88.
- 20.
Joseph Persky, “Retrospectives: Consumer Sovereignty,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 7, no. 1 (1993): 183–91; Israel Kirzner, “Mises and His Understanding of the Capitalist System,” Cato Journal 19, no. 2 (1999): 215–32.
- 21.
Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalist Mentality (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008), 13, epub ed.
- 22.
James M. Buchanan, Cost and Choice: An Inquiry in Economic Theory (Chicago: Markham, 1969), chaps. 1 and 2.
- 23.
“Now, nobody ever contended that under unhampered capitalism those fare best who, from the point of view of eternal standards of value, ought to be preferred. What capitalistic democracy of the market brings about is not rewarding people according to their “true” merits, inherent worth and moral eminence.” Mises, The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, 12.
- 24.
Nock, “A Cultural Forecast,” 89. In many of Nock’s essays, he writes in very deterministic language, and throughout “A Cultural Forecast,” Nock suggests that he does not lament this trend—that “it is a situation to be remarked, not a condition to be complained of” (79). I believe that his argument and language often betray him on this point. Nock very clearly talks of cultural attainment as a desideratum, as it enriches spiritual life—something Nock regards clearly as desirable. Also, Nock uses normative quite a bit in this and similar essays, for instance, calling preference for the bathos a preference for “inferior goods” (77).
- 25.
Albert Jay Nock, The Theory of Education in the United States (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008), 52.
- 26.
Nock, Memoirs of a Man, 270; Nock, “Towards a New Quality Product”; Nock, The Theory of Education in the United States; McElroy, “Albert Jay Nock on Education.”
- 27.
E. L. Thorndike, Human Nature and the Social Order (New York: Macmillan, 1940), 310; Elwood P. Cubberley, Changing Conceptions of Education (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 56–57. For more on the widespread trends toward academic tracking in public schools, see Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (New York: Basic Books, 2010), chaps. 4 and 7.
- 28.
Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, 279. Similarly, Nock wrote that, as far as schools’ training function goes, “I would make hardly any actual changes, and those I would make are only such as should enable our system to go on doing practically what it is doing now, but to do it better.” Nock, The Theory of Education in the United States, 110–11.
- 29.
Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, 275.
- 30.
Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, 111.
- 31.
Nock, The Disadvantages of Being Educated, 19.
- 32.
Nock, The Theory of Education in the United States, 53–54.
- 33.
Nock, “Towards a New Quality Product,” 118–19.
- 34.
Nock, The Theory of Education in the United States, 152–53.
- 35.
Crunden, The Mind and Art of Albert Jay Nock, 61–63.
- 36.
Matthew Arnold, A French Eton, or, Middle Class Education and the State (London: Macmillan, 1864), 44.
- 37.
Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), 24, epub ed.
- 38.
Nock, “Towards a New Quality Product,” 118–19.
- 39.
George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 82.
- 40.
Charles Gerald Nitsche, Albert Jay Nock and Frank Chodorov: Case Studies in Recent American Individualist and Anti-Statist Thought (College Park: University of Maryland, 1981); Gregory T. Eow, “Fighting a New Deal: Intellectual Origins of the Reagan Revolution, 1932–1952,” PhD diss., Rice University, 2007, 212–18.
- 41.
Frank Chodorov, “A Really Free School System,” The Freeman, July 1954.
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Currie-Knight, K. (2019). Albert Jay Nock: Pessimism About Education by State or Market. In: Education in the Marketplace. Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11778-8_2
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