Abstract
Nock is important for having transmitted Oppenheimer’s views of the state and the ruling class to American readers and applying them to a study of American history. He also distinguished between “government,” which is organized from below and locally to solve social problems, and the “state,” which is coercive and applied top down. He pithily defines the state as “the organization of the political means.” Regarding the American historical experience, he notes that voters have been tricked by the American republican experiment into thinking that “they, the people” control the government which Nock thinks is a fiction. When he wrote this in 1935, he was becoming pessimistic that “the depletion of social power by the State” could ever be reversed.
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Notes
- 1.
John Bright said he had known the British Parliament to do some good things, but never knew it to do a good thing merely because it was a good thing.
- 2.
James Madison, Reflections, 1.
- 3.
Franz Oppenheimer , Der Staat, ch. I. Services are also, of course, a subject of economic exchange.
- 4.
In April, 1933, the American State issued half a billion dollars’ worth of bonds of small denominations, to attract investment by poor persons. It promised to pay these, principal and interest, in gold of the then-existing value. Within three months the State repudiated that promise. Such an action by an individual would, as Freud says, dishonour him forever, and mark him as no better than a knave. Done by an association of individuals, it would put them in the category of a professional-criminal class.
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Hart, D.M., Chartier, G., Kenyon, R.M., Long, R.T. (2018). Albert J. Nock, Our Enemy, the State (1935). In: Hart, D., Chartier, G., Kenyon, R., Long, R. (eds) Social Class and State Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64894-1_29
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64894-1_29
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