Throughout his life, Nock was a deeply private man who shared few of the details of his personal life with his working partners. He was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to a father who was both a steelworker and an Episcopal priest, and he was raised in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from St. Stephen's College (now known as Bard College) (attended when he was 14—18 years of age), where he joined Sigma Alpha Epsilon Fraternity, he had a brief career playing minor league baseball. He then attended a theological seminary and was himself ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1897. Nock married Agnes Grumbine in 1900 and had two children but separated from his wife after only a few years of marriage. In 1909 Nock left the clergy and became a journalist.
In 1914, Nock joined the staff of
The Nation magazine, which was at the time supportive of liberal capitalism. Nock was an acquaintance of the influential politician and orator William Jennings Bryan, in 1915 even travelling to Europe on a special assignment for Bryan, who was then Secretary of State. Nock also maintained friendships with many of the leading proponents of the Georgist movement, one of whom had been his bishop in the Episcopal Church. However, while Nock was a lifelong admirer of Henry George, he was frequently at odds with the left-leaning movement that claimed his legacy. Further, Nock was deeply influenced by the anti-collectivist writings of the German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, whose most famous work,
Der Staat, was published in English translation in 1915. In his own writings, Nock would later build on Oppenheimer's claim that the pursuit of human ends can be divided into two forms: the productive or economic means and the parasitic, political means.
Between 1920 and 1924, Nock was the co-editor of
The Freeman.
The Freeman was initially conceived as a vehicle for the single tax movement. It was financed by the wealthy wife of the magazine's other editor, Francis Neilson, although neither Nock nor Neilson was an orthodox single taxer. Nock and Neilson would later have a vituperative falling out. Contributors to
The Freeman included Charles Beard, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Mann, Lewis Mumford, Lincoln Steffens, Thorstein Veblen, William Henry Chamberlin, Louis Untermeyer, and Suzanne La Follette, the more libertarian cousin of Senator Robert La Follette.
After
The Freeman, which had never turned a profit, ceased publication in 1924, Nock became a freelance journalist and a friend of essayist H. L. Mencken. He lived most of the rest of his life in New York City and Brussels.
In the mid-1920s, a small group of wealthy American admirers began funding Nock's work, allowing him to pursue a variety of projects. These included his first full-length book, a short biography of Thomas Jefferson, titled
Mr. Jefferson. In his 1932 books
On the Disadvantages of Being Educated and Other Essays and
Theory of Education in the United States Nock launched a scathing critique of modern government-run education.
In his 1936 article "Isaiah's Job", which appeared in the
Atlantic Monthly, Nock expressed his complete disillusionment with the idea of reforming the current system. Believing that it would be impossible to convince any large portion of the general population of the correct course and opposing any suggestion of a violent revolution, Nock instead argued that libertarians should focus on nurturing what he called "the Remnant". The Remnant, according to Nock, consisted of a small minority who understood the nature of the state and society, and who would become influential only after the current dangerous course had become thoroughly and obviously untenable, a situation which might not occur until far into the future. Nock's philosophy of the Remnant was influenced by the deep pessimism and elitism that social critic Ralph Adams Cram expressed in a 1932 essay, "Why We Do Not Behave Like Human Beings". Why We Do Not Behave Like Human Beings at alumnus.caltech.edu In his
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, Nock makes no secret that:
[My educators] did not pretend to believe that everyone is educable, for they knew, on the contrary, that very few are educable, very few indeed. They saw this as a fact of nature, like the fact that few are six feet tall. [...] They accepted the fact that there are practicable ranges of intellectual and spiritual experience which nature has opened to some and closed to others.
In 1941, Nock published a two part essay in the
Atlantic Monthly titled "The Jewish Problem in America". The article was part of a multi-author series, assembled by the editors in response to recent anti-Semitic unrest in Brooklyn and elsewhere "in the hope that a free and forthright debate will reduce the pressure, now dangerously high, and leave us with a healthier understanding of the human elements involved".
Nock's argument was that the Jews were an Oriental people, acceptable to the "intelligent Occidental" yet forever strangers to "the Occidental mass-man". Furthermore, the mass-man "is inclined to be more resentful of the Oriental as a competitor than of another Occidental"; the America masses are "the great rope and lamppost artists of the world"; and in studying Jewish history "one is struck with the fact that persecutions never have originated in an upper class movement". This innate hostility of the masses, he concluded, might be exploited by a scapegoating state to distract from "any shocks of an economic dislocation that may occur in the years ahead", concluding "If I keep up my family's record of longevity, I think it is not impossible that I shall live to see the Nuremberg laws reenacted in this country and enforced with vigor", and affirming that the consequences of such a pogrom "would be as appalling in their extent and magnitude as anything seen since the Middle Ages".
Despite this obvious dread of anti-Semitism, the article was itself declared anti-Semitic and Nock was never asked to write another, effectively ending his career as a social critic.
Against charges of anti-Semitism, Nock answered: "Someone asked me years ago if it were true that I disliked Jews, and I replied that it was certainly true, not at all because they are Jews but because they are folks, and I don't like folks." Albert Jay Nock,
Autobiography at www.cooperativeindividualism.org Joseph T. McKaharay,
Albert Jay Nock and the Jewish Problem at www.cooperativeindividualism.org A self-admitted recluse, such a response is but characteristic of Mr. Nock.
In 1943, two years before his death, Nock published his autobiography,
Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, the title of which expressed the degree of Nock's disillusionment and alienation from current social trends. After the publication of this autobiography, Nock became the sometime guest of oilman William F. Buckley, Sr., whose son, William F. Buckley, Jr., would later become a celebrated author.
Nock died of leukemia in 1945.
