"When people say 'let's do something about it,' they mean 'let's get hold of the political machinery so that we can do something to somebody else.' And that somebody is invariably you." -- Frank Chodorov
Frank Chodorov (February 15, 1887 - 1966) was an American member of the Old Right, a group of libertarian and conservative thinkers who were non-interventionist in foreign policy (opposing American entry into World War II) and anti–New Deal.
"All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates.""The pertinent question: if Americans did not want these wars should they have been compelled to fight them?""The State acquires power... and because of its insatiable lust for power it is incapable of giving up any of it. The State never abdicates."
Chodorov was born Fishel Chodorowsky on the Lower West Side of New York in 1887, the eleventh child of Russian immigrants. He graduated from Columbia University in 1907, then worked at a number of jobs around the country. While working in Chicago (1912-17), he read Henry George's Progress and Poverty. Chodorov wrote that he "read the book several times, and each time I felt myself slipping into a cause." According to Chodorov:
In 1937, Chodorov became director of the Henry George School of Social Science in New York. There he established (with Will Lissner) and edited a school paper, The Freeman. It published articles by Albert Jay Nock (founder of an earlier journal also called The Freeman), as well as such leading figures of the day as John Dewey, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Lincoln Steffens and Thorsten Veblen. Chodorov used the magazine to express his anti-war views:
With the coming of World War II such views were no longer tolerated: Chodorov was ousted from the school in 1942. "[I]tseemed to me then that the only thing for me to do was to blow my brains out," wrote Chodorov, "which I might have done if I had not had Albert Jay Nock by my side." Nock had weathered similar "war fever" during World War I when, as editor of the antiwar journal The Nation, he had seen that magazine banned from the U.S. mails by the Wilson administration.
Chodorov published articles in a variety of magazines, including H.L. Mencken's American Mercury, the Saturday Evening Post and Scribner's. In 1944, he launched a four-page monthly broadsheet called analysis, described as "an individualistic publication...the only one of its kind in America." Murray Rothbard called it "one of the best, though undoubtedly the most neglected, of the 'little magazines' that has ever been published in the United States." Along with Nock's works, Chodorov was influenced by Franz Oppenheimer's The State: "[B]etween the state and the individual there is always a tug-of-war," wrote Chodorov, "whatever power one acquires must be to the detriment of the other." Attracting a modest subscriber base, the magazine merged with the conservative weekly Human Events in 1951, where Chodorov became an associate editor.
In 1954, Chodorov again became editor of The Freeman, in its new incarnation, revived under the auspices of Foundation for Economic Education. He engaged with William F. Buckley and Willi Schlamm on the question of whether individualists should support interventionism to aid people resisting Communist aggression. Chodorov continued to advocate non-intervention, but as the Cold War continued, he lost influence: the American conservative movement came to be a bastion of interventionist foreign policy in combating Soviet expansionism.
In 1953, Chodorov founded the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), with William F. Buckley, Jr. as president, becoming the first national conservative student organization, reaching 50,000 members by the end of the century. In later years, ISI became extremely influential as a clearinghouse of conservative publications and as a locus of the conservative intellectual movement in America. It later evolved into the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
Chodorov was a major influence on many of those who would go on to lead the libertarian and conservative movements, including Buckley, M. Stanton Evans, Murray Rothbard, Edmund A. Opitz, and James J. Martin. Rothbard, an economist, wrote:
A secular Jew, Chodorov returned to belief in Judaism in later years.
