Was Albert Jay Nock Like Socrates?

Many people criticize Albert Jay Nock for not being a man of action, but he couldn’t have been a man of action any more than Socrates could have drank the hemlock

If you spend any time reading about Albert Jay Nock, you quickly learn two things: (1) He was an intensely private man, perhaps the most private man in the history of the United States, battling with Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski for that top spot. (2) He thought his life and his ideas were superfluous to contemporary American society and thought.

Most people seem to accept the privacy part of Nock without too much objection. Who, after all, hasn’t similarly considered retreating from the modern world as much as possible, living in a cave, like Plato’s just man in a snowstorm?

But that second Nockian trait tends to grate. Nock, many people think, should have gotten involved more and was wrong to give up. They even accuse him of simply being lazy (which might be accurate . . . I have no opinion).

Perhaps the best example of this attitude comes from Jonah Goldberg’s 2009 tribute to Nock, “Mortal Remains: The wisdom and folly in Albert Jay Nock’s anti-statism.” In this otherwise-fine piece, Goldberg asserts that “Nock’s greatest mistake lay in his…