Our Enemy, The State

See, as I'm not interesting enough to do podcast thingies of my own opinions, and to try and get me out of the habit of dipping into a book rather than reading the whole work, I started reading to my computer whenever I picked up an interesting work on political-economy.  I don't know what the computer thinks of it all, but judging by the reaction from one author whose book I gave the treatment to recently, others seem to like it, and so I have today knocked off an audiobook version of Albert Jay Nock's "Our Enemy The State" (a .pdf file of the complete work).

Nock was a friend and follower of Henry George and quite a libertarian heavyweight in his day (he died in 1945); even Rothbard cited him as a big influence on him.  He and his friend Frank Chodorov were probably the last major libertarians who, in common with many libertarians and anarchists of the preceding nineteenth century (as well as the British Liberals till somewhat later), had viewed the special privileges attached to land ownership as one of the major nuts to crack in moving toward a fairer, freer society.

In "Our Enemy..." Nock distinguishes first "social power" from "State power", where "social power" is, as described by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the last sections of "What is Property?", all the (good, voluntary) associations and obligations that bind us to each other, and is constantly being predated upon by "State power".  The book is essentially a warning, somewhat in the same vein as Spencer's "The Man Versus the State" and Hayek's "Road to Serfdom", that this "State power" will take over so much of what had previously been the purview of "social power" to the extent that people will no longer have the will to do anything for themselves and will always look to the State to "do something" in any eventuality.

And he distinguishes also between "government" and "the State" after the fashion of Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, in which he sees "government" as something set up by mutual consent and only to secure the negative rights of "freedom and security" when the social power proves inadequate.  This leads him to an interesting "take" on the American Revolution.  The Declaration of Independence, upon which Paine's influence was clear and formalised by Thomas Jefferson, for whom Nock has a soft spot as more or less the one person in the revolutionary band who did understand the dangers of allowing "government" to become "State", was essentially ditched just as soon as it came into being. 

Whilst the ideals of "natural rights" and "individual sovereignty" were useful for galvanising everyone, of whatever class, against the British "common enemy", just as soon as the United States was founded, these groups naturally fractured and battled with each other for access to the exploitative power of the State.  The winners were those who had been top of the pile before the revolution, the land speculators and exploiters of others' labour who deliberately framed the Constitution to be as protectionist as possible as against Jefferson's idea of widely distributed individual sovereignty where the "highest" level of political organisation was to be the township level (not entirely dissimilar to the idea of "Cellular Democracy" about which I have blogged previously).

And it is this, he says, that has marked out the State as far back as history records: that the State is founded by conquest and confiscation; that it is always a vehicle of economic exploitation by one class over another.  Man will always seek to meet his needs with the least possible effort.  There are only two ways of meeting those needs: either by work and trade - the "Economic Means" and naturally involving the most effort; or by conquest and confiscation, and economic exploitation of others, in a word, robbery - the "Political Means" which, if you happen to have influence over the people who administer that State, is the easiest way, since it does not involve work for yourself, but feeding off the work of others through State granted privilege and protection.

The catalyst for the book is Franklin D. Roosevelt's accession to power in 1932 which accelerated the progress of the State power's predation over social power, in much the same way as Nock had observed had happened for forty years or more in Europe, and, by implication at least, had led to the great global threats of Fascism, "Hitlerism" as he called it, and state Communism, each of which had promised to be different from what had gone before in their respective countries, but which were just as centred on conquest of the access to the "Political Means" as any other State before them.

And, as we are in an election year here, it is worth noting Nock's view that essentially it doesn't matter who you vote for, at each stage in the State's advance over social power, the politicians tend to accept what has already been done (after all, it gives them, as actual or putative administrators of the State, all the more power) and will never truly roll back that State.  They are the State, or want to be; they are the very people who desire most to have access to the "Political Means"; how could they do otherwise?  That every appearance of the State's receding is actually in itself an exercise in State power - temporarily offering concessions in order to maintain a semblance of actually having the interests of the people at heart.

The book ends on a depressing note: Nock says he didn't write it in the hope of changing minds, or of fomenting any kind of change in direction; the State will only change when it collapses, having taken all power to itself and still found itself insatiable with no more to confiscate.

Feel free to download my Audiobook reading of "Our Enemy, The State" if you think you can bear my dulcet tones for the best part of four hours.

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Attachment	Size
01 Our Enemy The State.m4b	110.47 MB
01 Titles, acknowledgements and preface.mp3	3.74 MB
02 Part 1.mp3	21.84 MB
03 Part 2.mp3	17.33 MB
04 Part 3.mp3	23.93 MB
05 Part 4.mp3	24.07 MB
06 Part 5.mp3	20.53 MB
07 Part 6.mp3	14.41 MB
OurEnemyTheStateMP3s.zip	110.97 MB