Government is not society. The State is not a community. Political participation is not the same thing as self-government. Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, the State asks us to stop treating those ideas as interchangeable.
If you believe legitimate authority begins with the individual, Nock will feel less like an introduction and more like a provocation. He does not ask whether better people should administer the State. He asks whether the State is structurally different from society and whether its expansion necessarily comes at society’s expense.
Who Was Albert Jay Nock?
Nock was an Episcopal priest who left the ministry and became a journalist and social critic. He co-edited The Freeman in the early 1920s and influenced Frank Chodorov, Leonard Read, Murray Rothbard, and other figures in modern libertarian and anarchist thought.
The framework beneath Our Enemy, the State came largely from German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, who argued that wealth is acquired through two methods. The “economic means” involves production and voluntary exchange, while the “political means” involves force, confiscation, or legally protected privilege. Nock applied that distinction relentlessly to American government.
Why Government and Society Are Not the Same
For Nock, society is the realm of human cooperation. People create, trade, associate, solve problems, build institutions, and care for one another. The State produces no independent resources. It can use only what society gives it or what it compels society to surrender.
Nock argues that every expansion of State power produces a corresponding reduction in social power. When the State assumes a responsibility, people can lose both the authority and the habit of addressing that responsibility themselves.
That distinction is invaluable for anyone serious about self-government. It invites us to ask whether an institution depends on consent, whether people can refuse participation, whether competing alternatives are permitted, and whether the arrangement would survive without the threat of punishment.
Those questions apply to education, housing, money, health care, mutual aid, bodily freedom, community safety, and nearly every area in which people have been taught to wait for centralized permission.
The American History Nock Put on Trial
Nock believed colonial governments were not neutral institutions supervising an otherwise free commercial society. Rather, they were mechanisms through which politically connected commercial interests obtained privileges they couldn’t get through voluntary exchange: land grants, monopolies, protective legislation, favorable taxation and regulation, and restrictions on competitors.
He treats the American Revolution partly as a struggle over access to land, trade, and government favors. He praises the Articles of Confederation and portrays the Constitutional Convention as an elite centralizing project shaped by creditors, land speculators, and commercial interests.
Nock believed that the Marshall Court, the Civil War, the federal income tax, and the New Deal were stages in a continuous consolidation of power. Nock’s narrative makes the progression feel almost inevitable.
An independent reader should resist going down the above rabbit hole too quickly. Nock relied heavily on Charles Beard’s economic interpretation of the Constitution. Forrest McDonald later found no simple correlation between delegates’ financial holdings and voting behavior. Later quantitative research, however, identified economic patterns consistent with parts of Beard’s argument.
Nock’s history is therefore neither worthless nor settled. It highlights interests traditional civic mythology often minimizes. Thus, it should be read as a challenge to inherited history, not as replacement mythology that no longer needs examination.
What Anarchist Readers Can Take From Nock
Nock is strongest when he directs attention away from personalities and toward incentives. Politicians change, but institutions retain power. Agencies seek larger budgets. Emergency measures can become permanent. Businesses can use government to obtain privileges they could not secure through voluntary exchange.
This helps explain why replacing the people in office frequently leaves the machinery intact. If the structure rewards expansion, changing administrators may alter how power is exercised without changing where it resides.
Nock also offers a demanding definition of freedom. Self-government is not simply choosing who will govern you. It is developing the capacity to direct your life, form voluntary relationships, accept responsibility, and cooperate without requiring political authority to organize every human need.
What Self-Sovereign Readers Must Reject
Nock’s attack on centralized authority does not place his own assumptions beyond scrutiny.
His State-versus-society binary is sometimes too clean. Real institutions can contain coercion, consent, mutual benefit, and exploitation simultaneously. Infrastructure, collective defense, environmental spillovers, and dispute resolution create coordination problems that Nock diagnoses more effectively than he solves.
His elitism creates a deeper contradiction. In “Isaiah’s Job”, Nock divided humanity into “the Remnant,” a minority capable of understanding humane principles, and “the masses,” whom he described as intellectually and morally incapable. You cannot argue that people have the right to govern themselves while assuming most are inherently unworthy of doing so.
Nock’s antisemitism must also be confronted. In his 1941 Atlantic essays, “The Jewish Problem in America”, he used racialized claims about Jews and “Occidentals.” Anthropologist Ruth Benedict rejected his theorizing as unscientific, while other contemporaries condemned the essays as antisemitic.
Self-Government Requires More Than Opposition
Nock offers an incisive diagnosis, but not a practical roadmap. Opposition to the State is not yet self-government. Declaring yourself sovereign does not create the skills, institutions, relationships, or accountability that a freer society requires.
A self-governing culture must know how to resolve conflict, support vulnerable people, organize mutual aid, protect individual rights, and prevent new concentrations of private or public power. Otherwise, opposition becomes an identity rather than a lived alternative.
Read Our Enemy, the State slowly, with a pencil and an argument ready. Keep Nock’s distinction between the economic and political means. Use it to examine every institution claiming authority over your life. Then apply the same scrutiny to Nock.
That is the discipline self-sovereignty demands. A free mind does not merely question the State. It questions every thinker, movement, and doctrine that asks to take the State’s place inside it.
