Customer Reviews

Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

[...]
Nock understood a truth that is nearly unspeakable now, in the wake of the disastrous era of Big Government, that although the West in general pays great obeisance to the idea of Freedom, and America in particular is, at least theoretically, founded upon the primacy of the idea, most people (the mass-men) do not give a fig about it. And since in a democracy the masses will wield power, the prospects for the West appeared pretty bleak :

Considering mankind's indifference to freedom, their easy gullibility and their facile response to
conditioning, one might very plausibly argue that collectivism is the political mode best suited to
their disposition and their capacities. Under its regime the citizen, like the soldier, is relieved of the
burden of initiative and is divested of all responsibility, save for doing as he is told. He takes what
is allotted to him, obeys orders, and beyond that he has no care. Perhaps, then, this is as much as
the vast psychically-anthropoid majority are up to, and a status of permanent irresponsibility under
collectivism would be most congenial and satisfactory to them.

Given a just and generous administration of collectivism this might very well be so; but even on
that extremely large and dubious presumption the matter is academic, because of all political modes
a just and generous collectivism is in its nature the most impermanent. each new activity or
function that the State assumes means an enlargement of officialdom, an augmentation of
bureaucracy. In other words, it opens one more path of least resistance to incompetent,
unscrupulous and inferior persons whom Epstean's law has always at hand, intent only on satisfying
their needs and desires with the least possible exertion. Obviously the collectivist State, with its
assumption of universal control and regulation, opens more of these paths than any other political
mode; there is virtually no end of them. Hence, however just and generous an administration of
collectivism may be at the outset, and however fair its prospects may then be, it is immediately set
upon and honeycombed by hordes of the most venal and untrustworthy persons that Epstean's law
can rake together; and in virtually no time every one of the regime's innumerable bureaux and
departments is rotted to the core. In 1821, with truly remarkable foresight, Mr. Jefferson wrote in a
letter to Macon that 'our Government is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it
will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation first [i.e., centralisation] and then corruption, its
necessary consequence.'

It will of course be argued, with the perfection of twenty-twenty hindsight, that Nock (and Jefferson and Jefferson's other conservative heirs) overstated the case and fell pray to hysterics. We are after all in the midst (hopefully not at the end) of what has been a twenty year pause in the process of collectivization. The Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc crumbled under the weight of just the kind of corruption that Nock feared, and they proved much less capable of producing material goods than even Nock might have expected. Likewise, many of the Socialist countries of the West have had to turn to at least some level of reprivatization in order to prop up their Social Welfare systems and to revive their moribund economies. Here in the States, we managed to avoid the worst excesses, keeping Health Care at least partially out of the hands of government, and have taken some baby steps towards reprivatizing such programs as Welfare and Social Security. But the process has been uneven and victories have been only partial and have come only after fierce battle. One need only look at the debates over the Clinton Health Care Plan, Welfare Reform and Social Security Privatization to see how little regard the Left really has for Freedom, always preferring the "Security" of having Government do for us all.

But even if this pause in the march of Collectivization should prove to be of long-lasting duration, it should not be seen as a refutation of Nock's ideas, but as a tribute to them. For if Nock's arguments seem self-evident to us now, it is all too easy to forget how truly superfluous they seemed in 1943. Nock, who was writing before even Hayek's Road to Serfdom had been published, is one of the incredibly small group of men who kept alive the idea of freedom and who resisted the, at the time seemingly inevitable, force of collectivization. If his most dire predictions did not come true it is not solely because he overestimated the opposition, but because a powerful counterrevolution eventually rose up, structured around ideas like his, and it is in this regard that modern conservatism owes him a tremendous, almost completely unacknowledged, debt.

There is much more in this wonderful book and Nock explains himself much better than I have. He writes beautifully and with great humor. On nearly every page you'll find an idea or a turn of phrase that you'll want to pause and turn over in your mind. I can not recommend this book highly enough. I can't wait to read it again and everything else I can find by this least superfluous of men.

GRADE : A+

...and this was his crowning glory, instinct with the serene twilit retrospection of his final hour. It is a book, in the words of one critic, "too good to be true." And, in spite of its title, Albert Jay Nock's MEMOIRS OF A SUPERFLUOUS MAN bears only the faintest resemblance to the memoir genre to which we are now accustomed. The sublimely cultivated Nock (1870-1945), essayist, social critic, diarist, and biographer, was very likely the most supremely differentiated American literary personality of the first half of this century, and in his twilit retrospection Nock provides as intellectually moving a summa of his response to the character of his times as we have any right to expect. As we pass, via Nock's MEMOIRS, through the vanished world of his late-Victorian youth and classical education, and see through his eyes the deep tidal evolution of our countrymen away from their earlier rootedness in stout yeoman independence, and towards the accelerating conformity induced by the Faustian bargain we have struck with mass-market materialist democracy, dominated by the gangsterish brutality of the modern centralized state, we find to our unceasing delight that Nock has left untouched no significant dimension of life: manners, morals, religion, culture, literature, politics, history, marriage, and, toward the end, even death itself - each is thrown in turn into the sharpest and most surprising relief by a mind so accustomed to viewing all questions "sub specie aeternitatis" under the aspect of eternity), that no reader can come from even an initial absorption by this book without emerging with a view of the world forever cleansed and purified of everything not essential to living the humane life. And the learning which informs Nock's writing is a marvel unto itself: memoirs of the French Renaissance, the social life of Greek and Roman antiquity, the conversations of Goethe with Eckermann, centuries of theological debate, not to mention personal contact with many of the shrewdest and most worldly figures of his own time - all are pressed into service with a lightness of touch that our ponderously drilled battalions of Ph.D.'s can never hope to emulate. And the delicate, skeptical humor with which Nock relates every germane anecdote and reflection puts him light years above the grim ideological polemicists of our century, whose stock in trade is too often passed off as "serious" social criticism. Along with Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, John Jay Chapman (another neglected American genius whose works repay the inevitable absorption following astonished, belated discovery), and Finley Peter Dunne, Nock provides an indispensable chapter in what cultural historian Jacques Barzun has called "the great American tradition of the judicious eccentric." Be warned, though: after reading his MEMOIRS, you may find your cultural habits changed forever. You will never again feel the need to acquire an opinion of Tom Friedman's latest essay in best-selling globaloney so as not to be caught short at the next round of cocktail-party Book-of-the-Moment-Club "conversation." You will never again think of an Ivy League graduate or a Ph.D. on the one hand, and an educated mind on the other, as being in any way synonymous - even in theory. And you will never, even for a moment, confuse your daily NEW YORK TIMES habit with an instrument of mental cultivation - if, in fact, you retain it at all. And you may find yourself doubled over in helpless laughter the next time some Volvo-driving professional describes the programming on NPR as "serious intellectual radio." And you will leave your first astonished reading of Nock with a silent question, addressed to every teacher and writer to whom you have hitherto entrusted the fertilization of your mind: "Where (or why) have you been hiding Albert Jay Nock all my life?" Given the present level of the development of our race - somewhat more than animal, yet far less, psychically, than fully human - you won't be long in having a go at an answer. I envy anyone about to discover THE MEMOIRS OF A SUPERFLUOUS MAN, for its author may prove the transforming companion of a lifetime. We may close our debt of gratitude for the moment with the words of a long-ago editor of THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, Ellery Sedgwick, delivered upon Nock's death: "I love and respect his memory. Something unique has gone out of this world."

But even if this pause in the march of Collectivization should prove to be of long-lasting duration, it should not be seen as a refutation of Nock's ideas, but as a tribute to them. For if Nock's arguments seem self-evident to us now, it is all too easy to forget how truly superfluous they seemed in 1943. Nock, who was writing before even Hayek's Road to Serfdom had been published, is one of the incredibly small group of men who kept alive the idea of freedom and who resisted the, at the time seemingly inevitable, force of collectivization. If his most dire predictions did not come true it is not solely because he overestimated the opposition, but because a powerful counterrevolution eventually rose up, structured around ideas like his, and it is in this regard that modern conservatism owes him a tremendous, almost completely unacknowledged, debt.

A consummate stylist, essayist, biographer and critic Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945), in this his crowning work, surveys, from the twilit retrospection of Olympian old age, the tidal shift in American culture and politics over his lifetime from a republic of stout yeoman Jeffersonian democracy - to the now-familiar world of the total state and total war. Nock's vast learning and startling, eccentric insights into virtually every sphere of human endeavor make him seem a spirit from another world.

Albert J. Nock (1870-1945)lived when he thought many Americans and Europeans went "from civilization to decadence." He actually argued Americans went from barbarianism to decadence without passing through civilization. Nock live when peace, law-and-order, cosmopolitan communities, etc. were the norm. He saw Americans and Europeans become colletivized thoughtless men and women who lost the capacity to do serious reading, thinking, and writing.

These MEMOIRS began with Nock's childhood, early eduation, experience in boarding school, and college learning. Nock remembered when learing was more informal but much more authenic and thoughtful. Nock reflected on the fact that trash literature replaced The Great Books whose publishers had to fight for survival. Nock made the interesting observation that The Great Books re history, literature, philosophy, etc. were designed to impart wisdom and make men think. The trash literature only appealed to sensations and base tastes. Then there were the Uplifters who could not mind their own business and who wanted to engineer others to be like the Uplifters, and bad literature relected this trend. Fortunately for Nock, he had access to good books and enough men and women who could relate to these books.

Nock had harsh words for politics or what he called ecnonomism. He carefully diagnosed that the entry of the US into the Spanish-American War clearly showed that absolutism can flourish as well under republicanism as under atuocracy. He saw the trend to what he called "Statism" whereby people exist for the State which Nock thought was opposed to a peaceful society of free men and women. Nock noted William Penn's remark (1644-1718) that"... there is hardly a system so ill designed that in good hands it would so well enough" In other words, the government under mass men can be dangerous and lethel as so many political figures are scoundrels and criminals. Nock's examples from Ancient History include Socrates (470 BC-399 BC)and Christ who both were victims of mass men. Nock cited a comment of a friend who said self-preservation was the first law of human conduct and exploitation was the second. Nock recognized that these are the basic human instincts which caused men and women to be numb to civilized behavior. Nock was angered by two older women celbrating battle field deaths, but he realized that these two "harpies" were too brain dead to have sense of decency and respect. Nock carefully that mass men longer respected life nor respected the dignity of death. Economism had taken hold at the loss of self respect and good sense.

Nock also made some interesting observations re the end of W.W.I. During the negotiations at Versailles (1919), Nock said he only respected Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929)because Clemenceau was the only self admitted brigand and looter who did not cater to the pious slogans and frauds which mass men were foolish enough to believe. As an aside, the undersigned was surprised that Nock was not prosecuted for his oppoistion to WW I and the frauds hoisted the American people. As Nock reflected, the Americans and Europeans believed in Progress and Uplift by annhilation of careful studies of history and wisdom of over 3,000 years of the History of Western Civilization.

Nock had harsh words for media editors and writers. The gurus refused to use knowledge, rason and logic in appealing to the mob. They simply catered to feat and hatred which they knew they could promote to line their pockets. Nock used Socrates and Christ as useless men. Socrates and Christ were of no use to the powers-that-be and were such an embarrassment that Socrates was poisoned, and Christ was crudified.

Nock warned that mass men's greed and economism were so predatory and destructive that they might eliminate the human race and leaving God to make a new Creation. Nock respected and agreed with peace advocates, but he refused involvement because he thought such efforts were doomed to failure. Time has thus far proved him right.

Nock wrote a thoughtful book. This reviewer thought Nock appeared too snobbish, but Nock showed little rancor or anger. The undersigned thought the book was too pessimistic, but then little has changed since the book was published (1943), and the social, economic, and political malaise leaves one with little hope. The publishers could have improved the book by adding an index. This book is cause for serious thought, a good introduction to historical and literary studies, and the comments of a mostly self-educated man.

James E. Egolf

May 29,2011

Alber J. Nock delivers Memoirs of a Superfluous Man with detachment, wit, and humor like no one else I have read.

Mr. Nock discusses his early life in a cultural melting pot, his first and later impressions of politics, views on eduacation including a criticism of universal literacy, his work with an independent newspaper, and his hopes and doubts for the future. Mr. Nock's major themes are for liberal arts style education and decentralized government.

Many of his insights are great, some debateable, but agree or disagree they are quite interesting, and the prose with which they are written make this book a pleasure to read.

I highly recommend this book.

Alber J. Nock delivers Memoirs of a Superfluous Man with detachment, wit, and humor like no one else I have read.

Though written as an autobiography, it deals less with happenings and more with ideas. It is an autobiography of thought.

Mr. Nock discusses his early life in a cultural melting pot, his first and later impressions of politics, views on eduacation including a criticism of universal literacy, his work with an independent newspaper, and his hopes and doubts for the future. Mr. Nock's major themes are for liberal arts style education and decentralized government.

Though a few ideas may be debateable, they are quite interesting, and the prose with which they are written make this book a pleasure to read.

I highly recommend this book.

...under the other (out-of-print, alas) listings for this same title, listed under the author's full name, Albert Jay Nock.

On the surface, MEMOIRS OF SUPERFLUOUS MAN, is an often charming, occasionally misanthropic remembrance of a vanished America by a self-admitted nearly vanished American type. Deploying a literary strategy similar to Henry Adams' THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS, Nock identifies himself, his beliefs, his elite classical education as superfluous in modern day America (circa 1900 to 1943). But the crucial difference between Nock and Adams is how they qualify themselves as superfluous. Adams is a man of subtle and ironic self-awarness who recognizes that he and the elite class he belongs to has apparently outlived its time, certainly its usefulness. That his family's his long chain of service has come to an end with him, suddenly snapped against a new America where the new men of power (such as his once good friend Teddy Roosevelt who turned his back on his class and remade himself as a man of the people), is deftly, self-effacingly and ironically told, and often contains real pathos. The same cannot be said of Nock's version of superfluity.

Though he attempts to use the sophisicated distancing techniques of Adams, Nock only manages to appear inveterately opposed to everything that might upset his elitist equlibrium. Through the lens of his classical education, Nock sees mankind as unchanging, steeped in sin, a species whose small attempts at building effective governments are destined to end in futility and folly. Where Adams sees that those in power in his time have lost their ardor for and dedication to the ideals of the revolutionary era implicitly criticizing the new technocratic class in government and business for its bloodless utilitarian and pecuniary values, Nock criticizes all modern liberal governments, and anything remotely else remotely Lockean. He absents himself from the social and political movements of his time, such as the women's movement, scorning its outcome as all too predetermined -- since the disruptive liberal ethos demands equality no matter how violently it rents the social fabric, there was nothing to be done for Nock but watch it happen with a certain measure of glee. Nock is as elliptical and implict as Adams, but where Adams employs the technique to chide society (and himself), what Nock leaves unstated is his hatred for liberalism. He leaves unstated his belief, for instance, that the social fabric that had held women so securely in their place for so long -- that conservative and sensible fabric mystically woven over the course of time -- should remain intact because it always had, and thus always should. Interestingly, like other intellectuals of his time and Adams and James before him, Nock fled the new pecuniary America. But unlike other intellectuals of his time who fled to Europe because it seemed to offer them a more humane and more traditional culture as a potential corrective to the grasping, greedy money culture of the second industrial revolution, Nock apparently fled America because he wanted to hobnob with the European artistocracy, no matter how faded and tattered it had become.

MEMOIRS OF A SUPERFLUOUS MAN has become one of the early canonical works of the neoconservative movement. It has all the earmarks of the Straussians -- the hatred of liberalism, the belief that only a few can be trusted with the disturbing truths of philosophy and that this elect should be entrusted with the political leadership by dint of this hard won wisdom. Nock also displays the parternalistic populism of the neocons as he waxes poetic about the common lumberjacks he lived with as a boy when his father took the family from Brooklyn to Michigan to head up a lumber operation. He portrays these commoners as hardy Americans untouched by the evils of cosmopolitan liberalism, brilliant and unspoiled, rugged individualists all. In a particularly vivid sketch, he describes a musical evening where these common men of toil sang better than any professional chorus he had ever heard. What he leaves unstated here is the neocon belief that the common run of mankind should be made content with entertainments and religions fashioned and promulgated by the elect to keep the commoners happy in their ignorance of the true nature of the world.

Nock asks his readers to accept that he knows the true nature of the world. Like most conservative arguments, it is the argument from authority, a form of argument which refuses to engage in the hurly burly of real debate. And that is why ultimately, Nock comes off as as dry and passionless as the technocrats he and Adams abhor.