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Taking his inspiration from those Russians who seemed superfluous to their autocratic nineteenth-century society and sought inspiration in the private sphere, even to the point of writing largely for their desk drawers, Nock made the essential point: ransack the past for your values, establish a coherent worldview, depend neither on society nor on government insofar as circumstances permitted, keep your tastes simple and inexpensive, and do what you have to do to remain true to yourself. He borrowed from ancient Greece, Thomas Jefferson, Matthew Arnold, and especially from Rabelais, but not from banks. He voted for Marcus Aurelius and Charles Dickens, but not for Franklin D. Roosevelt. He felt that as far as society was concerned, he was superfluous; no one had the slightest use for the intellectual goods he had to offer. He felt society on the whole superfluous to his needs. It wallowed in materialist values, intellectually irresponsible hypotheses, and political nostrums. Vote for Voltaire: cultivate your garden and allow democratic citizens to go to hell in ways best suited to themselves.
-Robert M. Crunden, The Superflous Men (1977, 1999)
ALBERT JAY NOCK (1870-1945) was never a household name even in his own lifetime but his memory has been kept green in the half century since his death. His Mr. Jefferson (1926), Our Enemy, The State (1935), and Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943) have never been long out of print. In 1991 Jacques Barzun wrote about the double pleasure of reading Nock "for what he says and for the way he says it." Nock's work was "social and intellectual criticism at its best" and Barzun wrote optimistically that he "will surely climb in due course to his proper place in the American pantheon." Charles Hamilton noted that Nock "contributed some powerful and lasting criticism of the state of humane life in America." Nock was not a voluminous writer, wrote his friend, Frank Chodorov, but "had a rare gift of editing his ideas so that he wrote only when he had something to say and he said it with dispatch." Hendrik Willem van Loon exclaimed that Nock was "possessed of a rare genius for the handling of words." And finally, H. L. Mencken, no slouch himself as a prose stylist, declared that Nock...