Anarchism, which holds the state intrinsically inhumane, has an individualist right as well as anarcho-syndicalist left. The left has enjoyed more press; the right, more cultural influence.

Thus, the radical individualist Albert Jay Nock’s prose style and ideas still influence American paleo-conservatism. He appeared in New York in 1910 at 40, as a staff writer for American Magazine. Genial yet astonishingly private throughout his adult life, Nock revealed himself when he described Thomas Jefferson as “the most approachable and the most impenetrable of men, easy and delightful of acquaintance, impossible of knowledge.” Professional colleagues believed he could be contacted outside the office only by leaving a note under a certain rock in Central Park. And his autobiography, “Memoirs of a Superfluous Man,” discloses neither the date of his birth nor his parents’ names, his college nor his 12 years as an Episcopal priest, his failed marriage nor his minor-league baseball career.

Nock was largely self-taught before beginning formal classical studies at 14. He graduated from St. Stephen’s College (now Bard), supposedly among “the last in America to stick by the grand old fortifying classical curriculum,” knowing nothing of the natural sciences since Pliny or any history since 1500. Yet he felt prepared for living, his mind unencumbered by a “lumber of prepossession or formula.”

Nock abandoned both priesthood and wife for journalism in 1909.After working for various magazines, he organized the Freeman, which appeared in 1920.

Nock believed an editor’s job “is to do nothing,” and an editor “can’t set about it too soon or stick to it too faithfully.” Instead of giving orders, assigning subjects, or setting general policy, he sought out talent: writers (1) with a definite point of view, (2) stated clearly, (3) using “eighteen carat, impeccable, idiomatic English.” He told one would-be contributor, “[W]rite us a nice piece on the irremissibility of post-baptismal sin, and if you can put it over those three jumps, you will see it in print. Or if you would rather do something on a national policy of strangling all the girl-babies at birth, you might do that – glad to have it.”

The result was a magazine as brilliant as Harold Ross’s New Yorker or Frank Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair. But success became a bore, and he folded the magazine with the issue of March 4, 1924.

In 1926, critics found his biographical study of Jefferson “sparkling, charming, witty, and all the other adjectives inevitably called forth by Nock’s inimitable prose style.” Six years later, he published “The Theory of Education” in the United States, a book that distinguished education – a preparation for living, to see things as they are – from training. Few are educable; all can be trained. Certain intellectual and spiritual experiences are open to some and not to others.

That foreshadowed Nock’s ideological shift, inspired by the architect Ralph Adams Cram’s 1932 essay “Why We Do Not Behave Like Human Beings.” Cram argued most men did not behave like human beings because they were not human, merely Neolithic barbarians with delusions of grandeur. The distinction between the mob and the few who were truly human was greater than that between the mob and certain higher anthropoids.

Nock soon professed his new faith, writing: “The mass-men who are princes, presidents, politicians, legislators, can no more transcend their psychical capacities than any wolf, fox, or polecat in the land.” It informs “Our Enemy, the State”(1935),which holds the state antisocial, commandeered by one group or another of “mass-men” to legalize their theft of the product of others’ work. Liberal reforms such as the income tax merely enhance state power for further exploitation, and revolutions merely reapportion “the use of the political means” to exploit. If “Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so many trade names for collectivist Statism,” Nock asked, why should one think more of Roosevelt than of Hitler?

By 1941 such facile elitism had led to his Atlantic Monthly article, “The Jewish Question in America.” In that respectable venue, in elegantly polished prose and serenely analytical tones, Nock argued that, having failed to know their place, the Jews should be excluded from American society. That was shocking even then, and thereafter Nock’s articles appeared largely in outlets such as Scribner’s Commentator, which blended general essays with fascist apologia, and the Review of Books, which resolutely opposed the American war effort after Pearl Harbor.

Nonetheless, Harper Brothers published his “Memoirs of a Superfluous Man” to wide praise in 1943. Clifton Fadiman wrote: “I have not since the days of the early Mencken read a more eloquently written blast against democracy or enjoyed more fully a display of crusted prejudice.” Crusted, indeed: Nock held the three most degrading occupations were, in order, holding office in a modern republic; editing an American newspaper, and either pimping or managing a whorehouse.

He died unreconciled in 1945.