“No one can approach to an understanding of the English institutions, or of others, which, being the growth of many centuries, exercise a wide sway over mixed populations, unless he divide them into two classes. In such constitutions there are two parts (not indeed separable with microscopic accuracy, for the genius of great affairs abhors nicety of division): first, those which excite and preserve the reverence of the population — the dignified parts, if I may so call them; and next, the efficient parts — those by which it, in fact, works and rules. There are two great objects which every constitution must attain to be successful, which every old and celebrated one must have wonderfully achieved: every constitution must first gain authority, and then use authority; it must first win the loyalty and confidence of mankind, and then employ that homage in the work of government.” (Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution)

“An’ there ye ar-re. Th’ times has changed, an’ th’ kings lives in th’ sthreet with th’ rest iv us. It ‘ll be th’ death iv thim. No wan respects annybody they know. To be a king an’ get away with it, a man must keep out iv sight. Th’ minyit people know that a king talks like other people, that he has th’ same kind iv aches that we have, that his head is bald, that his back teeth are filled, that he dhrinks too much, that him an’ his wife don’t get along, an’ that whin they quarrel they don’t make a reg’lar declaration iv war, but jaw at each other like Mullarky an’ his spouse, their subjicks say: ‘Why, this here fellow is no betther thin th’ rest iv us. How comes he to have so good a job? Down with him?’ An’ down he comes.” (Dissertations by Mr. Dooley)

“Over forty years ago, a colleague and I drew up a plan by which his department, which was English and Comparative Literature, and mine, which was History would encourage Ph.D. candidates to offer as their dissertation the edition of an important work that was out of print, or in print but in need of editing. The plan was coupled with a proposal to the university press for the publication of these books, some possibly in paperback for class use. We were turned down, of course, on all sides, with indulgent smiles at our youthful idiocy. And being young, we gave up. We should have kept at it. The press came to favor the idea, but by then my colleague had retired, and I, being chief academic officer of the university, had no right to entertain or push ideas for academic use.” (Jacques Barzun, The Bibliophile of the Future, 1976)

“Who can behold the fanatical animation of Homenas, as he apostrophizes the sacred decretals, without being aware of the essential temperament that comes out in the hundred-and-one manifestations of philosophical absolutism that are forever rife among us?”

‘When, ha! when [cries Homenas] shall this special gift of grace be bestowed on mankind, as to lay aside all other studies and concerns, to use you, to peruse you, to understand you, to know you by heart, to practice you, to incorporate you, to turn you into blood and incentre you into the deepest ventricles of their brains, the inmost marrow of their bones, the most intricate labyrinth of their arteries? Then, ha! then, and no sooner than then, nor otherwise than thus, shall the world be happy… Then, ha! then, no hail, frost, ice, snow, overflowing, or vis major; then, plenty of all earthly goods here below. Then, uninterrupted and eternal peace through the universe, an end of all wars, plunderings, drudgeries, robbing, assassinates (unless it be to destroy those cursed rebels, the heretics). Oh then, rejoicing, cheerfulness, jollity, solace, sports and delicious pleasures, over the face of the earth. Oh, what great learning, inestimable erudition and godlike precepts are knit, linked, rivetted and morticed in the divine chapters of these eternal decretals! Oh how wonderfully, if you read but one demi-canon, short paragraph, or single observation of these sacrosanct decretals — how wonderfully, I say, do you not perceive to kindle in your heart a furnace of divine love, charity towards your neighbour (provided he be no heretic), bold contempt of all casual and sublunary things, firm content in all your affections, and ecstatic elevation of soul even to the third heaven!’

“Might this not be the doctrinaire Marxian speaking, with a volume of Das Kapital in his hand; might it not be the doctrinaire free-trader, protectionist, prohibitionist, single-taxer; might it not be Mr. Henry Ford or Mr. Hoover, apostrophizing the doctrine of mass-production, and holding aloft the blue-prints and specifications of a completely industrialized society? ‘Then, ha! then, and no sooner than then, nor otherwise than thus, shall the world be happy’ — those words invariably recall us to ourselves, they bear us instantly across the field of every ephemeral, petty, and importunate absolutism, and give us a reviving vision of the victorious stretch of humanity that lies beyond it in an immeasurable future.” (Albert Jay Nock and C. R. Wilson, Francis Rabelais: The Man and His work, 1929)

“Speaking generally, American university-trustees and presidents regard buildings, endowments and student-population as the important thing, while on the Continent the professors are regarded as the important thing. A visiting German pundit the other day remarked this difference rather naively. ‘When Germans come to America’, he said, ‘you show them all over your buildings. When Americans visit our institutions, we introduce them to our professors’. We talked this over for quite a while, and decided that the Continental authorities had the common-sense view. After all, you can teach in a tent or a barn to as good purpose as in a palace, if you have the right kind of student-material and are the right kind of teacher; and failing these conditions, a palace is no help — you and your students are all dressed up, with nowhere to go, and hence nothing happens. Trustees and presidents who have a good eye for buildings, moreover, have a notoriously poor eye for men, and the Continental is right in seeing that men are all that count, for education is something that is communicated only by contagion, like measles. If you wish to catch measles, you have to go where measles is, maybe in a palace, maybe in a hovel, no matter — you’ll get it. But if there is nobody around who has measles, you won’t get it, palace or no palace, hovel or no hovel.” (Albert Jay Nock, A Journey into Rabelais’s France, 1934)

Available at: https://iwpbooks.me/books.

• Rabelais: The Man and His Work, 1929
• The Theory of Education in the United States, 1932
• A Journey Into Rabelais’s France, 1934
• A Journal of These Days, 1934
• Free Speech and Plain Language, 1937
• Henry George: An Essay, 1939
• Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, 1943
• Journal of Forgotten Days, 1948
• Letters from Albert Jay Nock, 1949

“7 December — Considered as a process, culture consists in an intensive learning and an intensive forgetting. Thus when a smart little Jewish boy from the East Side, or an alfalfa-fed girl from the great open spaces, comes to the college or university in search of culture, one should say, ‘Youngster, it is an affair of many years, many things, and much labour. You must learn much, and forget much, and the forgetting is as important as the learning’. Considered as a possession, culture might be described as the residuum left by a diligently forgotten learning. For example, someone tells you that Plato said so-and-so. You say, ‘I think not. What I have read of Plato and forgotten, and also of a great many other authors, likewise forgotten, has left the residual impression that Plato was extremely unlikely to have said anything of the kind’. Then you look it up, and find that you are right. But what would our modern schools think of a person who had this notion of culture? Oxford expresses somewhat this notion in a practical way, or did once express it, and therein largely lay the greatness of Oxford. I could never reconcile myself to the idea that the scientific school had any proper place in a university. A university implies faculties, and the function of a faculty is not the dissemination of useful knowledge, but the curatorship of useless knowledge; the kind of knowledge that, properly acquired and properly forgotten, leaves the residuum of culture. I have even had doubts about the position of the Faculty of Medicine in the traditional four faculties. I can see how it came to be included, and why in a sense it should be included still. Formerly it did not do much with the science of medicine, but mostly with its history and literature; and this was all very good, quite what a Faculty of Medicine should be doing now. For example, the Faculty of Medicine at Johns Hopkins ought not to be dealing out useful knowledge to medical students. Let a medical school do that. It ought to be winnowing and conserving the vast body of useless knowledge that has grown up around the profession. In short, it ought not to be making practitioners; it ought to be making practitioners like Pancoast and William Osler. Similarly, the Faculty of Law ought not to aim at turning out lawyers, but at turning out lawyers like Coleridge, Lord Penzance, or James Coolidge Carter. That seems to have been the more or less conscious aim of the medieval faculty; at least, its curriculum tended that way. Let us have all the science there is, let us have all the useful knowledge there is, but let us have them from the scientific schools, and leave the colleges and the universities free to employ themselves upon the enormous resources of useless knowledge, which are of such incalculable value, and are now so completely neglected that one could make out a pretty good case for the thesis that the world is perishing of inattention to the discipline of useless knowledge.” (Albert Jay Nock, A Journal of These Days, 1934)

“7 September — The worst thing I see about life at the present time is that whereas the ability to think has to be cultivated by practice, like the ability to dance or to play the violin, everything is against that practice. Speed is against it, commercial amusements, noise, the pressure of mechanical diversions, reading-habits, even studies, are all against it. Hence a whole race is being bred without the power to think, or even the disposition to think, and one can not wonder that public opinion, qua opinion, does not exist.” (Albert Jay Nock, A Journal of These Days, 1934)

“19 June — The day of the liberal and the constitutionalist seems to be over, and it is high time. The war made hay of liberalism, and our Constitution has been so consistently clapperclawed into the service of base purposes that popular superstition about its sanctity has evaporated. The political liberal is the most dangerous person in the world to be entrusted with power, for no one knows what he will do with it; and the worst of him is, that whatever he does, he will persuade himself that it was the divinely-appointed thing to be done, e.g., Mr. Wilson at the Peace Conference. The old-style, hard-baked Tory had character; you knew where he was; also you knew there were some things he would not do and could not be persuaded to do. The liberal has no character, only stubbornness; and there is nothing he will not do. Of all the crew of crooks that were herded at Versailles, the only one I had a grain of respect for was old Clémenceau. You could do business with Clémenceau; he was out for everything in sight, and made no bones of saying so. He also seemed to take a grim delight in showing up the shuffling piosities of his accomplices. I have known many political liberals in my lifetime, some very highly placed, and there is none of them whom I would willingly see again, either in this world or in the next.”

“20 June — I spent an hour yesterday in the Sunday crowd on Narragansett Pier beach, formerly a resort of the social elect, in the days when transportation was slow and costly. Now it is a sort of Coney Island for all of Providence, Pawtucket, etc., who can coax a decrepit automobile to carry them that far. On principle, I am glad of the change; the old régime had little to recommend it but its amenities, which were mostly superficial enough, but agreeable to share. The crowd that descends on Narragansett now is dreadful. Of all the masses of mankind, I think, the most ignoble and repulsive is the mass of the small bourgeois. In their progress from the proletariat they have left its solid virtues behind them, and carried with them nothing but its rapacity and hideousness; nor have they taken on anything from the upper bourgeois but his narrowness, timidity, and an exaggeration of his petty conventions. Mr. Jefferson says that some of his diplomatic colleagues ‘had learned nothing of diplomacy but its suspicions’. These people are like that, and they are almost all the people we have. More completely now than when Matthew Arnold said it, we are like England ‘with the Barbarians left out, and the Populace nearly so’.” (Albert Jay Nock, A Journal of These Days, 1934)

“Ward was a first-class critic of society; and he has lived for a century by precisely the same power that gave a more robust longevity to Cervantes and Rabelais. He is no Rabelais or Cervantes, doubtless; no one would pretend that he is; but he is eminently of their glorious company. Certainly Keats was no Shakespeare, but as Matthew Arnold excellently said of him, he is with Shakespeare; to his own degree he lives by grace of a classic quality which he shares with Shakespeare; and so also is Ward with Rabelais and Cervantes by grace of his power of criticism. Let us look into this a little, for the sake of making clear the purpose for which this book is issued. I have already said that Ward has become a special property, and that he can never again be a popular property, at least until the coming of that millennial time when most of our present dreams of human perfectability are realized. I have no wish to discourage my publishers, but in fairness I have had to remind them that this delectable day seems still, for one reason or another, to be quite a long way off, and that meanwhile they should not put any very extravagant expectations upon the sale of this volume, but content themselves as best they may with the consciousness that they are serving a vital interest, really the ultimate interest, of the saving Remnant. Ward is the property of an order of persons — for order is the proper word, rather than class or group, since they are found quite unassociated in any formal way, living singly or nearly so, and more or less as aliens, in all classes of our society — an order which I have characterized by using the term intelligence. If I may substitute the German word Intelligenz, it will be seen at once that I have no idea of drawing any supercilious discrimination as between, say, the clever and the stupid, or the educated and the uneducated. Intelligenz is the power invariably, in Plato’s phrase, to see things as they are, to survey them and one’s own relations to them with objective disinterestedness, and to apply one’s consciousness to them simply and directly, letting it take its own way over them uncharted by prepossession, unchanneled by prejudice, and above all uncontrolled by routine and formula. Those who have this power are everywhere; everywhere they are not so much resisting as quietly eluding and disregarding all social pressure which tends to mechanize their processes of observation and thought. Rabelais’s first words are words of jovial address, under a ribald figure, to just this order of persons to which he knew he would forever belong, an order characterized by Intelligenz; and it is to just this order that Ward belongs.” (Albert Jay Nock, 1924, Artemus Ward)

“Rabelais is for the common man who hardly has it in him to be either sage or saint, but who wishes to learn something about the difficult and interesting art of living. It is through association with the spirit of Rabelais that one’s equanimity becomes suffused with joy, and thus is turned into a true and energizing superiority; thus it is that one makes progress in pantagruelism, ‘a certain jollity of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortune’. M. Faguet defines Rabelais’s temper as that of ‘a gay stoicism’, which seems to us rather a dubious term. Superiority — that is the right word — a gay, joyous, wise, imaginative, tolerant superiority. This is a communicable quality, even contagious, and in keeping one’s spirit continually exposed to its contagion, one finds that much of the fine art of living manages somehow to get itself learned. For in his estimate of the values of life, Rabelais is indeed wholly with the sages and the saints; it is only in method that he is not with them. He does not recommend the humane life; he exhibits it, and lets it recommend itself. He does not denounce the triviality and hollowness of what for most men are master-concerns — riches, place, power, and the profound sophistications of character incident to their pursuit — no, all this again, he simply exhibits. There is nothing of the hortatory or pulpit style in his moralities, and they are all the more effective for its absence. Empty and rotten and trifling! says Marcus Aurelius of the common master-concerns of life; and those who are engaged with them are like ‘little dogs biting one another, and little children quarrelling, laughing, and then straightway weeping’. Yes, one assents to that, but one must have a touch of the sage or saint in oneself to be really energized by it. ‘The fashion of this world passeth away’, said Goethe, ‘and I would fain occupy myself with the things that are abiding’. Well, we all feel like that, sometimes at least; but the common sort of man is not really much moved by declamation of this kind, impressive as it is. Even the majestic sentence carved on the tomb of one of the Scipios, Qui apicem gessisti, mors perfecit tua ut essent omnia brevia, honos fama virtusque, glories atque ingenium — even this is profoundly melancholy in its majesty, melancholy and relaxing. Rabelais is dynamogenous and illuminating; he lights up the humane life with the light of great joy, so that it shows itself as something lovely and infinitely desirable, by the side of which all other attainments fall automatically into their proper place as cheap, poor, and trivial. One closes with it gladly, joyfully, perceiving that for the sake of it all else that is lost is well lost.” (Albert Jay Nock, 1929, Rabelais: The Man and His Work)