“It must be laid down once and for all, that the chief purpose of reading a classic like Rabelais is to prop and stay the spirit, especially in its moments of weakness and enervation, against the stress of life, to elevate it above the reach of commonplace annoyances and degradations, and to purge it of despondency and cynicism. He is to be read as Homer, Sophocles, the English Bible, are to be read. Felix ille, as Erasmus said of the Bible, felix ille quem in hisce litteris meditantem mors occupat. The current aspect of our planet, and the performances upon it, are not always encouraging, and one therefore turns with unspeakable gratitude to those who themselves have been able to contemplate them with equanimity, and are able to help others do so. In their writings one sees how the main preoccupations, ambitions, and interests of mankind appear when regarded ‘in the view of eternity’, and one is insensibly led to make that view one’s own. Thus Rabelais is one of the half-dozen writers whose spirit in a conspicuous way pervades and refreshes one’s being, tempers, steadies, and sweetens it, so that one lays the book aside conscious of a new will to live up to the best of one’s capacity, and a clearer apprehension of what that best may be. An unexampled power to render just this service is what has made the English Bible the book of books to all sorts and conditions of men, even when most ignorantly and unintelligently used. It is what, too, will unfailingly bring men back to the Bible after however long and justifiable exasperation with its misuse has kept them away from it; and so, will it bring men back, after long misapprehension, misuse, or neglect, to other literature which in its degree has the same power.” (Albert Jay Nock, 1929, Rabelais: The Man and His Work)

“When Rabelais was born, printing and paper-making had been in force for fifty years, but their evolution had been slow; they had but lately got on their feet as commercial undertakings. When they did so, however, the production of books started up at great speed in all the countries of Western Europe almost simultaneously. Any one who is fifty years old can make a comparison, though a very weak and imperfect one, with the development of the means of transportation and communication in his own lifetime. As a boy, Rabelais saw probably very few books, but by the time he was thirty, they were relatively quite abundant; and naturally, the dissemination of books immensely facilitated and promoted the study of Greek and Roman literature, which had long been in fashion. All this literature, however, had previously been available only in manuscripts, mostly the treasure of kings, popes, and monasteries. Instruction in it was given from these manuscripts orally, supplemented by the pupils’ handwriting. We have a survival of that practice in the name ‘lecture-system’, which is still commonly given to this method of teaching. But by the first quarter of the sixteenth century, books became a property of the bourgeois, as well as of the nobility and of the monasteries, and even students of the poorer sort might hope to possess a book or two of their own.

“The revival of Greek and Latin studies, which was the main expression of the spiritual life of the sixteenth century, goes by the appropriate though recently coined name of ‘humanism’. These literatures gave the longest, most complete, and most nearly continuous record available of everything that the human mind had ever been busy about, in all departments of its activity. They exhibited ‘the best that had been thought and said in the world’, and it was for this reason that they were laid hold of with such eager curiosity by the aspiring genius of the period. One could not come into contact with Greek and Roman letters without touching philosophy, history, poetry, sculpture, drama, painting, architecture, agriculture, physics, mathematics, religion, medicine, law, and astronomy. Hence there was no activity of the human spirit, except music, that they did not directly and powerfully stimulate. A great renewal of interest in the study of Greek and Latin literature began in Italy, in the fourteenth century; by the sixteenth century it had covered Europe. It reached France rather late. Two teachers, one of them a man of considerable eminence, gave lessons in Greek more or less irregularly in Paris, towards the end of the fifteenth century; and in the first decade of the sixteenth century, the University of Paris offered some kind of instruction in Greek, but this lasted only about four years. At this time, too, there was but one printer in Paris who could set Greek type — indeed, the first printing-press in Paris, a small affair, was set up as late as 1470 — and by 1520 he had managed to publish only five or six Greek books; with these inconsiderable exceptions, the Greek books used in France were imported, most of them coming from Italy.

“So, Rabelais’s youth and maturity were roughly contemporaneous with the youth and maturity of the great art of printing. To relate him further to the status of art, science, and letters, and show what his setting was in the general movement known as humanism, we may mention that when Rabelais was born, Leonardo da Vinci had still twenty-five years to live, and Michelangelo was already twenty years old, Raphael was a boy of twelve, Titian a youth of eighteen, and Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg, at the age of twenty-four, was beginning his mighty career as an engraver. Luca della Robbia and Donatello had been dead but a few years. Erasmus of Rotterdam, the dominating force in humanism, whose spiritual kinship with Rabelais was extremely close, closer probably than that with any other man before or since his day, was nearly thirty. Budé, who was the chief promoter of Greek studies in France, had himself begun the study of Greek the year before, at the age of twenty-six. Copernicus, the forerunner of modern astronomy, was twenty-two. Machiavelli, the founder of modern political science, was twenty-six. In the year that Cervantes was born, Rabelais was shaping up the Fourth Book of his great narrative, and getting it ready to send to the printer. Rabelais’s death in 1553 preceded by nine years the birth of Lope de Vega, who, one may say, established the art of the modern drama in Europe, for it spread from Spain over all Europe with great rapidity; and by but eleven years, the birth of Shakespeare.” (Albert Jay Nock, 1929, Rabelais: The Man and His Work)

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
• Free Speech and Plain Language, 1937
• Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, 1943

“An educated young man likes to think; he likes ideas for their own sake and likes to deal with them disinterestedly and objectively. He will find this taste an expensive one, much beyond his means, because the society around him is thoroughly indisposed towards anything of the kind. It is preeminently a society, as John Stuart Mill said, in which the test of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds. In any department of American life this is indeed the only final test; and this fact is in turn a fair measure of the extent to which our society is inimical to thought. The president of Columbia University is reported in the press as having said the other day that ‘thinking is one of the most unpopular amusements of the human race. Men hate it largely because they can not do it. They hate it because if they enter upon it as a vocation or avocation it is likely to interfere with what they are doing’. This is an interesting admission for the president of Columbia to make — interesting and striking. Circumstances have enabled our society to get along rather prosperously, though by no means creditably, without thought and without regard for thought, proceeding merely by a series of improvisations; hence it has always instinctively resented thought, as likely to interfere with what it was doing. Therefore, the young person who has cultivated the ability to think and the taste for thinking is at a decided disadvantage, for this resentment is now stronger and more heavily concentrated than it ever was.” (Albert Jay Nock, 1932, The Disadvantages of Being Educated)

“Whenever I survey a crowd of people, I am overpowered by a sense of the most prodigious, the most stupendous miracle that can conceivably be performed, even by omnipotence. What miracle can one imagine, comparable with the annual and regular turning-out of millions of human beings, guaranteed positively no two alike? I can think of none. By comparison with this, raising the dead, cleansing lepers, multiplying loaves and fishes, seem most insignificant. Well, but, here that miracle is, here those beings are, and their infinite variety suggests to me that their Creator is not working this continuous miracle merely to show what He can do when He tries, but that He has some pretty distinct idea in mind when He does it. The thing is, therefore, to hit on some principle of social organization that comes nearest to corresponding with the conditions which this miracle appears to impose. The only principle I can think of as coming anywhere near filling this bill is one that we have never tried — freedom. We have tried everything else with no great success, so even as a ‘flyer’ or sporting venture, we might do worse than try freedom. It is fair to give warning, however, that a profitable application of this principle must go far beyond economic and political freedom, though these of course come first: economic freedom, meaning that each individual has free access to the primal source of his subsistence; and political freedom, meaning that government confines itself to exercising only the negative interventions of a Polizeistaat. But the principle must govern all the relations of life; and the essence of its successful application is that freedom should never be felt as permissive. As an illustration of what I mean, I may cite the amenities that we practice daily; they are actually exercises in true freedom. As things stand now, for example, the vegetarian devours his vapid fodder in pleasant converse with the husky beef-eater; the red-licker Democrat and the grape-juice Prohibitionist drink together on the best of terms. Neither party feels that he is acting on sufferance; the whole point is that neither party really notices what the other’s choice is. This is the index of true freedom; well, why not extend indefinitely our application of the principle that so largely governs our existing amenities? In New York the other day, a magistrate refused to commit two girls for appearing naked on the stage, saying that mere nudity does not in itself connote a lewd performance. This is all very well, but one must see, I think, that the freedom which these girls now enjoy is purely permissive; it is freedom by prescription — that is to say, it is not freedom at all. True freedom in these premises would be found where, if the two walked naked on Fifth Avenue at noonday, no one would notice, unless quite casually or by afterthought, that they happened not to be wearing any clothes. Whether in small matters or in great, the thoroughgoing application of this principle is, in short, an affair of the spirit; and while this principle is no foundation for a Utopia or anything remotely resembling one, it would seem to offer better terms for the organization of human society — terms corresponding much more closely with the nature of man — than those offered by any other principle of which we have knowledge.” (Albert Jay Nock, 1935, Thoughts on Utopia)

“If I should come here and try to impress you by saying that my institution turned out so many hundred Masters of Arts last year, and would turn out so many hundred more this year, I should expect you to reply somewhat thus: ‘Yes, that is all very fine, very good, but what are they like? To bear the degree of Master of Arts is an immense pretension, and noblesse oblige — how are they justifying it? Are they showing disciplined and experienced minds, are they capable of maintaining a mature and informed disinterestedness, a humane and elevated serenity, in all their views of human life? Do they display invariably the imperial distinction of spirit, the patrician fineness of taste, which we have been taught to associate with that degree of proficiency in the liberal arts? We cannot see that the kind of discipline to which you say they have been subjected has any such bearing. Gymnastics, copy editing, stenography, food etiquette, home laundering, and such like, are commendable pursuits, and we are all for having them well and freely taught, but we cannot see that they tend in the least towards what we have always understood an advanced degree in the liberal arts to mean. Therefore if you ask us to congratulate you on the number of your graduates, we must first have a look at their quality’.” (Albert Jay Nock, 1932, The Theory of Education in the United States)

“The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest and fullest continuous record available to us, of what the human mind has been busy about in practically every department of spiritual and social activity — every department, I think, except one: music. This record covers twenty-five hundred consecutive years of the human mind’s operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, politics, medicine, theology, geography, everything. Hence the mind that has attentively canvassed this record is not only a disciplined mind but an experienced mind — a mind that instinctively views any contemporary phenomenon from the vantage point of an immensely long perspective attained through this profound and weighty experience of the human spirit’s operations. If I may paraphrase the words of Emerson, this discipline brings us into the feeling of an immense longevity, and maintains us in it. You may perceive at once, I think, how different would be the view of contemporary men and things, how different the appraisal of them, the scale of values employed in their measurement, on the part of one who has undergone this discipline and on the part of one who has not. These studies, then, in a word, were regarded as formative because they are maturing, because they powerfully inculcate the views of life and the demands on life that are appropriate to maturity and that are indeed the specific marks, the outward and visible signs, of the inward and spiritual grace of maturity. And now we are in a position to observe that the establishment of these views and the direction of these demands is what is traditionally meant, and what we citizens of the republic of letters now mean, by the word ‘education’; and the constant aim at inculcation of these views and demands is what we know under the name of the Great Tradition of our republic.” (Albert Jay Nock, 1932, The Theory of Education in the United States)

“Dissatisfaction is, of course, a noble and invaluable attribute of man; one should never, strictly speaking, be satisfied with anything, least of all with the social institutions and mechanisms which we create. The lively and peremptory exercise of dissatisfaction is the first condition of progress; one wishes that Americans at large had a better understanding of its uses. But dissatisfaction with something which may and should be made to work better, differs in quality from dissatisfaction with something which gives no hope of ever being made to work at all. Dissatisfaction in the realm of the airplane is a very different thing in quality from dissatisfaction in the realm of the perpetual-motion device. In the one case, the application of ingenuity may, and often does, improve the machine and makes it work better. In the other case, when all the resources of ingenuity are exhausted, the machine gives only a semblance of working, without the reality.” (Albert Jay Nock, 1932, The Theory of Education in the United States)

“If you place in a bottle half a dozen bees and the same number of flies, and lay the bottle down horizontally, with its base to the window, you will find that the bees will persist, till they die of exhaustion or hunger, in their endeavor to discover an issue through the glass; while the flies, in less than two minutes, will all have sallied forth through the neck on the opposite side. From this Sir John Lubbock concludes that the intelligence of the bee is exceedingly limited, and that the fly shows far greater skill in extricating itself from a difficulty, and finding its way. This conclusion, however, would not seem altogether flawless. Turn the transparent sphere twenty times, if you will, holding now the base, now the neck, to the window, and you will find that the bees will turn twenty times with it, so as always to face the light. It is their love of the light, it is their very intelligence, that is their undoing in this experiment of the English savant. They evidently imagine that the issue from every prison must be there where the light shines clearest; and they act in accordance, and persist in too logical action. To them glass is a supernatural mystery they never have met with in nature; they have had no experience of this suddenly impenetrable atmosphere; and, the greater their intelligence, the more inadmissible, more incomprehensible, will the strange obstacle appear. Whereas the feather-brained flies, careless of logic as of the enigma of crystal, disregarding the call of the light, flutter wildly hither and thither, and, meeting here the good fortune that often waits on the simple, who find salvation there where the wiser will perish, necessarily end by discovering the friendly opening that restores their liberty to them.” (Maurice Maeterlinck, 1901, The Life of the Bee)

“I see some who study and comment on their almanacs and cite their authority in current events. With all they say, they necessarily tell both truth and falsehood. For who is there who, shooting all day, will not sometime hit the mark? [Cicero.] I think none the better of them to see them sometimes happen to hit the truth; there would be more certainty in it, if it were the rule and the truth that they always lied. Besides, no one keeps a record of their mistakes, inasmuch as these are ordinary and numberless; and their correct divinations are made much of because they are rare, incredible, and prodigious. In this way Diagoras, who was surnamed the Atheist, replied to the man in Samothrace, who, showing him in the temple many votive offerings and tablets of those who had escaped shipwreck, said to him: ‘Well, you who think that the gods care nothing about human affairs, what do you say about so many men saved by their grace?’ ‘This is how it happens’, Diagoras answered. ‘Those who were drowned, in much greater number, are not portrayed here’.” (Montaigne, Essays, Frame Translation)