Our Enemy, the State

Our Enemy, the State is Albert Jay Nock’s historical and polemical account of the state as an institution that absorbs social power into political power. It is the main bridge from Oppenheimer’s sociology to the American Old Right libertarian critique.

What the Book Argues

Nock distinguishes government from the State. Government, in his usage, can mean the negative function of securing freedom and justice. The State is different: it is the organization of the political means, a coercive apparatus for distributing privileges, rents, monopolies, and commands.

The book applies that distinction to American development. Nock reads colonial land tenure, the Mayflower Compact, the Revolution, post-revolutionary land speculation, the Constitution, tariffs, banking, railroads, and the New Deal as moments in a continuing struggle over access to the political means. The American case is therefore not an exception to the conquest-and-exploitation pattern. It is Nock’s demonstration that the same pattern can appear in republican and constitutional clothing.

Social Power and State Power

Nock’s contribution to the wiki vocabulary is the contrast between social power and state power. Social power is the productive capacity of society: labor, exchange, invention, charity, local initiative, and voluntary association. State power grows by converting these capacities into political administration, taxation, subsidy, bureaucracy, emergency rule, and monopoly law.

This makes the book central to Evolution of the State and State Power and Intervention. Nock is especially useful where the wiki needs the historical layer between Oppenheimer’s origin theory and Rothbard’s later analytic theory.

Relation to Oppenheimer and Rothbard

Nock explicitly follows The State and its Political Means and Economic Means distinction. Anatomy of the State later cites Nock for the state-power/social-power contrast, making Nock one of the transmission links into Rothbardian libertarianism.

The supplied raw extraction contains six chapters, not five. This reference follows the actual extracted text.

See Also

• Albert Jay Nock - author reference
• Franz Oppenheimer - upstream sociological source
• The State - source for Nock’s political/economic means distinction
• Political Means and Economic Means - core vocabulary Nock applies
• Evolution of the State - broader historical-state concept article
• War and State Formation - Tilly’s non-libertarian sociology of war, coercion, taxation, and state formation
• Coercion, Capital, and European States - descriptive historical-sociology comparator to Nock’s state-power/social-power frame
• State Power and Intervention - concept article using Nock’s social-power/state-power frame
• Mass Society and Atomization - Arendtian comparison point for the social-power depletion problem
• Anatomy of the State - Rothbard’s later use of Nock’s categories
• Libertarianism - broader topic context for Nock’s Old Right anti-statism
• The State as Parasite: A Thesis - reciprocal link.
• The 2026 EU Wealth-Tax Directive: Capital-Consumption Analysis - thesis applying Nock’s state-power-absorbing-social-power vocabulary to the May 2026 EU wealth-tax directive

Sources

• Our Enemy, the State - full-text PDF extraction aggregate with six chapters and chapter footnotes