attacking the Versailles Treaty and Allied intervention innthe Russian civil war. Nock, however, was unhappy workingnfor another editor. He wanted his own journal, and,nthanks to Mrs. Neilson’s money, he was to get his wish.nNock and Neilson edited The Freeman from 1920 untiln1924. Modeled after the Spectator, it was planned as “anRadical paper,” in the tradition of Cobden and Bright,n”opposed to all the nostrums of Socialism and bureaucraticnpaternalism.”nMost of the intellectuals prominent in the early 20’snwrote for The Freeman; its pages were filled with articles bynCharles Beard, Hendrik Van Loon, Bertrand Russell, andnH.L. Mencken. The literary pages, edited by Van WycknBrooks, featured reviews by Conrad Aiken, John DosnPassos, and Carl Sandburg. Nock was the impresario oiThenFreeman, supervising production and writing dozens ofnarticles, blasting the Harding administration for everythingnfrom high-tarifiF policies to punitive measures against andefeated Germany. Yet even as Nock frenetically producedndiatribe after diatribe, the quietism which was to mark hisnphilosophy was already beginning to emerge.nIt was on August 11, 1920, that Nock first discussed thenidea of the “superfluous man.” “Our universities boast thatnthey are becoming helpmates of business,” Nock wrote.n”The machinery of business speeds forward faster andnfaster, and, as it speeds, human nature becomes, beneathnthe surface, more and more recalcitrant. The most cynical,nthe most thick-skinned of people begin to ask themselvesnwhere they are going and for what purpose.”nNock believed that “these bolshevists of the spirit . . .nwanderers who can not find themselves, who can not fitnin,” could not be redeemed by commercial America. It wasnonly by examining the masterpieces of the past, the “greatncompanions who have given to mankind its literature andnits religion,” that the American wanderer could find hisnspiritual roots and finally flourish. “Having access to thenwhole world of psychology, philosophy and history,” Nocknconcluded, “they are under the free moral obligation to seenthemselves in the common sunlight.”nIt was that sunlight—eternally emanating from thenclassics of the past—that Nock was to turn to after ThenFreeman ceased publication in 1924. First came Jeffersonn(1926), which celebrated the part-time inventor and genteelnanarchist while ignoring the President who purchasednLouisiana. Then came other worthy books: The Theory ofnEducation in the United States, A Journal of These Days, AnJourney Into Rabelais’s France. It was with Our Enemy, thenState (1936) that Nock secured his reputation.nIt took some courage on Nock’s part to write a tractncalling the State “the only professional criminal class” at thenheight of the New Deal. Franklin Roosevelt was, to Nock,nthe American Domitian, the man who destroyed the lastnvestige of independence by the states in his relenfless questnto make Washington into a devouring imperial capital. Thenordinary citizen, Nock believed, would sheepishly acceptnthe New Deal; a “peculiar moral enervation existed innregard to the State,” Nock wrote, creating a silent majoritynthat blithely ignored the judicial empire-building of JohnnMarshall, the “monocratic military despotism” of Lincoln,nthe foreign imperialism of McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt,nand the domestic imperialism of Franklin Roosevelt.nLandscapenby James MicbienFrom Theophile Gautier, “Le Paysage’nNot a leaf stirs on a limb.nNot one bird sings;nOn the red horizon’s rimnTwilight’s flickerings;nOn this side, sparse, smallnBushes, furrows half drowned,nGreyish sections of wall.nGnarled willows bowed to the ground;nOn the other, a field that endsnWith a broad, water-logged ditch,nA slow old woman who bendsnHeavy-loaded; beyond whichnThe track, which takes a dipnInto blue hills’ inclines,nAnd unreels, like a long stripnOf ribbon, in loops and twines.n(In Nock’s eyes, only the protests against atrocities in thenSpanish-American War of 1898 “marked the last majorneffort of an impotent and moribund democracy.”)nAs Western civilization slowly sank beneath the weight ofngovernment expansion. Nock saw a way of escape. Therenwere a few people, he believed, who would be willing tonfree themselves from the constricting bonds of ideology.nThese people Nock called “the Remnant,” people whon”have an intellectual curiosity, sometimes touched withnemotion, concerning the august order of nature; they arenimpressed by the contemplation of it, and like to know asnmuch about it as they can.”nThe goal of the Remnant, Nock explained in a 1936nessay, was to “proceed on our way, first with the morenobscure and extremely difficult work of clearing and illuminatingnour own minds, and second, with what occasionalnhelp we may offer to others whose faith, like our own, is setnmore on the regenerative power than on the uncertainnachievements of premature action. . . . Those who haventhis power are everywhere; everywhere they are not sonmuch resisting as quietly eluding and disregarding all socialnpressure which tends to mechanize their processes ofnobservation and thought.”nNock was an elitist, but he denied he was a conservative.nHe refused to join anti-New Deal organizations and in an1937 essay insisted on his independence from the nascentnconservative movement. “When occasion required that Inlabel myself with reference to particular social themes orndoctrines, the same decent respect for accuracy led me tondescribe myself as an anarchist, an individualist, and ansingle-taxer.”n”I see I am now rated as a Tory,” he wrote BernardnIddings Bell in 1933. “We have been called many badnnnJULY 1387/ISn