The Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

Here's my review of "The Memoirs of a Superfluous Man," a paleoconservative classic by Albert Nock. It was fairly early on in my attempt to understand conservatives that I heard about the book -- late 2002. It wasn't easy to find; it's out of print, deservedly so; I finally found a copy at the Brooklyn Pubic Library.

Coincidentally I was reading Henry Adams'truly classic "The Education of Henry Adams" at the time, and so saw the extent to which Nock, though claiming that he was inspired by "The Education of Henry Adams," was really doing a one-dimensional impersonation of Adams.

The roving pack of neo-, theo- and paleo-cons who swarm any negative reviews of their foundational texts on Amazon have slammed my review: currently, of the 73 ratings of my review as of today, 59 of them are negative. If you go to Amazon and read the other reviews, you'll see examples of what Lionel Triling called conservaives' "irritated mental gestures that seem like ideas."

MEMOIRS OF AN INSIDIOUS MAN
November 28, 2002
On the surface, MEMOIRS OF SUPERFLUOUS MAN, is an often charming, occasionally misanthropic remembrance of a vanished America by a self-admitted nearly vanished American type. Deploying a literary strategy similar to Henry Adams' THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS, Nock identifies himself, his beliefs, his elite classical education as superfluous in modern day America (circa 1900 to 1943). But the crucial difference between Nock and Adams is how they qualify themselves as superfluous. Adams is a man of subtle and ironic self-awarness who recognizes that he and the elite class he belongs to has apparently outlived its time, certainly its usefulness. That his family's his long chain of service has come to an end with him, suddenly snapped against a new America where the new men of power (such as his once good friend Teddy Roosevelt who turned his back on his class and remade himself as a man of the people), is deftly, self-effacingly and ironically told, and often contains real pathos. The same cannot be said of Nock's version of superfluity.

Though he attempts to use the sophisicated distancing techniques of Adams, Nock only manages to appear inveterately opposed to everything that might upset his elitist equlibrium. Through the lens of his classical education, Nock sees mankind as unchanging, steeped in sin, a species whose small attempts at building effective governments are destined to end in futility and folly. Where Adams sees that those in power in his time have lost their ardor for and dedication to the ideals of the revolutionary era implicitly criticizing the new technocratic class in government and business for its bloodless utilitarian and pecuniary values, Nock criticizes all modern liberal governments, and anything remotely else remotely Lockean. He absents himself from the social and political movements of his time, such as the women's movement, scorning its outcome as all too predetermined -- since the disruptive liberal ethos demands equality no matter how violently it rents the social fabric, there was nothing to be done for Nock but watch it happen with a certain measure of glee. Nock is as elliptical and implict as Adams, but where Adams employs the technique to chide society (and himself), what Nock leaves unstated is his hatred for liberalism. He leaves unstated his belief, for instance, that the social fabric that had held women so securely in their place for so long -- that conservative and sensible fabric mystically woven over the course of time -- should remain intact because it always had, and thus always should. Interestingly, like other intellectuals of his time and Adams and James before him, Nock fled the new pecuniary America. But unlike other intellectuals of his time who fled to Europe because it seemed to offer them a more humane and more traditional culture as a potential corrective to the grasping, greedy money culture of the second industrial revolution, Nock apparently fled America because he wanted to hobnob with the European artistocracy, no matter how faded and tattered it had become.

MEMOIRS OF A SUPERFLUOUS MAN has become one of the early canonical works of the neoconservative movement. It has all the earmarks of the Straussians -- the hatred of liberalism, the belief that only a few can be trusted with the disturbing truths of philosophy and that this elect should be entrusted with the political leadership by dint of this hard won wisdom. Nock also displays the parternalistic populism of the neocons as he waxes poetic about the common lumberjacks he lived with as a boy when his father took the family from Brooklyn to Michigan to head up a lumber operation. He portrays these commoners as hardy Americans untouched by the evils of cosmopolitan liberalism, brilliant and unspoiled, rugged individualists all. In a particularly vivid sketch, he describes a musical evening where these common men of toil sang better than any professional chorus he had ever heard. What he leaves unstated here is the neocon belief that the common run of mankind should be made content with entertainments and religions fashioned and promulgated by the elect to keep the commoners happy in their ignorance of the true nature of the world.

Nock asks his readers to accept that he knows the true nature of the world. Like most conservative arguments, it is the argument from authority, a form of argument which refuses to engage in the hurly burly of real debate. And that is why ultimately, Nock comes off as as dry and passionless as the technocrats he and Adams abhor.