Albert Jay Nock's Metaphorical Hemlock

Many people criticize Albert Jay Nock for not being a man of action, but he couldn’t have been a man of action any more than Socrates could have declined to drink the hemlock

In the cacophonous mess that has always been the United States, there lived a man named Albert Jay Nock, a soul so fiercely private he might’ve outdone Thoreau in his woodland reverie or Kaczynski in his lonesome Montana shack.

This fortress of solitude was a one-man rebellion against the clamor of a nation hell-bent on collectivizing its spirit into a …