Source: Beyond the Welfare State (1958), p. 38
Context: Generally speaking, the less privileged groups in democratic society, as they become aware of their interests and their political power, will be found to press for more and more state intervention in practically all fields. Their interest clearly lies in having individual contracts subordinated as much as possible to general norms, laid down in laws, regulations, administrative dispositions, and semi-voluntary agreements between apparently private, but in reality, quasi-public organizations [e. g., wage agreements between Swedish unions and employers' confederations, and their counterparts in other countries].
“"Democratic" State practice is nothing more or less than State practice. It does not differ from Marxist State practice, Fascist State practice, or any other. Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: you get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you.”
"The Criminality of the State" in American Mercury (March 1939). A similar statement was later made by Jerry Ford
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Albert Jay Nock 68
American journalist 1870–1945Related quotes
Collected Works, Vol. 24, pp. 42–54.
Collected Works
Israel
Source: The Misuses of Anti-Semitism http://hnn.us/articles/1002.html, Juan Cole, History News Network, September 30, 2002
Source: The Sword or the Cross, Which Should be the Weapon of the Christian Militant? (1921), Ch.4 p. 69-70
Context: None of us believes that rulers are infallible or that their commands should constitute our highest standard of right and wrong. Quite apart from the belief of the ruler, the method of war is either Christian or un-Christian, and his command does not determine whether our participation in it is moral or immoral. Therefore, the Christian citizen must come to his decision on a basis of the spirit and teaching of Jesus, quite independently of the command of the ruler. To say that Jesus and St. Paul recognize the function of the state is not to say that they command the Christian to participate in war when ordered to do so by the ruler of the nation; any more than their recognition of the state meant that they sanctioned human slavery, polygamy, extortion and the other evil practices which were approved by the [Roman] state.
Message of Protest to the United States Senate (15 April 1834).
1830s
Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Ideal, p. 161
Power and the Useful Economist (1973)
Context: When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise — to deny the political character of the modern corporation — is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality. The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error. The beneficiaries are the institutions whose power we so disguise. Let there be no question: economics, so long as it is thus taught, becomes, however unconsciously, a part of the arrangement by which the citizen or student is kept from seeing how he or she is, or will be, governed.
The one abandons the disobedient and expels him; the other receives him in its bosom and seeks to instruct, or at least to console him.
Source: Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism (1783), p. 45
N.Y. Journal-American (November 11, 1954)