Today would have been 137th birthday of Albert Jay Nock, described by the Mises.org Freedom Calendar as “American essayist and libertarian aristocrat.”

In The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard called him a “Tory anarchist,” but Nock might have objected to the “Tory” part of the label.

As an individualist, an opponent of Prohibition and Big Business, and an opponent of centralization and coercive authority more generally, Nock was considered a “Man of the Left.”

Then the 1930s New Deal drew most of the 1920s American Left into the social fascism of FDR’s corporate state, leaving laissez-faire individualists like Mencken and Nock in the cold. But rather than openly embracing their own shift to the fascist Right, the American Left turned semantics on its head, called their new corporatism “liberalism” and thereby pinned on the original liberals the labels of “conservative,” “reactionary,” and worse:

The individualists and laissez-faire liberals were stunned and embittered, not just by the mass desertion of their former allies, but also by the abuse these allies now heaped upon them as “reactionaries,” “fascists,” and “Neanderthals.” For decades Men of the Left, the individualists, without changing their position or perspectives one iota, now found themselves bitterly attacked by their erstwhile allies as benighted “extreme right-wingers.” Thus, in December 1933, Nock wrote angrily to Canon Bernard Iddings Bell:

“I see I am now rated as a Tory. So are you — ain’t it? What an ignorant blatherskite FDR must be! We have been called many bad names, you and I, but that one takes the prize.”

Nock’s biographer adds that “Nock thought it odd that an announced radical, anarchist, individualist, single-taxer and apostle of Spencer should be called conservative.”

If you don’t know Nock, you can start with Jeffrey Tucker’s “Albert Jay Nock: Forgotten Man of the Old Right” or you can jump right in to Nock’s own “Anarchist’s Progress,” first published in the American Mercury in 1927 and republished in On Doing the Right Thing: