In the popular histories of political ideas, there's no more omnipresent figure than the godfather--as in, Irving Kristol, godfather of neoconservatism, or William F. Buckley Jr., godfather of modern conservatism. But intellectual historians tend to unjustly neglect a very important influence when they trace their genealogical lines: the weird uncle. For American conservatives that figure is Albert Jay Nock--a man who died a decade before the first issue of National Review but who shaped its spirit nonetheless.

Nock didn't try hard to obscure his strangeness. In fact, he carefully tended his eccentric image on nearly every page of his Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, published in 1943. During his long career as a writer for New York's little magazines like The American Magazine and Harper's, these foibles became enshrined in myth. A misanthropic character, who considered Western civilization to be on a road to perdition, he viewed himself an atavistic figure from premodern times and occasionally wore a cape to symbolize his preference for the past. This sartorial detail also had the intended effect of enshrouding him in mysteriousness. During a stint as editor of the Freeman, he declined to give his colleagues his home address or to reveal more substantive details about himself. Van Wyck Brooks recounted a rumor that contacting Nock required leaving a note under a rock in Central Park. None of his New York friends or colleagues knew that Nock had spent decades as an Episcopal priest or that he had abandoned his wife and children. Had they read his Memoirs they would not have come to know these facts either.

While most conservatives have willfully suppressed any memory of Nock, the godfather has been gracious in his treatment of him. In a lecture in 1999, Buckley recounted, "I began reading Albert Jay Nock, from whom I imbibed deeply the anti-statist tradition which he accepted, celebrated, and enhanced." Buckley hadn't just known Nock from his oeuvre. During the early forties, Nock regularly lunched with Buckley's father at the family's estate, delivering sweeping pronouncements about civilization's decay. A good portion of the early National Review staff looked upon Nock with similar reverence.

Given the noisy victory dance Christian conservatives are now performing, it is hard to imagine that they are part of a movement that Nock helped launch. But, at its birth, the conservative movement looked a lot more like Randolph Bourne than Ralph Reed--a bit anarchist, somewhat bohemian, occasionally blasphemous, and thoroughly misanthropic. Nock's Memoirs exudes these qualities and has another charming trait: It may be the most splenetic work in all of American literature.

Memoirs of a Superfluous Man begins with an advertisement against itself. Nock tells his readers that he "led a singularly uneventful life"--an announcement that doesn't portend the massive egotism and arrogance to come. From the start, the book fails miserably as memoir. Just as he refused to give colleagues his address, he resists supplying readers with the most basic data. He lives in towns without names, cavorts with nameless friends in unspecified years. As a self-described anarchist, he stays true to himself and resists convention. The book abandons all pretenses to chronological storytelling and melts into a pot of digressions. But Memoirs isn't really memoir at all. It resides in the canon of elitist misanthropy--a genre that flourished in the interwar period in the angry writings of H.L. Mencken, Ralph Adams Cram, and, to an extent, Jose Ortega y Gasset.

Nock began his journalistic career as muckraker, working along side Lincoln Steffens. But, like Mencken and Cram, he grew wildly disillusioned with the secular faith of the progressive era. When he looked at the changes of the early twentieth century, the embrace of the democratic ideal and the rise of mass culture, he recoiled in horror. Society was in the midst of what he described as "rebarbarisation." It was "increasingly repulsive and degrading." He lamented, for instance, that the expansion of literacy and schooling had "enabled mediocrity and submediocrity to run rampant." And the state, he argued, had turned into "a pliant organ of such segments of the Neolithic mass as can get at it."

The last phrase holds the key to Nock's view--the Neolithic mass. Society, he believed, included both humans and barbarians suffering from delusions of grandeur. These barbarians hadn't evolved to a state that could be properly described as human. But in the twentieth century, they had broken through the gates. Nock responded to this incursion with seemingly infinite haughtiness. "One can hate human beings, at least I could--I hated a lot of them when that is what I thought they were--but one can't hate subhuman creatures or be contemptuous of them, wish them ill, regard them unkindly."

Nock can't easily be slipped into a shelf on the taxonomical table of American ideology. He gets described in turns as an anarchist, anarchocapitalist, and libertarian. His biographer Michael Wreszin places him squarely in the anarchist camp. (Wreszin also wrote a superb biography of Dwight Macdonald, another devotee of Nock's work.) Indeed, he wrote a book called Our Enemy, the State. When Nock summed up his political philosophy, it sounded strikingly similar to the objectivism of Ayn Rand. "I found myself settled in convictions which I suppose must be summed up as an intelligent selfishness, intelligent, egoism, intelligent hedonism." But unlike Rand and her disciples, this celebration of selfishness didn't lead him to laissez faire economics. In fact, he despised modern society's embrace of "economism" and rampant materialism. "Such values," he wrote, "cannot build a [society] which is lovely." In end, he is a classic conservative, who views the values of the past as superior to those of the present.

His eccentric tastes are also on display in the many pages he spends waxing lyrical about the virtues of Belgium, which he believes has resisted the decrepitude of modernity. Nock may be the first and last man to locate Eden in Brussels. Unfortunately, when searching for the culprit of social decline, he wasn't nearly so idiosyncratic in his choice. Like Henry Adams and Henry Ford, he settled on a stock villain, the Jew. A few years before the publication of his memoir, he wrote an essay on "The Jewish Problem in America" for The Atlantic Monthly. And Memoirs of a Superfluous Man is rife with anti-Semitic shots. Jews, he moans, always complain about their victimization. Publishing has been destroyed by the "cutthroat competitive attitude of [editors like] Marks Pasinsky, Moe Greisman and Hymie Salzman." Nock leaves no doubt the presence of this "alien" force has contributed to his feelings of alienation.

How does someone filled with so much bile, so little regard for his own species continue living? This is the question that occupies the last passages of Nock's memoir, where he wrestles with the arguments against suicide in the guise of a recounted conversation with a friend. He concludes, "I said I could not object to suicide on the ethical or religious grounds ordinarily alleged." Yet, he cannot bring himself to endorse the practice either. "It seems to me so distinctly one of the things that a person just does not do." Indeed, this discussion captures his misanthropy perfectly. Nock takes too much pleasure in disdaining humanity to be a morbid misanthrope; he is a happy hater, too big a fan of Rabelais to embrace the grim logical conclusions of his arguments.

Two years after publishing his Memoirs to great acclaim, Nock died a natural death. Nearly sixty years later, for better and for worse, it's hard to find much of his spirit in contemporary heirs of Buckley's movement. Nock's crude elitism has given way to crude populism. His rebelliousness has given way to a movement that treasures message discipline. Conservatives have largely wrapped themselves in the economism that he abhorred. In the grave, he has become a truly superfluous man.