… is from page 3 of the 1973 reissue (with an Introduction by Walter Grinder) of Albert Jay Nock’s 1935 masterpiece, Our Enemy, the State; Nock distinguished “social power” – voluntary choices, actions, and arrangements such as occur in markets and in mutual-aid societies – from “State power”:
Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.
