The Hero With a Thousand Pages

William F. Buckley Jr.’s reputation is in ruins. This is through no fault of Buckley himself, nor has it been brought about by the publication of this brick of a biography by Sam Tanenhaus. Rather, Buckley is suffering something like the fate that befell his early literary hero Albert Jay Nock, a philosophical anarchist who came to be remembered largely for his anti–New Deal politics. Nock died in 1945, and the Nock who was afterward needed by the young Buckley and others who sought to carry on the fight against the new order built by Franklin Roosevelt was simply a libertarian, the author of a book called Our Enemy, the State—never mind that that work wasn’t just anti-statist but an expression of radical “Georgist” economics. Nock was for a time cherished for how well he wrote, too, but ideology at length subsumed the memory of the author and man himself.