Max Nomad

{{Short description|Austrian-American anarchist (1881–1973)}} {{More citations needed|date=June 2025}} '''Max Nomad''' was the pseudonym of '''Maximilian Nacht''' (15 September 1881 – 18 April 1973), an Austrian-born American author and educator. In his youth he espoused militant [[anarchism]] and in the 1920s he was a supporter of the [[Bolshevik Revolution]]. From the 1940s he was for many years a politics lecturer in the United States.

==Life== Maximilian Nacht was born in 1881, into a wealthy Jewish family in [[Buchach]], eastern [[Galicia (Eastern Europe)|Galicia]] (now in [[Ukraine]]).<ref>''[http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/nomad.html Guide to the Max Nomad Papers] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100829160340/http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/nomad.html |date=2010-08-29}}'' at the Tamiment Library, New York University</ref> Before [[World War I]], he lived in Austria and attended the [[University of Vienna]].{{Citation needed|date=June 2025}}

He died in 1973.<ref>''[https://search.socialhistory.org/Record/ARCH00915]'' at International Institute of Social History</ref>

==Career== From 1903 to 1907 Max, his older brother [[Stephen Naft|Siegfried]] and, sometimes, [[Senna Hoy]] in [[Zürich]] edited five volumes of a militant journal, ''Der Weckruf'' (The Alarm). In 1908 Max went to live in [[Kraków]], where he became involved, along with [[Jan Wacław Machajski]], in setting up a group called Workers' Conspiracy.{{Citation needed|date=June 2025}}

Max's brother Siegfried, later Stephen, emigrated to the United States at the end of 1912, and Max followed in 1913.<ref>Siegfried Nacht also used the pen-name Arnold Roller: ''Der Generalstreik und die soziale Revolution''. London 1902 (translated into 17 languages); ''Der soziale Generalstreik''. Berlin 1905; ''Die direkte Aktion'' London 1906. ''Sodatenbrevier'', 1906.</ref>

During the 1920s Max Nacht wrote pro-Soviet articles using the [[pseudonym]] "Max Nomad." However, he distanced himself from [[Stalinism]] in 1929. Writing in ''[[Scribner's Magazine]]'' in 1934, he coined the phrase ''capitalism without capitalists'' to describe the Soviet system.{{Citation needed|date=June 2025}}

A [[Guggenheim Fellowship|Guggenheim Fellow]] in [[List of Guggenheim Fellowships awarded in 1937|1937]], he became a lecturer in politics and history at [[New York University]], the [[New School for Social Research]] and the [[Rand School of Social Science]].{{Citation needed|date=June 2025}}

Nomad wrote of himself: <blockquote> <small> I remain a lone-wolf philosophical anarchist whose sympathies go out to the poorest of the poor struggling for more and more of the good things of life. But I feel akin only to those rebellious but politically unattached intellectuals who dream of justice and an equal chance for everybody, but know, as I do, that, given the eternal recurrence of predatory elites, and the incurable ignorance and gullibility of the masses, a privileged and educated minority will always rule and exploit the uneducated majority.<ref>Coombs, Anne, ''Sex and Anarchy: The Life and Death of the Sydney Push'', Penguin Books Australia, 1996; p. 56.</ref> </small> </blockquote>

== Works== * ''Die revolutionäre Bewegung in Rußland''. Neues Leben, Berlin 1902 * ''Rebellen-Lieder'' Arnold Roller (Siegfried Nacht), Max Nacht (eds), 1906 * ''Rebels and Renegades''. New York 1932. 430 pp. * ''Apostles of Revolution''. Little, Brown & Co., Boston 1939. 467 pp. * ''A Skeptic's Political Dictionary and Handbook for the Disenchanted''. New York 1953. 171 pp. * ''Aspects of Revolt''. New York [1959]. 311 pp. * ''Political Heretics from Plato to Mao Tse-Tung''. Ann Arbor 1963 * ''Dreamers, Dynamiters and Demagogues: Reminiscences''. New York [1964]. 251 pp. * ''The Anarchist Tradition and Other Essays''. 1967. 398 pp. * ''Masters--Old and New'' 1979 * ''White Collars and Horny Hands: The Revolutionary Thought of Waclaw Machajski'' 1983

==References== {{Reflist}}

==Further reading== * Werner Portmann: ''Die wilden Schafe: Max und Siegfried Nacht''. Unrast Verlag, Münster (Germany) 2008.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Nomad, Max}} [[Category:1881 births]] [[Category:1973 deaths]] [[Category:20th-century American Jews]] [[Category:20th-century American male writers]] [[Category:20th-century American non-fiction writers]] [[Category:20th-century anarchists]] [[Category:American anarchist writers]] [[Category:American male non-fiction writers]] [[Category:Anarchist theorists]] [[Category:Austrian emigrants to the United States]] [[Category:Jewish anarchists]] [[Category:People from Buchach]]