Max Nomad was the pseudonym ofMaximilian Nacht (15 September 1881 – 18 April 1973), an Austrian-born American author and educator. In his youth he espoused militantanarchism and in the 1920s he was a supporter of theBolshevik Revolution. From the 1940s he was for many years a politics lecturer in the United States.
Maximilian Nacht was born in 1881, into a wealthy Jewish family inBuchach, easternGalicia (now inUkraine).[1] BeforeWorld War I, he lived in Austria and attended theUniversity of Vienna.
He died in 1973.[2]
From 1903 to 1907 Max, his older brotherSiegfried and, sometimes,Senna Hoy inZürich edited five volumes of a militant journal,Der Weckruf (The Alarm). In 1908 Max went to live inKraków, where he became involved, along withJan Wacław Machajski, in setting up a group called Workers' Conspiracy.
Max's brother Siegfried, later Stephen, emigrated to the United States at the end of 1912, and Max followed in 1913.[3]
During the 1920s Max Nacht wrote pro-Soviet articles using thepseudonym "Max Nomad." However, he distanced himself fromStalinism in 1929. Writing inScribner's Magazine in 1934, he coined the phrasecapitalism without capitalists to describe the Soviet system.
AGuggenheim Fellow in1937, he became a lecturer in politics and history atNew York University, theNew School for Social Research and theRand School of Social Science.
Nomad wrote of himself:
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.[4]
