Time & Perspective Quote by Albert J. Nock

Nock’s line is a deliberate insult to the tribal addiction of politics: the courtroom drama of winners and losers. He shrinks “who is right” into something “too small” not because accuracy doesn’t matter, but because the ego theater around being right is a dead end. “Who” is a badge; “what” is a standard. One is social rank, the other is moral architecture.

The sentence works by yanking the reader out of the instinct to pick a side. Nock treats the partisan frame as a category error, as if arguing over which player scored misses the fact that the rules themselves might be corrupt. The real contest, he insists, is not between rival factions but between rival definitions of right: justice versus expedience, liberty versus control, principle versus the mood of the crowd. The subtext is bleakly contemporary: if you’re obsessed with who’s winning the argument, you’re probably already losing the ethical one.

Context matters. Writing in the early 20th century, with mass politics, propaganda, and expanding state power becoming modern defaults, Nock was a skeptical libertarian voice wary of public opinion being manufactured and moral language being weaponized. “Who is right” maps neatly onto the era’s rising machinery of party, press, and ideology; “what is right” points to something sturdier than consensus. It’s not a plea for neutrality. It’s a demand that moral reasoning outrank affiliation, even when that makes you unfashionable, ineffective, or alone.