Max Nomad is the pseudonym of Austrian-born American author and educator Maximilian Nacht (1881, Buchach, Halychyna, now Ukraine – 1973).[1] 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.
Maximilian Nacht was born in 1881, into a wealthy Jewish family in Buchach, eastern Halychyna, now in Ukraine.[2] Before World War I, he lived in Austria and attended the University of Vienna.
From 1903 to 1907 Max, his older brother 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 Cracow, where he became involved, along with Jan 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 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.
A Guggenheim Fellow in 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.
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]
