Education
Before World War I, he lived in Austria and attended the University of Vienna.
Before World War I, he lived in Austria and attended the University of Vienna.
From the 1940s he was for many years a politics lecturer in the United States of America. Born in 1881, into a wealthy Jewish family from Buchach, eastern Halychyna, now Ukraine, he was influenced by the thought of anarchist January Wacław Machajski. He wrote pro-soviet articles in the 1920s using the pen-name Max Nomad. 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 himself, Max Nomad said: "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.".
In his youth he had espoused militant anarchism and in the 1920s he was a follower of the Bolshevik Revolution. He distanced himself from Stalinism in 1929.
Writing in Scribner"s Magazine in 1934, he coined the phrase capitalism without capitalists regarding the Soviet Union.