Robert Nozick

Robert Nozick (1938–2002) enters this wiki through one book: Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), the work that gave libertarian minarchism its standing in professional political philosophy.

Place in This Wiki

Nozick was an American philosopher who spent most of his career at Harvard and ranged across epistemology, decision theory, and the philosophy of mind. The wiki uses one slice of his work: Anarchy, State, and Utopia, written in part as a libertarian answer to his colleague John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. There Nozick argues from near-absolute individual rights — “there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights)” — to two conclusions: that a minimal state confined to protection and the enforcement of contracts is justified, and that no more extensive state is.

He occupies a precise position in the libertarian field. Against the individualist anarchist, he defends the minimal state, arguing it could arise from a stateless order of private protective agencies by an “invisible-hand” process without anyone’s rights being violated — which is exactly the step the Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist denies. Against the egalitarian, his entitlement theory of justice and the Wilt Chamberlain argument hold that maintaining any preferred distribution requires continuous interference with voluntary exchange. Nozick is an academic libertarian, not a movement one, and he grounds rights more in a Kantian separateness-of-persons than in the natural-law or praxeological routes the rest of this corpus favors.

See Also

• Anarchy, State, and Utopia - his work present in this wiki
• Minarchism - the position his book anchors
• Market Anarchism and Private Law - the anarchist alternative his minimal-state argument answers
• Nonaggression and Property Rights - the rights-first premises he shares with the rest of the tradition
• Ayn Rand - the other major modern statement of the rights-protecting minimal state
• Criticisms of Anarcho-Capitalism - The strongest objections to a stateless market order — public goods, the warlord/Hobbesian problem, Nozick’s invisible-hand state, equal justice, and stability — each stated fairly
• Distributive Justice - How should wealth be shared? Rawls’s egalitarian ‘justice as fairness’ versus Nozick’s entitlement theory — the strongest challenge to libertarian property, stated fairly
• Private Security and Insurance - the dominant-protective-agency objection, in context

Sources

• Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Full Text Aggregate) - the basis for this profile (Basic Books, 1974; user-provided full text)