Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) is one of the books about political philosophy most frequently assigned to college students. Fifty years after its publication, I’d be surprised if you could walk into a reasonably well-stocked Barnes & Noble anywhere in the English-speaking world without finding a copy.
This level of success is, in some ways, well-deserved. Nozick is an excellent writer, combining stylistic flair with a high level of rigor in most of his arguments. It’s a pleasure to read, even if (like me) you deeply abhor his conclusions.
Nozick was, when he wrote it, a hardcore libertarian. He thought any distribution of wealth whatsoever was acceptable as long as it came from letting the chips fall where they may in a free market. The only justifiable state would be a “night-watchman state” that would be “limited to protecting persons against murder, assault, theft, fraud, and so forth.”
If inequality becomes so severe that poor people are starving to death in the streets, it may be admirable for the rich to voluntarily help them, but taxing the rich to fund a welfare state would be an unacceptable violation of their property rights. And nationalizing the businesses currently owned by the rich and turning them over to the democratic management of workers or larger communities, as socialists propose, would certainly be out of the question. However pleasant a more equal society might sound, Nozick thought that there was no way to achieve and then preserve such a society without illegitimate violations of liberty.
As it happens, Nozick himself had backed away from this extreme position by the end of the 1980s, although his second thoughts have never received nearly as much attention as Anarchy, State, and…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
