According to Nozick, we cannot hope to understand any realm of human conduct by dealing with it on its own terms. In its main outline, Nozick's case is not difficult to follow, though it is presented inelegantly, with long digressions (e.g., on vegetarianism), and an unflagging prolixity in refuting the kind of objection likely to be posed by the fatuous freshman or journalist. Beyond the Minimal State? To this extent, Anarchy, State, and Utopia can be understood as a direct response both to anarchists who deny the legitimacy of any state, minimal or otherwise, and to liberal defenders of the modern welfare state like the philosopher John Rawls, whose classic study A Theory of Justice (1971) receives sustained criticism in the second half of Nozick’s book. Please enter your username or email address. In order to demonstrate a broad spectrum of possible political philosophies it is necessary to define the outer boundaries, these two treatises stand… Part 1: Rights. ANARCHY, STATE, AND UTOPIA By Robert Nozick Robert Nozick'sAnarchy, State and Utopia is, to date, the most sophisticated philosophical treatment of libertarian theory and themes. These days , in the occasional university philosophy classroom, the differences between Robert Nozick's "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" (libertarianism) and John Rawls' "A Theory of Justice" (social liberalism) are still discussed vigorously. Firstly, his idea of a minimal state requires not only that the state itself respects individual liberty to an unparalleled degree, but also that the population uniformly respects others' liberty to a high degree. To base arguments for state intervention on some prior social compact is implausible, for an invisible-hand model of the state enables him to assert that the pattern of state power is no more the product of conscious, collective agreement than the pattern of traffic on a given Saturday night. As noted earlier, Nozick begins Anarchy, State and Utopia with the assertion that “individuals have rights.” He never defended this proposition, but its intuitive appeal is supposed to be widely shared. Last updated 12/23/00. Third, a holding is just if it is acquired by a rectification of past injustices in acquisition and transfer. If he somehow fails, then the respectful reception accorded Anarchy, State, and Utopia by his professional colleagues must lead us to reconsider the terms on which academic philosophers have lately been addressing themselves to public affairs. To be legitimate—and Nozick is consistent in using legitimacy to exclude any prior element of coercion—law must somehow be purged of the exercise of willed negative incentives, a problem different from eliminating the exercise of arbitrary will. Aa. Nozick seems aware that his old terms are not quite equal to this. That doctrine is the Nozickean doctrine. What is less known is that his philosophy has been so thoroughly refuted that he no longer defends it. Explore the scintillating April 2021 issue of Commentary. (He sees force and fraud as unjust means of transfer.) But he abandons this style of presentation abruptly when he comes to discuss justice within the state. It is not, of course, essential that Nozick feel bound by the works within the tradition in which he is writing, but it is disturbing that he writes as if arguments which derive from intuitions much more penetrating than his own were, like Locke's views on the social compact, of small account. There is no more a disrributing or distribution ofshares than there is a distributing of mates in asocietyin which persons choose whom they shall marry. For an object’s coming under one person's ownership changes the situation of all others. SECTION I ety, diverse persons control different resources, and new holdinss arise out ofthe voluntary exchanges and actions ofpersons. Anarchy, state, and utopia. It has three major flaws though. The essay, which he views as preparation for the maturer formulations of his current book, distinguishes the conditions of coercion from those of inducement and deterrence. The success of the book in the marketplace, as well as the high esteem in which Rawls is held by his colleagues and students, has spawned a cottage industry of criticism and commentary on Rawls's “ideal contractualism,” which has been misread in some quarters as a doctrine for levelers.1, Now one of Rawls's Harvard colleagues, singled out for mention three times in the final page of acknowledgments to A Theory of Justice, has entered the lists with a self-labeled libertarian work that joins issue with Rawls at several points but which, as befits an attempt at original theory, approaches the problems of justice and the state from a fresh perspective. The flower-child in each of us will share with him the first error and the jejune logician will be attracted to the second. Nozick's view, which challenges both Rawls' theory and the Marxian position, will likely In both cases the product of one's labor is expropriated by a higher will over which one has no real influence. Anarchy, state, and utopia (2nd ed.). Now, unlike Nozick's views on philosophical method, this one provides the real unifying thread of the book, which is less a celebration of liberty than a trembling at governmental coercion. They have advocated a middleward distribution of wealth and the political power flowing from it, as a means of preserving liberty by preventing class warfare between the rich and poor.