Robert Nozick

Robert Nozick an American political philosopher (1938-2002), best known for Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a libertarian defence of the minimal state that became one of the most discussed works of political philosophy in the English-speaking world. He taught for many years at Harvard University and wrote on topics ranging from distributive justice to the nature of the self.

Life and Education

Robert Nozick was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1938, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia. He studied at Columbia University and then at Princeton, where he received his doctorate in 1963 with a dissertation on decision theory and the philosophy of science. He taught at Harvard, at Rockefeller University and again at Harvard, where he became the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and remained until his death.

His early work was in analytic philosophy and in the theory of rational choice. He helped to advance a theory of explanation and wrote on the foundations of decision making, showing an unusual range of interests. Even as a young teacher he was known for his technical skill, his wit and his willingness to press an argument into unexpected territory.

He was married to the poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and his later books reveal a widening of concern from technical analysis to questions of meaning and value. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2002. His influence endures less through a school than through the arguments he set in motion.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Anarchy, State, and Utopia appeared in 1974 and stands as the most rigorous statement of libertarian political philosophy in the twentieth century. Nozick began from a state of nature resembling the one described by Locke and argued that, from an initial position in which no state exists, a minimal state could arise by morally permissible steps without violating anyone's rights.

He contended that only a minimal state, limited to the protection of persons against force, theft and fraud, can be justified. Any more extensive state must either coerce some citizens in ways they do not deserve or violate the rights that make a state legitimate in the first place. This conclusion set him directly against the theory of distributive justice advanced by John Rawls.

The book also sketched a vision of utopia as a framework in which many different communities and ways of life could coexist, provided no one was forced to join them. The argument is notable for its clarity, its imaginative examples and its refusal to rely on intuition alone where an argument could be produced.

The Entitlement Theory of Justice

Nozick's central contribution to political philosophy is the entitlement theory of justice in holdings. He distinguished three principles: justice in acquisition, which governs how unowned things may come to be owned; justice in transfer, which governs how holdings may pass from one person to another; and the rectification of past injustice. A distribution is just, he argued, if it arises from just steps of these kinds.

This approach is historical rather than patterned. It does not ask whether a distribution matches some favoured pattern such as equality, but asks how it came about. Nozick argued that any attempt to preserve a fixed pattern will necessarily interfere with the free choices of individuals and so must be repeated and enforced.

His famous example of the basketball player Wilt Chamberlain illustrated the claim that liberty upsets patterns. If many people freely pay a small sum to watch him play, his wealth grows by their choices, and to correct the resulting inequality would be to forbid those voluntary transfers. The argument has been debated ever since by egalitarian and libertarian writers alike.

Other Philosophical Work

Beyond political philosophy Nozick wrote Philosophical Explanations, a wide-ranging book that treated knowledge, free will, personal identity and the meaning of life in an exploratory manner. He offered a tracking account of knowledge, on which a belief counts as knowledge when it varies with the truth of what is believed, and he explored a conception of value that goes beyond explanation.

The Examined Life, published in 1989, turned to the conduct of life and to questions of the good. He discussed love, creativity and the value of being led by values rather than merely being pushed by causes. The book showed a thinker willing to be personal and tentative in a way unusual among professional philosophers.

In The Nature of Rationality he examined why reason matters and how rational choice can incorporate symbolic and evidential considerations beyond simple maximisation. His last book, Invariances, addressed objectivity, necessity and the structure of the world. The range across these volumes is remarkably broad.

Influence and Legacy

Anarchy, State, and Utopia gave the libertarian tradition its most sophisticated philosophical expression and made the minimal state a serious subject of academic debate. It is widely taught alongside the rival theory of Rawls, and the contrast between the two books shaped a generation of work in political philosophy. Many arguments now standard in the field were first clearly stated by Nozick.

Critics have raised objections about the indeterminacy of acquisition, the difficulty of rectifying historical injustice and the problem of allowing extensive inequalities. Defenders have refined and extended his theses, and his work also influenced debates in law and economics. Even those who reject his conclusions often adopt his method.

He is remembered as a thinker of extraordinary inventiveness who brought analytic rigour to the oldest questions of politics. He was also, beneath the technical arguments, a philosopher of the examined life, concerned with what makes human existence meaningful. His influence continues in political, legal and moral thought.

See also

• Libertarianism
• Minimal state
• John Rawls
• Distributive justice