The Essential Robert Nozick

by Aeon J. Skoble

Robert Nozick was a professor of philosophy at Harvard University who is most famous for his contributions to political philosophy. His 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia helped establish the classical liberal or libertarian perspective as a viable alternative to redistributive egalitarian liberalism and to socialism. Despite many philosophers’ disagreements with Nozick’s arguments, those arguments could not be ignored. Robert Nozick was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1938, and received his undergraduate degree at Columbia University in 1959. At Columbia he was active in socialist politics, but during his time there and in graduate school at Princeton University, he was exposed to a variety of political perspectives, and he notes in the preface to his most famous book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, that it was discussions with friends that “led me to take libertarian views seriously enough to want to refute them, and so to pursue the subject further.” This included ideas such as individual rights, the need for limits on government, and the wealth-growing mechanisms of a free market system.

Genres: Philosophy

42 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 13, 2020

Reviews

[Mike Cheng · Rating 2 out of 5]

Robert Nozick is considered a seminal figure in the libertarian movement and best known for his book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (ASU). Although classical liberalism (i.e., the concepts of individual rights, limited government, and free markets ) did come about much earlier - largely due to the work of John Locke, America’s Founding Fathers, and the Austrian School of Economics - by the mid1970s governments, including that of the United States, were becoming ever more expansive. The zeitgeist trended toward support for the Leviathan (a term coined by Thomas Hobbes to refer to a powerful and sovereign central authority ) and a nanny state that would provide welfare to the indigent and ensure “fairness” to the disadvantaged. (Consider what was happening in America at the time - the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and heated discourse about women’s reproductive rights.)
Mr. Nozick was born in Brooklyn in 1938. He received his undergraduate degree at Columbia University in 1959, and during that time was active in socialist politics (e.g., he was a member of the school’s Young People’s Socialist League). He did, however, receive exposure to other political philosophies at Columbia as well as in graduate school at Princeton, including the work of the aforementioned Austrian School and the works of Ludwig Von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Mr. Nozick was also well versed in economics, and published ASU as the libertarian rebuttal to John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Despite American libertarianism being a somewhat esoteric philosophy at the time, Mr. Nozick and ASU arguably set the stage for what it is today. Interestingly, Mr. Nozick considered himself the opposite of a political conservative in most of his views and attitudes, even though his libertarianism is popular in the ideology of modern conservatism.
Mr. Nozick went on to write five other books following ASU, and passed away in 2002. This biography of Mr. Nozick is less about him, and more a primer on ASU.

[Lucille Nguyen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Might well be described as "the essential summary of Anarchy, State, and Utopia." Given the wide oeuvre of Nozick's philosophical works, this only summarized one. But nonetheless a solid summary of the book.