Nozick, Robert

▪ 2003

      American political philosopher (b. Nov. 16, 1938, New York, N.Y.—d. Jan. 23, 2002, Cambridge, Mass.), was a highly influential champion of libertarianism; in his first and best-known book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), he advocated the “minimal state”—a government whose role is limited to protecting citizens from violence, theft, and breach of contract. After earning advanced degrees from Princeton University (M.A., 1961; Ph.D., 1963), Nozick embarked on a long career in academia. He was a full professor of philosophy at Harvard University from 1969 until his death. Initially associated with socialist organizations, Nozick eventually came to defend capitalism and offer pointed criticism of the modern welfare state. In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, he argued that the state could not redistribute wealth without violating the rights of the individual; the book was honoured with a National Book Award in 1975. Nozick's other writings included Philosophical Explanations (1981), The Examined Life (1989), The Nature of Rationality (1993), and Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World (2001).

* * *

▪ American philosopher

born November 16, 1938, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.

died January 23, 2002, Cambridge, Massachusetts

 American philosopher, best known for his rigorous defense of libertarianism in his first major work, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). A wide-ranging thinker, Nozick also made important contributions to epistemology, the problem of personal identity, and decision theory.

      Nozick was the only child of Max Nozick, a Russian immigrant and businessman, and Sophie Cohen Nozick. After attending public school in Brooklyn, Nozick enrolled at Columbia College, where he earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1959. He received a Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton University in 1963, having written a dissertation on decision theory under Carl Hempel (Hempel, Carl Gustav). He taught at Princeton (1962–65), Harvard University (1965–67), and Rockefeller University (1967–69); in 1969, when he was 30 years old, he returned to Harvard as one of the youngest full professors in the university's history. At Harvard for the remainder of his teaching career, he was appointed Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy in 1985 and Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in 1998.

      During his high school and college years, Nozick was a member of the student New Left and an enthusiastic socialist. At Columbia he helped to found a campus branch of the League for Industrial Democracy, a precursor of the Students for a Democratic Society. While in graduate school he read works by libertarian thinkers such as F.A. Hayek (Hayek, F.A.) and Ludwig von Mises (Mises, Ludwig von), and his political views began to change. His conversion to libertarianism culminated in 1974 with the publication of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a closely argued and highly original defense of the libertarian “minimal state” and a critique of the social-democratic liberalism of his Harvard colleague John Rawls (Rawls, John). Immediately hailed by conservative intellectuals, the work became a kind of philosophical manifesto of the New Right, though Nozick himself was not entirely comfortable with this association.

      The main purpose of Anarchy, State, and Utopia is to show that the minimal state, and only the minimal state, is morally justified. By a minimal state Nozick means a state that functions essentially as a “night watchman,” with powers limited to those necessary to protect citizens against violence, theft, and fraud. By arguing that the minimal state is justified, Nozick seeks to refute anarchism, which opposes any state whatsoever; by arguing that no more than the minimal state is justified, Nozick seeks to refute modern forms of liberalism, as well as socialism and other leftist ideologies, which contend that, in addition to its powers as a night watchman, the state should have the powers to regulate the economic activities of citizens, to redistribute wealth in the direction of greater equality, and to provide social services such as education and health care.

      Against anarchism, Nozick claims that a minimal state is justified because it (or something very much like it) would arise spontaneously among people living in a hypothetical “state of nature” through transactions that would not involve the violation of anyone's natural rights. Following the 17th-century English philosopher John Locke (Locke, John), Nozick assumes that everyone possesses the natural rights (natural law) to life, liberty, and property, including the right to claim as property the fruits or products of one's labour and the right to dispose of one's property as one sees fit (provided that in doing so one does not violate the rights of anyone else). Everyone also has the natural right to punish those who violate or attempt to violate one's own natural rights. Because defending one's natural rights in a state of nature would be difficult for anyone to do on his own, individuals would band together to form “protection associations,” in which members would work together to defend each other's rights and to punish rights violators. Eventually, some of these associations would develop into private businesses offering protection and punishment services for a fee. The great importance that individuals would attach to such services would give the largest protection firms a natural competitive advantage, and eventually only one firm, or a confederation of firms, would control all the protection and punishment business in the community. Because this firm (or confederation of firms) would have a monopoly of force in the territory of the community and because it would protect the rights of everyone living there, it would constitute a minimal state in the libertarian sense. And because the minimal state would come about without violating anyone's natural rights, a state with at least its powers is justified.

      Against liberalism and ideologies farther left, Nozick claims that no more than the minimal state is justified, because any state with more extensive powers would violate the natural rights of its citizens. Thus the state should not have the power to control prices or to set a minimum wage, because doing so would violate the natural right of citizens to dispose of their property, including their labour, as they see fit. For similar reasons, the state should not have the power to establish public education or health care through taxes (taxation) imposed on citizens who may wish to spend their money on private services instead. Indeed, according to Nozick, any mandatory taxation used to fund services or benefits other than those constitutive of the minimal state is unjust, because such taxation amounts to a kind of “forced labour” for the state by those who must pay the tax.

      Nozick's vision of legitimate state power thus contrasts markedly with that of Rawls (Rawls, John) and his followers. Rawls argues that the state should have whatever powers are necessary to ensure that those citizens who are least well-off are as well-off as they can be (though these powers must be consistent with a variety of basic rights and freedoms). This viewpoint is derived from Rawls's theory of justice, one principle of which is that an unequal distribution of wealth and income (wealth and income, distribution of) is acceptable only if those at the bottom are better off than they would be under any other distribution. Nozick's response to such arguments is to claim that they rest on a false conception of distributive justice: they wrongly define a just distribution in terms of the pattern it exhibits at a given time (e.g., an equal distribution or a distribution that is unequal to a certain extent) or in terms of the historical circumstances surrounding its development (e.g., those who worked the hardest have more) rather than in terms of the nature of the transactions through which the distribution came about. For Nozick, any distribution of “holdings,” as he calls them, no matter how unequal, is just if (and only if) it arises from a just distribution through legitimate means. One legitimate means is the appropriation of something that is unowned in circumstances where the acquisition would not disadvantage others. A second means is the voluntary transfer of ownership of holdings to someone else. A third means is the rectification of past injustices in the acquisition or transfer of holdings. According to Nozick, anyone who acquired what he has through these means is morally entitled to it. Thus the “entitlement” theory of justice states that the distribution of holdings in a society is just if (and only if) everyone in that society is entitled to what he has.

      To show that theories of justice based on patterns or historical circumstances are false, Nozick devised a simple but ingenious objection, which came to be known as the “Wilt Chamberlain” argument. Assume, he says, that the distribution of holdings in a given society is just according to some theory based on patterns or historical circumstances—e.g., the egalitarian theory, according to which only a strictly equal distribution of holdings is just. In this society, Wilt Chamberlain is an excellent basketball player, and many teams compete with each other to engage his services. Chamberlain eventually agrees to play for a certain team on the condition that everyone who attends a game in which he plays puts 25 cents in a special box at the gate, the contents of which will go to him. During the season, one million fans attend the team's games, and so Chamberlain receives $250,000. Now, however, the supposedly just distribution of holdings is upset, because Chamberlain has $250,000 more than anyone else. Is the new distribution unjust? The strong intuition that it is not unjust is accounted for by Nozick's entitlement theory (because Chamberlain acquired his holdings by legitimate means) but conflicts with the egalitarian theory. Nozick contends that this argument generalizes to any theory based on patterns or historical circumstances, because any distribution dictated by such a theory could be upset by ordinary and unobjectionable transactions like the one involving Chamberlain. Nozick concludes that any society that attempted to implement such a theory would have to intrude grossly on the liberty of its citizens in order to enforce the distribution it considers just. “The socialist society,” as he puts it, “would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.”

      Nozick emphasizes that his vision of the minimal state is inclusive and is compatible with the existence of smaller communities based on varying theories of justice. A group that wished to form a socialist community governed by an egalitarian theory would be free to do so, as long as it did not force others to join the community against their will. Indeed, every group would enjoy the same freedom to realize its own idea of a good society. In this way, according to Nozick, the minimal state constitutes a “framework for utopia.”

      Anarchy, State, and Utopia has generated an enormous secondary literature, much of it critical. Unlike Rawls, however, Nozick did not attempt to defend or revise his political views in published work. Nozick's other books include Philosophical Explanations (1981), The Nature of Rationality (1993), and Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World (2001).

* * *