![]() ![]() While for some people, that sounds like a conclusion so obviously wrong it requires no answer, Nozick thinks it worth taking seriously. This might imply the moral necessity of anarchism. If people’s rights cannot be overridden, then most forms of government we’re familiar with lack moral legitimacy. Tell Me MoreĪ robust theory of rights such as the one Nozick outlined poses a significant challenge to political philosophy. Agree or disagree, Anarchy, State, and Utopia makes thought-provoking arguments that cannot be simply waved away. Praise for Anarchy, State, and Utopia’s clear and accessible writing style crossed ideological lines, and it won the National Book Award in 1975. He had been a Fulbright Scholar at Oxford University, President of the American Philosophical Association, and was Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard, that university’s highest honour. Nozick’s last book, Invariances, was published in 2001. Towards the end of a distinguished career as an academic during which he wrote a total of six books on a diverse range of subjects, Nozick was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1994 and he passed away in 2002. Nozick’s work is thus philosophical, but richly informed by economics, and has played a critical role in securing a respectable place in academic discourse for the classical liberal perspective. When he was a student, libertarian ideas were being discussed in economics departments, and he mentions being exposed to thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Murray Rothbard, whose economic liberalism overlapped political liberalism. Nozick was a professor of philosophy at Harvard University for almost his entire career. 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. Robert Nozick was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1938, and received his undergraduate degree at Columbia University in 1959. Despite many philosophers’ disagreements with Nozick’s arguments, those arguments could not be ignored. 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. 10).Robert Nozick was a professor of philosophy at Harvard University who is most famous for his contributions to political philosophy. 7, § 2) and other arguments attempting to justify more than the night-watchman state (ch. I shall thus not address his discussions of Rawls's theory of justice (ch. Below I shall focus only on his core argument. The argument is complex, and Nozick often inserts long – and very interesting – digressions. The other is that nothing more extensive than the night-watchman state is legitimate, except with the consent of all. One is that a night-watchman state (which protects only against violence, theft, fraud and breach of contract) could be legitimate, even without the consent of all those to be governed. ![]() This all changed with the publication of Rawls's articulation and defence of liberal egalitarianism and Nozick's libertarian challenge to the legitimacy of anything more than the night-watchman state.Īt the core of Nozick's book are two arguments. Moreover, to the extent that normative theories were considered, utilitarianism was the centre of attention. ![]() the semantics of moral discourse), with little attention given to normative moral theories. For much of the preceding half-century, under the influence of logical positivism's heavy emphasis on empirical verifiability, much of moral philosophy was taken up with metaethics (e.g. Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), along with John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), radically changed the landscape in analytic political philosophy.
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