Robert Nozick and the Good Fight
by David Kelley"Whoever makes something, having bought or contracted for all other held resources used in the process…is entitled to it. The situation is not one of something's getting made, and there being an open question of who is to get it. Things come into the world already attached to people having entitlements over them…. Those who start afresh to complete 'to each according to his ____' treat objects as if they appeared from nowhere, out of nothing."
I first read that passage in a book manuscript that was circulating in the Princeton University philosophy department in 1974. It reminded me of the words Ayn Rand put in the mouth of her hero in Atlas Shrugged:
"The problem of production, they tell you, has been solved and deserves no study or concern; the only problem left for your 'reflexes' to solve is now the problem of distribution. Who solved the problem of production? Humanity, they answer. What was the solution? The goods are here. How did they get here? Somehow."
Indeed, the manuscript sounded many of the same political themes as Rand's novel: that individuals have rights, including the right to own property and trade it freely in a capitalist economy; that the function of government is strictly and solely to protect those rights; and that it is wrong for the government to redistribute income.
I was stunned to learn that the author, Robert Nozick, had been a star in Princeton's graduate philosophy program a decade before and was now a Harvard professor. With one or two exceptions, I had never met, read the works of, or even heard of any academic philosopher who espoused libertarianism. Here was a new and intellectually powerful advocate—and at Harvard, no less.
When Anarchy, State, and Utopia was published later that year, the entire intellectual world was stunned. Philosophy professors weren't supposed to think like this. For one thing, the book dealt with real issues of property, production, and redistribution. Political philosophers at the time were obsessed with highly technical issues, many of them involving the language of politics, not the substance. It had been only a few years since the eminent John Rawls brought new life to the field with A Theory of Justice. Rawls outlined a theory of a just society, attempting to reconcile liberty with the welfare state. His argument was new and sophisticated, but his conclusions were safely, respectably liberal. Nozick, on the other hand, was a radical. A young professor, with a word-of-mouth reputation for brilliance but only a few publications to his credit, he was putting forward a view unheard of in polite academic society. He even had a calm but devastating critique of Rawls's theory.
Robert Nozick died in January at age 63. He had turned to other topics after Anarchy, State, and Utopia. His later works were immensely ambitious, probing deeply into questions of knowledge and nature, human life and human choice. But it seems likely that he will be remembered best for his first book.
Nozick's point of departure was the "principle that individuals are ends and not merely means; they may not be sacrificed or used for the achieving of other ends without their consent. Individuals are inviolable." This statement of moral individualism was the basis for his view that individuals possess rights to life, liberty, and property, and that such rights may not be sacrificed in the name of welfare, equality, or any other alleged social value.
Anarchy, State, and Utopia went on to make two enduring contributions to political philosophy. One was to explain how a government could arise in the first place. Nozick used the old thought experiment of a "state of nature"—a society in which people live and interact but have no established political system—to ask the question: How could a government legitimately be formed in such a society? Could anything justify it in claiming sole jurisdiction over the society? Anarcho-capitalists in the libertarian movement had answered this question in the negative. They argued that even a minimal state, limited to the function of protecting individual rights, would nevertheless violate rights by prohibiting rival "protection agencies" from providing the same service.
In reply, Nozick explored how a marketplace of competitive protection agencies would work, and what each of them would be morally entitled to do. Drawing on technical work in economics and law as well as philosophy, he outlined the complex procedural issues involved in using force to protect rights, respond to crime and the threat of crime, and settle disputes. He showed why no protection agency could serve its "clients" fully unless it had the power to make itself the court of final appeal from the decision of any other agency. In effect, it would have to be a government.
Nozick's second enduring contribution was to challenge the political assumptions of the Left. Nothing more than a minimal state, he claimed, could be justified. The polemical chapters of Anarchy, State, and Utopia subject the welfare state and socialism to a withering critique. Political philosophers like Rawls accepted individual liberty as a value but assumed that it is compatible with welfare rights, the redistribution of wealth, and regulation of business and the economy. Socialists claimed to believe in liberty but insisted that it requires enforced equality and collective control. Nozick relentlessly exposed the fallacies in these views.
Though he made ample use of economic theory in this critique, he wrote primarily from a moral point of view. Like Rand, he enraged the Left by denying them the moral high ground—and he did so with great wit. "The socialist society," said Nozick, "would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults." In a discussion of the income tax as a device for redistribution, he argued that "taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor." On one issue after another, he punctured the political idealism of those who wanted government to pursue their vision of utopia; he did it by showing that any such program uses coercion to violate individual autonomy.
In the world of academic philosophy, Nozick became the most prominent advocate of libertarianism, the theorist with whom every other viewpoint had to contend. This was not because his case for freedom was fundamentally original. Many of the arguments he used can be found in the long tradition of classical liberalism, from John Locke in the seventeenth century to Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand in our own era. The reason for Nozick's prominence was principally that he cast the arguments in the method and style of analytic philosophy, the approach that dominates academic philosophy in English-speaking countries.
As the name suggests, analytic philosophers consider their job to be the close and detailed analysis of issues. They prize philosophical dissection: subtle distinctions, rigorous arguments, precise formulations of positions. Nozick was a master of this approach. He handled the scalpel of analysis with a speed and dexterity that awed his colleagues, even when they didn't like his views. And indeed, his book did much to clarify issues of distributive justice and the nature of the conflict between libertarians and egalitarians.
But the goal of close analysis creates occupational hazards. Analytic philosophers are often insensitive to the wider context of the issues they deal with and unwilling—or unable—to examine their own fundamental assumptions, concepts, and methods. As a result, they tend to take for granted the current state of play in their specialist domains, treating complex, derivative concepts and assumptions as axiomatic. Nozick was no exception.
This was nowhere clearer, to me at least, than in an early article he wrote criticizing Rand's moral and political philosophy. Nozick more or less completely failed to come to grips with Rand's theory, spinning his wheels in an effort to break apart her integrated view of human life and values. In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, the shortcoming of his method was most evident in his failure to explain why individuals are ends in themselves and why they are inviolable; his statement of the principle was about as far as he went. Nozick did not accept Rand's explanation that individuals are ends in themselves because life is metaphysically an end in itself, the fundamental value that each person seeks to realize. But he did not offer any alternative.
Nevertheless, Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a genuine classic in the literature of freedom. Robert Nozick fought the good fight with intellectual brilliance, moral idealism, and personal courage. Everyone else engaged in that fight owes him a large debt of gratitude.
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