Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick was an influential American philosopher known for his contributions to political philosophy, particularly libertarianism. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1938 to Jewish parents of Russian descent, he developed a passion for philosophy during his teenage years, which led him to pursue studies at Columbia University and later Princeton. Nozick's first major work, *Anarchy, State, and Utopia* (1974), emerged as a significant response to John Rawls's *A Theory of Justice*, advocating for a minimal state that prioritizes individual rights over redistributive justice.
In this seminal text, he introduced the "entitlement theory," outlining how property rights should be acquired, transferred, and rectified in cases of injustice. Nozick's ideas sparked extensive debate and criticism, particularly regarding his libertarian stance and assumptions about individual rights. His later works, such as *Philosophical Explanations* and *The Examined Life*, expanded his philosophical inquiries beyond political theory to topics in epistemology, ethics, and the human experience.
Nozick's impact on philosophy and political thought has been profound, revitalizing interest in normative political theory within the analytic tradition. His defense of libertarianism has resonated with many contemporary political thinkers and contributed to shifts in political discourse, particularly during the 1980s. He passed away in 2002, but his legacy continues to influence discussions of individual liberty and social justice.
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Robert Nozick
American philosopher
- Born: November 16, 1938
- Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
- Died: January 23, 2002
- Place of death: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Nozick helped revive the field of political philosophy in the analytic philosophical tradition. His formulation and defense of libertarianism provided an alternative to the prevailing liberalism of academic circles, and thereby contributed to a change in the intellectual climate.
Early Life
Robert Nozick (NAWZ-ihk) was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, the only child of Jewish parents of Russian extraction. He developed an interest in philosophy by the time he was fifteen or sixteen years old. He recalls wandering the streets of Brooklyn carrying a paperback copy of Plato’s Republic, hoping that someone would notice and discuss philosophy with him. His parents encouraged him to go into medicine, but the philosophy courses he took at Columbia University only deepened his interest in philosophy. Also during this period, Nozick joined the Socialist Party and founded the Columbia branch of the Student League for Industrial Democracy. Despite failing five courses (including three in philosophy) he graduated from Columbia in 1959.
Nozick then went to Princeton University for graduate work in philosophy. While there he met Carl Hempel, a former member of the logical positivism movement, and was inspired to pursue studies in rationality and decision theory. He wrote his dissertation under Hempel’s direction on decision theory and received his Ph.D. in 1963. After spending 1963-1964 at Oxford University on a Fulbright Fellowship, Nozick returned to Princeton and taught there for a year. In 1965 he was offered a teaching position at Harvard. In 1969 he received tenure and was promoted to full professor.
Life’s Work
Although Nozick had flirted with socialism and left-wing politics during his undergraduate days, reading libertarian theorists such as F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman led him to abandon those views. Another factor that brought Nozick to political views very different from those he held early was the publication in 1971 of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice , an influential defense of liberalism and the welfare state. Rawls, Nozick’s colleague at Harvard, argued that inequalities in the distribution of social goods are justifiable only when such inequalities offer the greatest possible gain to the worst-off in society. Nozick’s first book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), is considered by many his response to Rawls.
The starting point of Anarchy, State, and Utopia is that individuals have rights that severely limit what others may do to them. Nozick argues in the first part of the book that this implies that the only sort of state that is justifiable is a minimal “night-watchman” state, whose only functions are enforcing contracts, protecting private property, and civil defense. All other roles that have been played by governments, such as that of managing education and health care, should be taken over by private agencies.
Nozick next argues that any state that goes beyond the minimal state is unjust. Many political theories hold that the state should redistribute wealth through taxation in order to achieve a just “pattern of distribution.” Nozick, in his well-known “Wilt Chamberlain” thought experiment, argues that liberty upsets patterns. Suppose that a just pattern of distribution has been achieved (for example, for the equalitarian this would be where everyone has an equal share). Now suppose that Wilt Chamberlain offers to play basketball on the condition that each spectator pays him a certain amount, and suppose many people agree to these terms. This means that in a short time people will have voluntarily moved from the original distribution to a new distribution. However, if the original pattern was just, then the pattern theorist seems committed to saying that the new pattern is unjust. It is difficult to see how this new pattern could be unjust since people voluntarily moved from the original pattern, which was assumed to be just. Nozick points out that the only way to preserve a pattern is to involve either massive and constant redistributions of wealth or prevent people from exercising their liberty by prohibiting them from, in Nozick’s words, “engaging in capitalist acts in private.” Nozick concludes all that political theory can legitimately say about the distribution of social goods is contained in his “entitlement theory.”
Entitlement theory has three parts: specifying when a person justly acquires something, specifying the conditions for just transfers of property, and rectifying past injustices in acquisition and transfer. While it might seem that a night-watchman state would fall far short of utopia, Nozick argues in final part of the book that given the widely varying conceptions of the good life, the minimal state provides the only framework in which individuals will be free to pursue what is most important to them.
The impact of Anarchy, State, and Utopia was immediate and profound. It won the 1975 National Book Award for Philosophy and Religion, and it inspired many books and articles, both supportive and critical. Criticisms of it included the following: Nozick assumes without sufficient justification that liberty trumps all other values; he assumes that individuals have absolute and inviolable rights without providing a foundation for these rights; the entitlement theory of distributive justice is impractical since it implies, for example, that much of the United States really belongs to Native Americans; it hardly seems that a society governed by libertarian principles could be a good or desirable society if these principles mean that a significant percentage of the population might live in absolute poverty.
Given the amount of attention Anarchy, State, and Utopia received, it would have been understandable if Nozick had spent the rest of his career developing and defending his political theory. He remarked, however, that he did not want to spend the rest of his life writing variations on “Son of Anarchy, State, and Utopia.” Instead, he went on to do significant work in other areas of philosophy. His next book, Philosophical Explanations (1981), mostly written while on sabbatical in Israel, deals with issues in epistemology, metaphysics, and the foundations of ethics. In 1989 he published The Examined Life , a nontechnical exploration of topics such as love, sex, death, the Holocaust, and the meaning of life. His fourth book, The Nature of Rationality (1993), revisited the topics of his dissertation. In 1997, a collection of his articles, essays, reviews, and several examples of his philosophical short fiction was published as Socratic Puzzles.
Nozick’s distinguished career was capped by delivering the John Locke Lectures in 1997, by his presidency of the eastern division of the American Philosophical Association in 1997-1998, and by his appointment as Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in 1998 at Harvard. His last book, Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World , was published in 2001, just a few months before his death from cancer on January 23, 2002. He had been diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1994 and was given just a few months to live. He lived almost another decade.
Significance
Nozick’s greatest impact has undoubtedly been his work in political philosophy. Along with Rawls, he resuscitated the field of political philosophy in the analytic tradition. Because many analytic philosophers held that a statement is meaningful only if it is empirically verifiable, it was argued that the only legitimate task for ethics and political philosophy was to explain how evaluative language functions. Rawls and Nozick upended that view by producing works of normative political theory that satisfied analytic philosophy’s high standards of clarity and rigorous argumentation.
Nozick’s defense of libertarianism and his critique of welfare liberalism have also been influential in contemporary political philosophy. Many libertarian and conservative political thinkers cite Anarchy, State, and Utopia as a major inspiration. While it is difficult to gauge the impact of Nozick’s views on real-world politics, it is not unreasonable to suppose that they contributed to the tilt to the right in politics during the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1980’s. Regarding his influence on conservatives, Nozick regretted that they failed to see that his argument for a free market also entailed libertarianism on social issues such as gay and lesbian rights and on drug legalization. For Nozick, these were all matters of individual liberty and formed an interconnected whole.
Bibliography
Borradori, Giovanna. The American Philosopher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. A collection of interviews with nine American philosophers, including Nozick, that examines the nature of philosophy and Nozick’s own philosophical development.
Feser, Edward. On Nozick. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 2004. A sympathetic interpretation and vigorous defense of Nozick’s political philosophy. An accessible and useful introduction.
Lacy, A. R. Robert Nozick. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. A comprehensive account of Nozick’s philosophy covering his political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, decision theory, and ethics.
Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974. Nozick’s first and most influential book. He makes the case for the libertarian view that only the minimal state is justifiable.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. Nozick’s second book covers philosophical methodology, topics in metaphysics and epistemology, and the foundations of ethics.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Socratic Puzzles. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Collection of Nozick’s essays and reviews on topics ranging from decision theory to animal rights.
Paul, Jeffrey. Reading Nozick: Essays on “Anarchy, State, and Utopia.” Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1982. Essays on Nozick’s political theory, including several influential and incisive criticisms of libertarianism. Essential reading for understanding Nozick’s libertarianism.
Schmidtz, David. Robert Nozick. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. A wide-ranging collection of essays covering many aspects of Nozick’s thought.