Political Philosophy

Anarchy, State, and Utopia

♡+

Robert Nozick

1974

Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) is Robert Nozick's first and most celebrated book, and one of the most important works of political philosophy of the twentieth century. Written partly as a response to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), it defends a libertarian theory of justice and limited government from a firmly individualist starting point. Nozick begins with the Lockean premise that individuals have rights — inviolable side constraints on what others may do to them — and argues that the only legitimate state is the minimal state: one limited to protecting individuals against violence, theft, and fraud, and enforcing contracts. Any more extensive state violates the rights of individuals by taxing them for purposes they have not consented to. The book's central positive contribution is the entitlement theory of justice: distributions of goods are just if they arose from just initial acquisitions and just voluntary transfers, regardless of their pattern. Nozick uses the "Wilt Chamberlain argument" to show that any attempt to enforce a patterned distribution of resources — whether egalitarian or meritocratic — will inevitably require continuous interference with voluntary exchanges and therefore violate individual liberty. The book concludes with a utopian framework: the minimal state is actually the best framework for utopia, because it allows any group to establish its own community according to its own principles, so long as membership is voluntary.