- Length
- 400 pagesBasic Books, 1974; reissued with a new foreword 2013
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
The fastest and sharpest reply in modern political philosophy, written three years after the book it answers by a colleague in the same building. Its central case - a basketball player and a million willing spectators - is the most efficient argument against redistributive theories anyone has produced.
- Date
- 1974
- Author
- Robert Nozick
- Region
- Harvard, United States
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 3 years
The standard statement of the libertarian position in academic philosophy, and one whose author spent his later career on other subjects and partly distanced himself from it.
What the book says
Three arguments in one book, of which the middle one is the famous one. The first asks whether any state can be justified to an anarchist, and argues that it can: from a condition with no state, protective associations would form, one would come to dominate a territory by ordinary competitive processes, and it would end up compensating those it prohibited from private enforcement - producing a minimal state without anyone violating anyone's rights along the way. The second argues that nothing more extensive than that minimal state can be justified. Here Nozick sets out an entitlement theory: a distribution is just if it arose by just acquisition and just transfer, and no further question about its shape arises. He tests this with a case. Suppose a distribution you consider perfectly just, and suppose a million people each choose to pay a small sum to watch a basketball player they admire; the player ends up far richer than anyone, and every step was voluntary. Any theory that condemns the outcome must condemn the choices, which means continuous interference with what people do with what is legitimately theirs. The third part imagines utopia not as one design but as a framework in which many communities can be tried.
What it argues
That individuals have rights so strong that they function as constraints on what may be done to them, and that almost everything a modern state does violates them. The entitlement theory has three parts: how holdings may justly be acquired, how they may justly be transferred, and how past injustices are to be rectified - and Nozick admits the third is the one he cannot work out, which matters more than it is usually allowed to. Taxation for redistribution is described as forced labour, since it takes the product of hours a person worked and directs it to purposes they did not choose. The minimal state limited to protection, enforcement of contracts and defence is the most that can be justified; the utopia section then argues that this is not an austere conclusion, because it permits every kind of voluntary community including egalitarian ones.
What it answered
Rawls, and behind him the assumption that political philosophy's job is to specify a just outcome. Nozick's deeper target is the whole family of theories he calls patterned - anything of the form to each according to their need, merit, contribution or moral desert - and his argument is that all of them are unstable against liberty. He also answers the anarchist, at length, in the first part, which is the section libertarians read least and philosophers often find most interesting.
How it argues
By example and by ingenuity, in a voice unlike anyone else in the field. Nozick is playful, digressive and openly unfinished - he says in the preface that he does not think a philosopher should present a seamless structure and that he is happy to leave loose threads visible. The arguments arrive as puzzles: the basketball player, the experience machine, the tale of the slave with nine masters, and dozens of footnotes chasing thoughts that go nowhere. This is why the book is more enjoyable than most of what it argues with and why its critics say it substitutes intuitions for argument.
The moment
Harvard in the early 1970s, the same department and the same decade as A Theory of Justice, with the war, the draft and the expansion of the American welfare state all in the background. Nozick said he had arrived at libertarianism reluctantly and against his own initial convictions, having been unable to answer arguments he had set out to refute. The book was written quickly, in about a year.
How it travelled
Into two audiences that barely overlap. In academic philosophy it made libertarianism a position that had to be answered, and the entitlement theory is taught wherever distributive justice is. Outside it, the book became a foundational text for a political movement whose economic programme Nozick had little to do with, and its arguments circulate in forms he would not have recognised. The experience machine, meanwhile, had its own separate career in the philosophy of wellbeing, cited by people with no interest in the politics.
The strongest objection
That the theory cannot start, because the rectification principle is missing. Nozick's account says a holding is just if it descends by legitimate steps from a legitimate original acquisition - but no actual holdings do. The history of every country includes conquest, expropriation, enslavement and fraud, and Nozick concedes that a full theory would need a principle of rectification and that he does not have one. Without it the entitlement theory cannot evaluate any real distribution, and the appeal to what people freely did with what was legitimately theirs is applied to holdings whose legitimacy is exactly what is in question. He also never defends the Lockean proviso on acquisition in the detail the argument requires.
Why read it
For the second part, which is where the philosophy is, and for the sheer pleasure of the writing - it is the most entertaining book in this section by some distance. The Wilt Chamberlain passage is three pages and worth more than most articles. Read it with Rawls; neither is fully intelligible without the other.
- First printed
- 1974
- First in English
- 1974
- Digitised
- No
Never revised. Nozick's later books - Philosophical Explanations, The Examined Life, Invariances - are on other subjects, and he wrote very little more on political philosophy.
Written in English. In copyright.
Where it stands
Live. The entitlement theory is the standing alternative to distributive accounts, the Wilt Chamberlain case is in every anthology, and the argument about whether liberty upsets patterns is where the disagreement between the two camps still concentrates.
On quoting this book
In copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether Nozick abandoned the position is argued. In The Examined Life he described the libertarianism of this book as seriously inadequate, and later remarks partly walked that back, so his final view is genuinely unclear. Whether the invisible-hand derivation of the minimal state works - whether the dominant agency really can prohibit independents and compensate them without violating rights - has been attacked from the anarchist side since 1974. And how much weight the intuitions the book relies on can bear is the standing methodological complaint about it.