Analytic & pragmatist · 1938–2002
Robert Nozick
Harvard libertarian who answered Rawls
Individuals have rights that set strict limits on what the state may do; a distribution is just if it arose from just acquisition and free exchange, whatever pattern results, so only a minimal state is justified.
Life and thought
Robert Nozick (1938–2002) was born in Brooklyn to a Jewish family from Russia, was a socialist student activist at Columbia, and took his doctorate at Princeton. He joined Harvard’s philosophy department in 1969, became a colleague of Rawls and stayed there for the rest of his life. Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), written in a brilliant, playful style, won a National Book Award; afterwards he moved restlessly to other subjects, from knowledge and free will to the meaning of life.
Nozick starts from rights: individuals have rights that no one, the state included, may violate. A distribution of goods is just if it arose from just acquisition and voluntary transfer, whatever pattern results. His Wilt Chamberlain example: begin from any distribution you think fair; if a million fans each freely pay to watch the basketball star play, he grows rich and nobody’s rights are violated, so keeping any fixed pattern would mean constantly interfering with free choices. Only a minimal state that protects against force, theft and fraud is justified, and he argued that redistributive taxation is on a par with forced labour.