Nozick and the libertarian challenge

Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) is the most powerful libertarian work of the twentieth century, and the standing reply to Rawls. Published three years after A Theory of Justice and awarded the National Book Award, it argues that only a minimal state — limited to protection against force, theft, and fraud, and to the enforcement of contracts — can be justified, and that any more extensive state violates individual rights.

The book has three projects. Against the individualist anarchist, Nozick argues that a minimal state could arise from a state of nature by an 'invisible-hand' process without anyone's rights being violated. Against the redistributivist — Rawls above all — he argues that nothing more extensive than the minimal state is justified, because redistributive taxation infringes the rights people hold over themselves and their holdings. Finally he sketches a 'framework for utopia' in which the minimal state is the common ground for a plurality of communities.

Two foundations carry the whole structure. The first is self-ownership: each person owns themselves — their body, talents, and labour — fully and exclusively. The second is the view of rights as side constraints rather than goals to be promoted. On these Nozick builds the entitlement theory of justice in holdings: a distribution is just if it arose by legitimate steps, whatever pattern results.

This note reconstructs the entitlement theory and the famous Wilt Chamberlain argument against 'patterned' justice, sets out the invisible-hand defence of the minimal state, and surveys the major criticisms — G.A. Cohen on self-ownership, the acquisition and rectification problems, and Nagel's charge that the theory rests on undefended foundations. It connects directly to last week's Rawls, to next week's question of equality, and to your jurisprudence work on rights and Raz.

Nozick writes in, and partly against, two traditions. The first is the Lockean account of natural rights. From John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1689) Nozick takes the picture of a state of nature in which individuals already hold moral rights — to life, liberty, and property — prior to and independent of any state; the idea that property in unowned things is acquired by 'mixing one's labour' with them; and the proviso that such acquisition is legitimate only where 'enough and as good' is left for others. Much of Anarchy, State, and Utopia is an attempt to see how far a rigorously rights-based Lockeanism can be pushed.

The second is the broad classical-liberal and libertarian tradition — Locke, Kant, the nineteenth-century individualists, and Nozick's contemporaries such as Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand — which treats individual liberty and private property as near-absolute and is deeply suspicious of state power. From Kant Nozick takes the principle that persons must be treated as ends in themselves and never merely as means; this becomes his account of rights as side constraints.

The immediate provocation, however, was Rawls. A Theory of Justice (1971) had made redistributive liberalism intellectually respectable and placed the difference principle at the centre of debate. Nozick's book is, among other things, a sustained argument that Rawls's 'patterned' and 'end-state' approach cannot be reconciled with taking individual rights seriously. It is a measure of Rawls's importance that the leading libertarian work of the century is structured as a reply to him; Nozick himself remarked that political philosophers must now 'either work within Rawls's theory or explain why not'.

A separate strand of the book, the experience machine thought experiment, attacks hedonism and, by extension, welfare-based theories: if we would refuse to plug into a machine guaranteeing pleasant experiences, then we value more than our mental states — a point Nozick presses against utilitarianism's focus on want-satisfaction.

Self-ownership

The foundation of Nozick's libertarianism is the thesis of self-ownership: each person enjoys over themselves — their body, their talents, their labour and its fruits — the same full and exclusive rights that a slaveholder would have over a slave, except that here the owner and the owned are the same person. Because you own yourself, others may not use you, or the product of your powers, without your consent. This is why, for Nozick, redistribution is not merely inefficient but a violation: to seize part of what your labour produces is to assert a partial property right in you.

Rights as side constraints

Nozick insists that rights function as side constraints on action, not as goals to be promoted. A goal-based view would tell us to minimise the total number of rights-violations, even if that meant violating someone's rights now to prevent more violations later. Nozick rejects this 'utilitarianism of rights'. Rights mark off a protected space around each person that may never be crossed without consent, even for good ends. The justification is Kantian and turns on the separateness of persons: 'there is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good'.

The practice questions for this topic — with model answers and mark schemes across foundation, standard, and challenge tiers — are set out below. Attempt each under timed conditions before revealing the model answer, then mark your work against the scheme.

The primary text and the leading critical literature are listed below. Read Anarchy, State, and Utopia Part II first; then Cohen for the deepest critique and Otsuka for the left-libertarian alternative.