Robert Nozick

"A thinker with wide-ranging interests, Robert Nozick was one of the two most important and influential political philosophers ... in the Anglo-American analytic tradition. His first and most celebrated book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), produced ... the revival of the discipline of social and political philosophy within the analytic school. ... His other significant contributions to analytic philosophy notwithstanding, Nozick’s defense of libertarianism remains his most notable intellectual mark on philosophical inquiry."

"Robert Nozick (1938–2002) was a renowned American philosopher who first came to be widely known through his 1974 book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), which won the National Book Award for Philosophy and Religion in 1975. Pressing further the anti-consequentialist aspects of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, Nozick argued that respect for individual rights is the key standard for assessing state action and, hence, that the only legitimate state is a minimal state that restricts its activities to the protection of the rights of life, liberty, property, and contract."

"Robert Nozick (1939-2002) is one of the most respected and honored philosophers in the world. ... Anarchy, State, and Utopia was a rigorous examination and defense of libertarianism. It was controversial, exciting, and -- most shockingly for a serious philosophical work -- a pleasure to read. And it is hard to overstate the book's importance to libertarianism."

"As teacher, friend, and colleague in no particular order, he was a restless intellectual capable of enlivening every discussion with a bewildering blitz of questions that always left you one step behind. ... Nozick was, as far as I know not trained as a lawyer ..., but his ceaseless curiosity and imagination allowed him to develop by intuition a theory of justice in holdings that followed closely on the legal approach to these problems."

"With the publication in 1974 of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, the debate on rights and justice has assumed a public dimension and intensity resembling the reaction to Ayn Rand's first raids into the territory of established political philosophy. ... The 'liberal' establishment is faced with Nozick's quest for the minimal state, and the querist shocks the egalitarian by arguing that everyone is entitled to everything gained by a just process. ... To Nozick's book, Newsweek delivered the compliment: 'at heart a shrewd defense of laissez-faire and a theoretical buttress for the growing libertarian movement' ..."

"Two books in particular, both by Harvard philosophers, animated our thinking: John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, which arrived in 1971 and was generally understood as an apology for the modern welfare state, and Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which appeared in 1974 as a critique of Rawls and, more fully, as a sophisticated defense of libertarianism and limited government. But Nozick had erected his argument on the assumption that people had rights, which meant that there was a good deal of more fundamental work to be done ..."

"Nozick argues that it's wrong for all of us to look in moral horror at Wilt Chamberlain’s earnings, band together into a government, and send in armed tax collectors because we think Wilt's money could be more valuably used somewhere other than Wilt's pockets. Nozick's parable is about the morality of politics while saying nothing about what Wilt ought to voluntarily do with his money. He might choose to spend it all on caviar and rare basketball cards ... Or he might use it to launch a new business, employing many of his fellow citizens at decent wages to teach his basketball skills to willing consumers."

"[Harvard President Neil L.] Rudenstine said that not only has Nozick had an important influence on contemporary philosophy, but 'his ideas have made a real difference well beyond his discipline, and beyond the academy. Robert has one of the most versatile, piercing, and agile minds that I have ever encountered,' Rudenstine said. ... Nozick, who grew up in Brooklyn and attended public school there, came to philosophy via a paperback version of Plato's Republic, which he found intellectually thrilling."

"As a child in his native Brooklyn, so the tale goes, young Nozick had been in the habit of asking street-corner preachers and soapbox orators, concerning whatever point of view they had been confidently expounding, 'How do you know that?' One presumes that his question met with a chilly reception; if so, he would have been well prepared for the reaction to Anarchy, State, and Utopia ..., which was often greeted with incredulity and outrage."

"Szasz, pushing his single-mindedness to near absurdity, assails Nozick for citing favorably the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. He engaged, Szasz tells us 'in psychiatry's most loathsome practices, including lobotomy' (p. 181). But Nozick's reference to Frankl has nothing to do with coercive psychiatry. ... Quite the contrary, [Szasz] often misunderstands Nozick, or dismisses what he says without consideration. He claims that Nozick wrongly ignores the bearings of free will on responsibility ..."

"The most intense way we relate to another person is sexually. Nothing so concentrates the mind, Dr. Johnson noted, as the prospect of being hanged. Nothing, that is, except sexual arousal and excitement: rising tension, uncertainty about what will happen next, occasional reliefs, sudden surprises, dangers and risks, all in a sequence of heightened attention and tension that reaches toward resolution."

"A capitalist society is peculiar in that it seems to announce that it is open and responsive only to talent, individual initiative, personal merit. ... Despite the created expectation, a capitalist society rewards people only insofar as they serve the market-expressed desires of others; it rewards in accordance with economic contribution, not in accordance with personal value."

"What I was really saying in The Examined Life was that I was no longer as hardcore a libertarian as I had been before. But the rumors of my deviation (or apostasy!) from libertarianism were much exaggerated. I think this book [Invariances] makes clear the extent to which I still am within the general framework of libertarianism, especially the ethics chapter and its section on the 'Core Principle of Ethics.'"

"Robert Nozick also believes in natural rights. He believes that it's by pursuing rational self-interest you would not violate the natural rights of others. He assumes that rights exist. He examines ... the consequences of that. It doesn't depend on a particular view of human nature. So in this view, natural rights is a so-called deontological approach. ... Nozick says that ... a minimal state against force, theft, fraud, and the enforcement of contracts is justified. Anything beyond that role is illegitimate because it violates people's rights."