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Robert Nozick: Books
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Robert Nozick, a philosophy professor at Harvard, is the intellectual hero of libertarians. His book, _Anarchy, State, and Utopia_, winner of the National Book Award in 1974, argues that "free minds and free markets" are the key to a successful society. While endorsing personal choice on social issues like drugs and pornography, Nozick mocked the economic interventionism of contemporary liberals who, he said, are "willing to tolerate every kind of behavior except capitalistic acts between consenting adults." Alas, it now appears that like so many other advocates of the free market, Nozick is willing to make one small exception --himself.
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A thinker with wide-ranging interests, Robert Nozick is one of the most important and influential political philosophers, along with John Rawls, in the Anglo-American analytic tradition. His first and most celebrated book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), has brought about, along with his Harvard colleague John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971), the revival of the discipline of social and political philosophy within the analytic school. Rawls’ influential book is a systematic defense of egalitarian liberalism, but Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a compelling defense of free-market libertarianism.
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Robert Nozick died in January at age 63. He had turned to other topics after Anarchy, State, and Utopia. His later works were immensely ambitious, probing deeply into questions of knowledge and nature, human life and human choice. But it seems likely that he will be remembered best for his first book.
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As mentioned above, the collection Robert Nozick aspires to provide a critical examination of Nozick’s thought as a whole. Relative to this aspiration, the book has both strengths and weaknesses. Among the most notable strengths is that a number of the essays examine connections between aspects of Nozick’s philosophy that have previously been scrutinized only in isolation. (This is especially apparent in the contributions by Gaus and Bratman.) Moreover, the collection ... examines some portions of Nozick’s work that have been unduly overshadowed by his more famous writings. (Again, Millgram’s essay on The Examined Life is perhaps the best example of this.) On the other hand, roughly half of the book is concerned with the political philosophy of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Perhaps as a result of this emphasis, there are some notable omissions, topics to which Nozick has made seminal contributions, which are largely or entirely ignored.
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For Harvard philosophy professor Robert Nozick, who has died of stomach cancer aged 63, the welfare state was a form of theft, and taxation tantamount to forced labour. His book, Anarchy, State And Utopia (1974), brilliantly criticised the redistributive liberalism of his fellow Harvard philosopher, inspirer and adversary John Rawls. Now in 11 languages, the work, advocating "the minimal state", philosophically underpinned the free market, anti-welfarism of the approaching Reagan-Thatcher era.
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Robert Nozick, the Harvard philosopher who passed away last month, was a thinker of remarkably diverse interests from free will to the Russian revolution. But Nozick will always be remembered for a single great book, the libertarian treatise, "Anarchy, State and Utopia." And that book, in turn, will always be remembered for its insightful discussion of professional basketball.
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