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Robert Nozick: Books
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Robert Nozick was a Harvard professor who specialized in political philosophy. His ideas on the ideal libertarian government were perhaps best expressed in his famous book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. According to Nozick, the best type of economic system is capitalist and the government in a capitalist society functions best when it has only very limited powers and, hence, does very little to interfere with the actions and rights of the citizens.
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Nozick (1938-2002) was a professor of philosophy at Harvard University until his death. His first book, Anarchy, State and Utopia astonished the philosophical world and made the discussion of liberty and property rights respectable again in scholarly circles. A former radical leftist, Nozick was converted to the libertarian perspective as a graduate student, mostly through reading the works of F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman. Below is an interview with Nozick from 2001.
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In contrast to his other works, Nozick’s third book, The Examined Life, has received scant attention from professional philosophers. In his interesting “How to Make Something of Yourselfâ€, Elijah Millgram suggests that “the reception accorded The Examined Life is in the first place a consequence of failing to place it in the genre to which it belongs†(p.176). The book should be understood, Millgram argues, not as the presentation of a philosophical theory but rather as an attempt to construct a distinctive philosophical persona, a concept which Millgram is concerned to explicate. The concluding essay by David Schmidtz, “The Meanings of Lifeâ€, differs from the others in that it is not primarily a critical engagement with some aspect of Nozick’s thought but rather “a self-conscious tribute to Nozick, not only in terms of its topic but in terms of its method as well†(p.6).
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Despite a reputation as a right-wing philosopher from Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Nozick was intellectually diverse in his writing and teaching. In Philosophical Explanations (Belknap Press, 1981), he explored the nature of knowledge, the self, free will and ethics. Nozick took on subjects that many academic philosophers had dismissed as irrelevant or meaningless, such as free will versus determinism and the nature of subjective experience, and why there is something rather than nothing. The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (Touchstone Books, 1990), contained 27 essays on subjects such as love, happiness and creativity, as well as evil and the Holocaust. In 1995, he published The Nature of Rationality (Princeton University Press) followed by Socratic Puzzles (Harvard University Press) in 1997. His last book, Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World, was published in October 2001 by Harvard University Press.
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Nozick found himself in a firestorm of controversy and condemned by many as a disreputable ideologue. As Jonathan Wolff, author of a book on Nozick, put it, "I first read Nozick as an undergraduate in 1980. At that time philosophy students usually reacted to Anarchy, State and Utopia in one of two ways. Either they thought its conclusions so repugnant that it should not be taken seriously as political philosophy at all, or they thought its conclusions so repugnant that it was vital...to show how it fails." In 1990, Wolff, by then a professor himself, wrote that he "fairly often...encounter[s] a third [view]: that, broadly speaking, Nozick is right."
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Nozick won almost instant fame in 1974 with his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which earned a National Book Award in 1975. The startling effect of the book came from its combination of several qualities. Unlike most books out of academia, it was a manifesto to the public, political world. Its opinions did not quite fit any of the common patterns of scholarly or popular thinking. And its style was a mixing of close philosophical analysis, brash personal assertions, anecdotes, and humor.
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