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Robert Nozick: Nature
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Nozick's great work, Anarchy, State and Utopia, was published in 1974, when he was about 35 years old, to instant critical acclaim. It shows some influence of the Hayekian strands, but in many ways takes off in a very different direction. Nozick did not start his great intellectual journey with homage to custom of past practices. Rather, he gravitated to the rational analysis of which Hayek disapproved. For Nozick the point of departure was that great trope of political and legal philosophy, "state of nature theory." He asked, as had others before him, the first hard question, which is why it is that there should be governments to which ordinary individuals owe any allegiance at all? In contrast to the strong collectivist urges of his time, Nozick pursued a fiendishly clever excursus into just about every corner of the world.
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In their respective contributions, Loren Lomasky and Gerald Gaus query whether Nozick’s ultimate abandonment of the libertarianism of Anarchy, State, and Utopia is well motivated. In both The Nature of Rationality and The Examined Life (1989), Nozick explicitly disowned his early libertarianism. Although Nozick’s remarks on this score are somewhat cryptic, their general thrust seems clear: libertarianism is inadequate because it does not allow for the symbolic value which derives from certain joint actions that are undertaken by society as a whole. Both Lomasky, in his consideration of the relationship between libertarianism and utopianism, and Gaus, in his consideration of the relationship between Nozick’s political philosophy and his theory of practical rationality, question whether the relevant values must inevitably remain unrealized within a libertarian society.
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Nozick returned to a more systematic mode of analysis in The Nature of Rationality (1993), which many consider his masterpiece. "The word philosophy means the love of wisdom," it begins, "but what philosophers really love is reasoning."
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Nozick's teaching followed the same lively, unorthodox, heterogeneous pattern as his writing. With one exception, he never taught the same course twice. The exception was "The Best Things in Life," which he presented in 1982 and '83, attempting to derive from the class discussion a general theory of values. The course description called it an exploration of "the nature and value of those things deemed best, such as friendship, love, intellectual understanding, sexual pleasure, achievement, adventure, play, luxury, fame, power, enlightenment, and ice cream."
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