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Robert Nozick
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Robert Nozick (November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher and Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University. Nozick, schooled at Columbia, Oxford and Princeton, was a prominent American political philosopher in the 1970s and 1980s. He did additional but less influential work in such subjects as decision theory and epistemology. His Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) was a libertarian answer to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, published in 1971. He was born in Brooklyn, the son of a Jewish entrepreneur from Russia, and married the American poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Nozick died in 2002 after a prolonged struggle with cancer.
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Robert Nozick is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University and the author of Anarchy, State, and Utopia and other books. This article is excerpted from his essay "Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?" which originally appeared in The Future of Private Enterprise, ed. Craig Aronoff et al. (Georgia State University Business Press, 1986) and is reprinted in Robert Nozick, Socratic Puzzles (Harvard University Press, 1997).
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During many years of teaching philosophy at Harvard University, Robert Nozick (1938-2002) wrote a series of rich and varied works, including Philosophical Explanations (1981), The Examined Life (1989), The Nature of Rationality (1995), [A]nd Socratic Puzzles (1997). The book for which he is best known... remained his first: the seminal critique of John Rawls’ theory of justice, Anarchy, State and Utopia [1] (1974). Their philosophical dialogue over the conditions of a just society helped to define American politics for a generation.
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Robert Nozick argued that the whole lot was a chimera, a cloud of rhetoric with no rational foundation at all. ‘No patterned principle [of social justice] can be realised without continuous interference with people’s lives,’ he wrote. ‘Any distributional pattern with any egalitarian component is overturnable by the voluntary actions of individuals over time.’ He proved it by a very simple example. Imagine, he said, that utopia has arrived and your preferred egalitarian distribution has been achieved: everyone has the same bundle of material resources. Now imagine that there’s a particular sportsman who is in great demand. (He picked a basketball player then in vogue called Wilt Chamberlain; today, you could substitute David Beckham.) People want to see this sportsman play, and will happily pay extra to do so. When they buy their ticket for a game, there’s a special box into which they drop an extra 25 cents.
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Robert Nozick was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1938, and he taught at Harvard University until his death in January 2002. He was a thinker of the prodigious sort who gains a reputation for brilliance within his chosen field while still in graduate school, in his case at the Princeton of the early 1960's, where he wrote his dissertation on decision theory under the supervision of Carl Hempel. He was ... like so many young intellectuals of that period, drawn initially to the politics of the New Left and to the socialism that was its philosophical inspiration. But encountering the works of such defenders of capitalism as F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Ayn Rand eventually led him to renounce those views, and to shift his philosophical focus away from the technical issues then dominating analytic philosophy and toward political theory. The result was his first and most famous book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), an ingenious defense of libertarianism that immediately took on canonical status as the major right-wing philosophical counterpoint to his Harvard colleague John Rawls's influential defense of social-democratic liberalism, A Theory of Justice (1971).
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Robert Nozick was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 16, 1938. His parents were both immigrants, and he referred to himself as just one generation from the shtetl (the small-town Jewish communities of Eastern Europe). He earned his B.A. degree in 1959 at Columbia University, where he was a socialist and a member of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society. He went on to an M.A. (1961) and a Ph.D. (1963) from Princeton University.
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Robert Nozick