Begging the Question with Style: Anarchy, State, and Utopia at Thirty Years

Summary

INTRODUCTION

With thirty years’ distance on its publication, one can safely assert that Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) has achieved the status of a classic. It is not only the central text for all contemporary academic discussions of libertarianism; together with John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), it also arguably framed the landscape of academic political philosophy in the last decades of the twentieth century. This is perhaps an appropriate moment to reflect on the book and ask, why? Why exactly has this book been so influential?

I start with the conviction–reinforced by a recent close rereading of the book–that the answer cannot be found in the cogency of its affirmative argument. Many of the critical observations in the book–chiefly of Rawls, but also (in passing) of Bernard Williams, H. L. A. Hart, Marxian economics, and egalitarian theory in general–remain important, fresh, and illuminating thirty years later. By contrast, the affirmative argument for the minimal state that makes up the bulk of the book is so thin and undefended as to read, often, as nothing more than a placeholder for an argument yet to be supplied. The book's central intuition (“Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them”) continues to resonate thirty years later, precisely because, articulated at that level of generality, it will provoke dissent only among hard-core utilitarians. (Indeed, even utilitarians will blanch more at the rhetoric of rights than at anything that follows from it.) The problem is defending the particular version of rights that make up libertarianism.