Natural Rights and Imperial Constitutionalism: The American Revolution and the Development of the American Amalgam

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Robert Nozick surely went where few men have gone before: he won a National Book Award and a great deal of public acclaim for writing an admittedly witty and clever, but nonetheless difficult and often technical book of philosophy. When Anarchy, State, and Utopia appeared in 1974, it stood next to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) as the second political philosophy “blockbuster” of the decade, convincing most observers that the obituaries for political philosophy regularly pronounced in the 1950s and 1960s were greatly premature. Rawls and Nozick–in those days regularly pronounced almost as one word-had not only revived political philosophy, but they had revived a specific tradition: Lockean liberal theory. Both made explicit appeal to Locke; neither was an orthodox Lockean. Nozick appealed to Lockean rights, but explicitly eschewed the Lockean social contract. Rawls appealed to a version of the contract, but eschewed Lockean natural rights. Each, in a sense, took in one half of the Lockean political philosophy, in both cases generously leavened with Kant and various other non-Lockean elements. Prior to Rawls and Nozick, Lockean theory certainly may have been in eclipse, but it remains a striking fact that our two revivalists burst onto the scene as (partial) legatees of Locke, the thinker known as “America's philosopher” for the great role he had in shaping American political culture. It is noteworthy that Rawls and Nozick not only struck so many resonant chords in Locke-land, but failed to have quite that kind of impact elsewhere.