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A Review of Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” (1974)

Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick passed away a few years ago, but his most famous book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, first published in 1974, remains one of the most commonly read works in contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy. Even though we didn’t include it on our reading list this semester, Nozick’s book is nevertheless a key part of the neoliberal canon (Harvey even mentions it in A Brief History of Neoliberalism), so I figured I might as well review it for our blog. The book draws upon a Lockean natural rights framework in order to generate a powerful right-libertarian defense of the minimal “nightwatchman” state—i.e., a state “limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on” (ix). Alongside this defense of the minimal state, Nozick also attempts to show that any state more extensive than this—in other words, any state that uses its coercive apparatus to prohibit certain activities, or to create an equitable distribution of wealth and resources—is morally suspect on the grounds that it violates the individual’s rights to liberty and property. To this extent, Anarchy, State, and Utopia can be understood as a direct response both to anarchists who deny the legitimacy of any state, minimal or otherwise, and to liberal defenders of the modern welfare state like the philosopher John Rawls, whose classic study A Theory of Justice (1971) receives sustained criticism in the second half of Nozick’s book. Nozick begins by refuting what he calls the “principled objections” of the anarchist. In his view, the strongest version of this anarchist argument against the state can be presented as follows: by monopolizing the use of force in a territory and punishing those who violate this monopoly, all states, regardless of size, end up violating the rights accorded to individuals in a Lockean state of nature, including the individual’s right to punish those who transgress the laws of nature. States are therefore “intrinsically immoral” (51). To refute this argument, Nozick claims that we needn’t examine specific governments that have existed at certain points in history. (Go figure.) Instead, all one needs to do in order to defeat the anarchist’s objection is offer a potential explanation of how a minimal state hypothetically could arise in a morally permissible manner (i.e. without violating anyone’s rights) from a Lockean state of nature. Having announced his criterion for success, Nozick then proceeds to sketch the following scenario: Individuals exist in a state of nature, free to act and dispose of their possessions as they see fit, so long as they agree to respect the self-same rights of others. Unfortunately, “inconveniences” emerge within this state of nature, perhaps due to scarcity of resources. Some persons transgress the rights of others; victims are then entitled to punish their

aggressors in search of compensation. Disputes emerge, along with feuds between warring parties. (In other words, individuals enter into what Locke calls “the state of war.”) Neutral parties are sought out to adjudicate conflicts. Eventually, individuals freely form groups or “mutual-protection associations” in order to enforce their rights through collective action. Some of these associations charge fees for the provision of their services—perhaps due to what Adam Smith calls man’s natural “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” (The Wealth of Nations, Book One, Chapter II). At some point a dominant power emerges out of the ongoing competition between these various associations. This dominant power possesses a significant market advantage in the competition for clients—and so eventually, through what Nozick calls an “invisible-hand process,” something resembling a minimal state emerges, once the dominant protective agency in a region achieves a de facto monopoly over the ability to enforce the rights of all of its members. The important thing to note is that Nozick shows how, at each step along the way, this transition from a “state of nature” to a “minimal state” occurs “in a morally permissible way that violates no one’s rights” (52). As a result, he thus appears to satisfy his original criterion for success. Of course, this type of argument can’t be used to justify any state currently existing in the real world, since all known states are thus far products of conquest and aggression; but, as Nozick notes, such an argument does suffice if our goal is simply to silence the traditional anarchist complaint that in the course of claiming its exclusive right to authorize and oversee the use of force within its boundaries, the state must violate individual rights, and therefore is intrinsically immoral (xi). From here, Nozick moves on to propose that while the minimal state arrived at by these means is morally justified, the same can’t be said for any state that attempts to enact more extensive interventions into the affairs of its subjects. In particular, Nozick argues that any state that finances non-protective programs by confiscating an individual’s property, or taxing an individual’s earnings without first seeking and acquiring that individual’s voluntary consent, is by definition unjust, even if it does so in order to achieve some form of distributive justice (i.e. in order to achieve a more optimal distribution of wealth and resources on the basis of need, equality, merit, etc). Here’s the basic argument: Along with their rights to life and liberty, individuals can also come to possess rights to property. These latter rights (which Nozick calls “entitlements”) are comprehensive and inviolable, and can only be obtained in two ways: either one can appropriate “unclaimed” holdings from nature, or one can inherit holdings through voluntary acts of transfer and exchange from those who were previously entitled to the holdings. According to Nozick, these are the only two legitimate ways of acquiring property; and once these methods are formulated as principles, they can be taken together to constitute what Nozick calls an “entitlement theory of justice.” (Though in fact, as Nozick himself notes, one additional

principle is needed in order to complete the theory. This principle would outline legitimate ways for rectifying violations of the first two principles. However, Nozick tells us that any kind of detailed explication of this third principle is beyond the purposes of his argument. Whether he’s right about this last point is a question we’ll return to in a moment.) The major conclusion that Nozick draws from this argument is that all compulsory state-organized redistribution schemes (including all publicly-funded projects to build and maintain roads, libraries, fire departments, etc, as well as efforts to protect the environment or to assist the poor, the sick, or the unemployed) by definition violate individual entitlements, and are therefore morally unjust. At this point it’s worth repeating that Nozick’s arguments have often been taken up beyond the elite realm of Anglo-American philosophy departments, with political figures sometimes citing Anarchy, State, and Utopia as an intellectual support for the neoliberal attack on “big government,” and the related turn toward privatization and deregulation over the past few decades. How, then, should we respond to Nozick’s work? For most of us, I’m sure, Anarchy, State, and Utopiarepresents Anglo-American analytic philosophy at its most absurd. After all, like other analytic philosophers, Nozick’s standard tactic in this work is to generate a series of isolated “thought experiments”: hypothetical micro-situations where abstract principles can be gauged and tested. Nozick defends this approach by claiming that “correct” principles of justice are ones that are universally applicable; therefore, “principles that fail for microsituations cannot be correct” (Nozick 204-205). Clearly this is a definition that presupposes in advance an abstract, “idealist” version of justice, unencumbered by any consideration of specific persons in specific historical circumstances. Scenarios are imagined as discrete monads—hypothetical thought-worlds, ripped from any kind of context or long-term historical process. Most of these scenarios seem logical enough in the sense that they’re usually internally consistent. But the conclusions derived from these experiments are often unfounded once one considers the historical sequences likely to have given rise to the conditions outlined in each scenario. For instance (and to take just one example), because our world is one where individual property rights are founded upon violent histories of conquest and aggression (i.e. what Marx calls processes of “primitive accumulation”), Nozick’s “entitlement theory of justice” ultimately has little or no bearing on current real-world conditions. After all, even if one were to subscribe to this theory, the actions of current governments would have to be judged according to Nozick’s untreated third principle regarding property rights—in other words, the one that would outline ways for rectifying previous acts of injustice. And of course, given the obvious difficulties involved in trying to formulate such a principle (a task that Nozick himself avoids), there’s no reason to assume that current welfare-state measures would have to be deemed unjust. In this case and in others,

then, Nozick’s conclusions are repeatedly compromised by his scrupulous failure to historicize his claims. We find a similar problem cropping up in Nozick’s conception of “the individual” as well. Time and again, readers are confronted with bizarre hypothetical scenarios full of imaginary, ‘Robinson Crusoe’-style figures that seem to emerge fully formed from the state of nature, with no social or familial obligations whatsoever. For instance, the book is full of statements like, “Let us imagine n individuals who do not cooperate together and who each live solely by their own efforts” (184)—despite the fact that, here in the real world, there’s simply no such thing as an individual who “lives solely by his or her own efforts.” [This reminds me of that other great neoliberal “Robinsonade” that we encountered a few weeks ago: Milton Friedman’s ridiculous account of four individuals “independently marooned on four islands in the same neighborhood” (Capitalism & Freedom, p. 165). Somehow Friedman’s absurd hypothetical scenario is supposed to demonstrate the immorality of all attempts to achieve equality through redistributive means.] One of the most basic, fundamental lessons of historical materialism (a lesson that bourgeois philosophers seem intent upon forgetting) is that humans are in fact social creatures, born prematurely and thus always-already dependent upon others for survival, language acquisition, etc. In other words, if considerations of justice are to have any bearing on life as it is lived by real historical figures, and not just by the rationally self-interested abstractions of analytic philosophy, then such considerations need to set aside their prelapsarian state-of-nature fantasies, and begin with the social itself....