Robert Nozick

Coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s, creature of academia Robert Nozick was bound to be drafted by his generation. Nozick was a leader in left-wing student activism. Like Russell Kirk, Nozick followed Norman Thomas at a young age, though not just for a disengaged foreign policy. As an undergraduate at Columbia University, he founded a branch of the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), a 1930s socialist relic which trained students in anti-industrial behavior. It was not until his days in graduate school, working on his doctoral thesis, that Nozick explored what lies beneath and found socialism's murky seabed. Initially, he thus recognized the value of capitalism, but not the virtue of its apologists; later, he finds both its defense and its defenders noble. His is not an uncommon transition, as Winston Churchill put to wit: "Anyone who is not a liberal at 20 has no heart, anyone who is not a conservative by 40 has no brain."* Like Churchill and countless others whom the light has found, Nozick struggles with a past as green as arugula salad in which idealistic passions suffer not the inhibitions of grey matter. Unfortunately, despite the wrinkles and the metamucil, still too many refuse to ripen with age.

Nozick's core political philosophy is expressed in his libertarian manifesto Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), his first major work. This was partially a response to John Rawls' theory of "justice as fairness," offered up only three years before, but also something of an answer to the wider redistributive culture responsible for the Great Society programs and 91 percent marginal tax rates of his day.

Nozick opens with a startling question: "If the state did not exist would it be necessary to invent it?" He uses "state-of-nature" theory, like Hobbes and Locke, to examine this question, to see how government would evolve from nothing, if not forced upon us. He shows that certain natural rights are necessarily inviolable. And he methodically shows a way that a state would evolve, without violating such rights, and that the result would be a minimal state, a "nightwatchman" state, designed mainly to protect one's person and property from the hoodlums of the wee hours. In the end, he offers us no-nonsense limited government: "Our main conclusions about the state are that a minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified; that any, more extensive state will violate persons rights not to be ordered to do certain things, and is unjustified; and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right." This is essentially the position taken by Locke and Mill and Hayek, in different style, over three centuries.

More revealing than his "Nightwatchman State" is Nozick's theory of distributive justice, i.e., how a distribution of wealth is justified in moral terms. He divides distributive justice into essentially two types of systems: those that are "historical," which determine justice if property is acquired by just actions; and those that are "patterned," which determine justice if the resulting distribution of property conforms to a favored pattern, such as equality of income or wealth. Typical pattern systems are Rawls' "justice as fairness", Bentham's utilitarianism, or Marx's familiar, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!" The trouble with pattern systems is that they attempt to prescribe an end-state, some (ostensibly laudable) goal to be achieved. These will always be completely incompatible with freedom: actions by free people to buy and sell will necessarily bring chaos and wreckage to any "pattern," even if it could be achieved. The inevitable solution in such systems is to seize the machinery of trade and force people's actions to produce the desired pattern. Property rights become contingent. It would be a world of paralysis, as a movie set with scripted parts and constant interruptions from a micromanaging director.

Concluding that only an historical system is just, Nozick weighs in with his Entitlement Theory of Justice, which, despite the name, does not entail a vast government program with annual growth rates nine times what Congress estimates. Rather, it unveils a theory of distributive justice in which each of us is (only) entitled to what is justly earned. In the game of who gets what, there are but three rules:

1. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding.
2. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in transfer, from someone else entitled to the holding, is entitled to the holding.
3. No one is entitled to a holding except by (repeated) applications of 1 and 2.

Like his favorite man of appeal John Locke, Nozick is best known for his work in political philosophy. But like Locke he also keenly explored epistemology, and made secondary efforts in metaphysics and theology. Indeed, Nozick was often asked why he did not continue to build on or revisit his popular Entitlement Theory in later works. But he was an explorer, not a surveyor. In his thirty-two years as a full professor at Harvard University, he only once offered the same course twice—he could become an expert at subjects as fast as bright Ivy-league pups could become aware of them. Such is the mark of a great philosopher, to see more value in opening new doors than in keeping a foot in old ones.

Nozick's political philosophy, and especially his Entitlement Theory, has been the object of as much carping and criticism as any other of the last fifty years. But as Henry James would say, to criticize is to appreciate. In the modern age capitalism is promoted more for its efficiencies than for its niceties, and Nozick has delivered a convincing moral defense of laissez-faire, following in the footsteps of Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and Ayn Rand. Indeed, like Rand, he likens taxation to slave labor. Witness to the collapse of communism abroad and the resurgence of bolshies at the lectern, he expressed his disgust at academia's sellout to the left in good Albee'n fashion: "Marxism repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

* Ironically, this commonly attributed quip is not as self-serving as it looks: Churchill missed both deadlines and apparently fails his own test. First elected to office as a Conservative at the age of twenty-four, he switched to the Liberals in 1904 at the age of twenty-nine, and switched back to the Conservatives in 1924 at the age of fifty.