Robert Nozick

Robert Nozick (New York, 1938 - 2002) was an American philosopher who taught at Harvard and also at Columbia, Oxford and Princeton. Trained in the analytic tradition of the mid-twentieth century, he worked on decision theory, epistemology, philosophy of mind and metaphysics, but his name is most closely tied to political philosophy. He is remembered today as the leading academic defender of the minimal state against the egalitarian liberalism of John Rawls.

He studied at Columbia, graduating in 1959, and at Princeton, where he completed his doctorate in 1963 under Carl Hempel. From 1963 to 1964 he was a Fulbright Scholar at Oxford. As a young man he was drawn to socialism and at Columbia he founded a local chapter of a student organization devoted to industrial democracy. His move toward libertarianism came through reading Friedrich Hayek and other defenders of capitalism. By his own account he was pulled into libertarianism somewhat reluctantly, since he could not find satisfying replies to its arguments.

His best-known book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), answers two opponents. Against anarcho-capitalists such as Murray Rothbard, he argues that a minimal state, limited to protection against force, fraud and theft and to the administration of courts, could arise without violating anyone's rights. Against Rawls, whose A Theory of Justice (1971) assigns a fair distribution of the gains of social cooperation to a central authority, Nozick insists that goods have a history. Someone made or transferred them, so their ownership cannot be judged without looking at that past. This led to his entitlement theory, a historical rather than patterned account on which a distribution is just when it results from legitimate acquisition and transfer, supplemented by a principle of rectification for past wrongs. In the third part of the book he sketches a liberal utopia in which many different communities can coexist and each person can choose how to live.

His other works pursued the same concern for careful argument. Philosophical Explanations (1981) proposed a counterfactual account of knowledge, the so-called tracking theory, which did not treat justification as a necessary condition for knowing. The Examined Life (1989), written for a general readership, took up love, death, faith and the meaning of life. The Nature of Rationality (1994) offered a theory of practical reason, and Socratic Puzzles gathered essays on a wide range of subjects. His last work, Invariances, explored objectivity through physics and biology.

Nozick is also known for his thought experiments. The utility monster shows how average utilitarianism might sacrifice the many for one individual. The experience machine was meant to show that ethical hedonism is inadequate, since few would choose to plug into a machine that produced pleasant experiences. His influence reaches into political theory, where the debate over the minimal state continues, and into contemporary epistemology. He died in 2002 after a long struggle with stomach cancer.