Some persons transgress the rights of others victims are then entitled to punish their aggressors in search of compensation. Unfortunately, “inconveniences” emerge within this state of nature, perhaps due to scarcity of resources. 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. without violating anyone’s rights) from a Lockean state of nature. (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. To refute this argument, Nozick claims that we needn’t examine specific governments that have existed at certain points in history. States are therefore “intrinsically immoral” (51).

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. Nozick begins by refuting what he calls the “principled objections” of the anarchist. 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. 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. The book draws upon a Lockean natural rights framework in order to generate a powerful right-libertarian defense of the minimal “night-watchman” state-i.e., a state “limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on” (ix). 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. 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.

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