Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Robert Nozick
Basic, 2013, (orig. 1974), 372 pages

In this book Robert Nozick asks: which functions of the state, if any, are justifiable on ethical grounds? Can one justify taxation to benefit the common good? Does the state have any right to appropriate resources to achieve common goals like going to the Moon? For Nozick, the answer is: only if the individuals consent to it.

As Thomas Nagel puts it in his introductory remarks, rights do not submit to a calculus of “the greater good”; they are boundaries that must not be crossed no matter what. “Respect for rights,” says Nagel, “is the sole condition of justice.” Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a libertarian counter-argument to John Rawles's idea of redistributionist social justice put forth in A Theory of Justice. It has been hugely influential, and a large literature has sprung up around it.

To show that our American legal system could be based on sound libertarian principles, which he calls the state-of-nature, Nozick tries to derive it from first principles. Then he tries to show that only a Lockean minimal state, and not something more expansive, is justifiable.

He also discusses the “Fairness Principle” advocated by Rawls, which states that a group that elects to restrain their own liberty has the right to restrain the liberty of anyone else who benefits from their agreement—even if they never agreed to it.

The Fairness Principle was, of course, not invented to benefit individuals, but to justify redistributive taxation. It was conceived as a license to justify and expand the welfare state. Nozick convincingly shows that such considerations have insufficient foundation in justice. No principle of justice can be continuously realized, he says, without continuous interference with people's lives.

Most of what Nozick says is a rebuttal to Rawles, and he presupposes a familiarity with Rawles's theory. Rawles believed that the distribution of talent, drive, and, indeed, everything noteworthy of the individual, is random and therefore unequal. This, he claimed, is unjust and must be compensated for by redistributing the fruits of their labor to the untalented and slothful. Nozick replies:

Denigrating a person's autonomy and prime responsibility for his actions is a risky line to take for a theory that otherwise wishes to buttress the dignity and self-respect of autonomous beings; especially for a theory that founds so much (including a theory of the good) upon persons' choices. [p.214]

Nozick is saying that Rawles's Fairness Principle is a blueprint for a society of ants, who have no individual worth, no value, no hope, and no ambition. A theory of justice that denies that individuals have value is problematic at best.

A Theory of Justice was an attempt use “social justice” as a foundation for collectivism. Helping the disadvantaged was one of Rawles's two pillars of justice. But Nozick saw that in practice, distributive justice leads to coercion, stagnation, erosion of property rights, massive injustice, and, ultimately, oppression. Game theory backs this up: in a classroom where everyone knows they will all get the same grade, why study? Experience shows that most students won't.

If Nozick is right, the welfare state could not have arisen from considerations of right and wrong. So what caused it? Presaging Mitt Romney by 38 years, Nozick asks why 51% of the lowest-income voters never banded together to vote free stuff for themselves. Eventually, of course, they did. So is democracy to blame? If democracy always devolves into a coercive, redistributionist state, Nozick's line of thinking suggests that it is democracy, not capitalism, that contains the seeds of its own destruction. Destruction is assured when the people, in their clamor for more government services, allow the government to throw off the restraints previously placed on it. Those restraints are all that keep democracies from exploding. Few societies have been able to keep their governments in check for long.

mar 30, 2014