American philosopher Robert Nozick may not be a household name, but his intellectual contributions to the liberty movement cannot be overstated. This past Saturday marked what would have been the 86th birthday of Nozick, who passed in 2002. Today, we reflect on his contributions to liberty.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Nozick studied at Columbia University and received his doctorate from Princeton University. Like many young intellectuals, Nozick initially considered himself a socialist and even started a chapter of the left-wing Student League for Industrial Democracy while at Columbia.
However, he began to question his socialist worldview upon reading the works of Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek and ultimately embraced free markets and private property rights.
“Once I came to think that workers were not being stolen from, but voluntarily contracted into working for certain wages, and I understood the functions that entrepreneurs performed, and also the functions of profits in society; that entitlement rationale for socialism fell away,” he explained in a 1977 interview published in the now-defunct Libertarian Review magazine.
Nozick’s central work, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” was published in 1974, and presents an argument for the minimal state, one limited to the “functions of protecting all its citizens against violence, theft, and fraud, and to the enforcement of contracts.
This limitation of the state flows from Nozick’s foundational argument that, “Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).”
One “may not violate persons for the greater social good,” because, ultimately, there is no such thing as a “social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives.”
Nozick acknowledges the counterargument that such a conception of the state overly constrains the state and necessarily prevents the state from fulfilling notions of distributive justice which would justify broader interventions in society in order to promote fairness or equality by pointing out that interventions predicated on redistribution necessarily involve the violation of people’s rights.
“No distributional patterned principle of justice can be continuously realized without continuous interference with people’s lives,” explains Nozick. “Patterned principles of distributive justice involve appropriating the actions of other people” and “institute (partial) ownership by others of people and their actions and labor.”
The minimal state, he reasons, is preferable, for it concerns itself centrally with the protection of rights.
In Nozick’s conception, the minimal state “treats us as inviolate individuals, who may not be used in certain ways by others as means or tools or instruments or resources.”
Further, according to Nozick, the minimal state offers a “framework for utopia” under which people are not only free to live their lives, but free to establish and live in communities with likeminded individuals under diverse and shared values (so long as they do so voluntarily and remain free to exit). In a time when more and more Americans are voting with their feet, this is not an alien concept.
Nozick’s arguments may not resonate with everyone, but in a world of big government and political polarization, they are worth considering and debating. Perhaps if America decentralized political power along these lines, and didn’t cede so much power to the government, national elections wouldn’t matter so much. Shrinking the power of the government means shrinking the ability of the other side to use government to do things you don’t them to do.
It’s something to think about.