The Long ConversationA timeline of world philosophy

Philosopher

Robert Nozick

1938–2002

American philosopher whose Anarchy, State, and Utopia made the classic case for a libertarian minimal state against Rawls, and who went on to new theories of knowledge and personal identity.

Black-and-white photograph of a smiling young man with thick dark hair, in a ringer T-shirt
Nozick on the cover of The Libertarian Review, December 1977.Public domain · See the original

Robert Nozick was born in Brooklyn in 1938 and wrote his doctorate at Princeton on decision theory under Carl Hempel. Like many young intellectuals of the early 1960s he was first drawn to the New Left, but reading Hayek, von Mises, Rothbard and Ayn Rand changed his mind, and turned him from technical questions towards political theory. He taught at Harvard until his death from stomach cancer in 2002.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) answered his Harvard colleague John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, and the two books together revived political philosophy in the analytic tradition. Unlike Rawls, Nozick then largely left political philosophy behind. Philosophical Explanations (1981) offered an externalist theory of knowledge and a “closest continuer” theory of personal identity, and later books took up rationality, the meaning of life and the nature of objective truth.

Key ideas

Self-ownership and side constraints
Following Kant’s demand that people be treated as ends and never merely as means, each person owns themselves, and their rights limit what anyone, the state included, may do to them.
The minimal state
Only a minimal, “night-watchman” state, which protects people against force, fraud and theft and runs the courts, can be justified. Anything more violates rights, and taxing earnings to redistribute them amounts to a kind of forced labour.
Entitlement, not distribution
Justice concerns how holdings came about, not their pattern. What was justly acquired and freely transferred is justly held, and his Wilt Chamberlain example shows that any favoured pattern is upset as soon as people make free exchanges.
Tracking the truth
A true belief is knowledge when it tracks the truth: had it been false you would not have believed it, and in slightly different circumstances where it was still true you would still believe it.
The closest continuer
A later person is the same person as an earlier one if they are the closest continuer of that person, a view built to handle puzzle cases of duplication and transfer.
Tradition
Western
Region
United States

Influences

Influenced by

Robert Nozick1938–2002

Influenced by

Robert Nozick1938–2002

Where these links come from
  • Robert Nozick drew on John Locke. Source: Edward Feser, Robert Nozick, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Robert Nozick drew on Immanuel Kant. Source: Edward Feser, Robert Nozick, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Robert Nozick drew on Ayn Rand. Source: Edward Feser, Robert Nozick, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Robert Nozick argued against John Rawls. Source: Edward Feser, Robert Nozick, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Key works

  • Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974
  • Philosophical Explanations, 1981
  • The Examined Life, 1989
  • Invariances, 2001

Sources

  1. Edward Feser, Robert Nozick, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy