Balkinization  

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

Nozick vs. Kant on libertarianism

Andrew Koppelman

Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) is the most important scholarly work of libertarian philosophy.  Published just three years after John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, it appeared at an opportune political moment.  It immediately became the most prominent foil to Rawls, who was widely understood to offer a social contract theory that justified a redistributive welfare state.  Nozick’s book is beautifully written and fun to read.  (A lot more fun than Rawls’s dry-as-dust prose.)  Its style is exciting and digressive, constantly darting off on interesting tangents.  Nozick must have been marvelous in the classroom.

It is not generally understood how much Nozick owes to a far lesser-known thinker, Murray Rothbard.  Tracing that connection, and particularly Nozick’s attempted deployment of Kant to shore up the holes in Rothbard’s philosophy, reveals that Anarchy, State, and Utopia is massively overrated, its claims unsalvageable. 

I explain at the Los Angeles Review of Books Philosophical Forum, here.


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