Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State, & Utopia

'Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).'

This is American philosopher Robert Nozick’s bold pronouncement at the beginning of anarchy, state, and utopia, a 1975 book that is largely a response to Rawl’s 1971 A Theory of Justice. It's the classic modern defense of libertarian political philosophy.

For Nozick, the rights that individuals have are natural, of fundamental importance, and completely, universally, unequivocally inviolable.

These rights, he argues, must be respected at all costs.

They aren’t designed by institutions, or dreamed up by revolutionaries, written into contracts and protected by lawyers. They are part of being human.

How then is a state justifiable? Taxation, the rule of law, a system that forces its citizens to pay for roads, schools and hospitals is surely a violation of an individual's natural rights as a human to be free to make their own choices.

‘Boundary crossing’, as Nozick calls it, crossing the line and infringing upon a person's freedom, is surely only permissible with consent.

This, loosely, is the position of the anarchist.

The anarchist argues that because of the inviolability of individuals, no state can be justified.

For Nozick, this is the fundamental question of political philosophy: whether there should be any state at all.

He wants to justify what he calls a minimal state. One that simply protects an individual’s right to freedom, and nothing else. He wants to argue that this is both justified philosophically, and, could develop from a state of nature historically.

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