Anarchy, State, and Utopia

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Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a work of political philosophy written by Robert Nozick in 1974. This highly acclaimed libertarian book was the winner of the 1975 National Book Award. In opposition to A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, Nozick argues in favor of a minimal state, "limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on." When a state takes on more responsibilities than these, Nozick argues, rights will be violated. To support the idea of the minimal state, Nozick posits an ultraminimal state as a thought experiment and attempts to show how it will, by the workings of an "invisible hand", lead to a minimal state.

Nozick's Entitlement Theory, influenced by John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Hayek, which sees humans as ends in themselves and justifies redistribution of goods only on condition of consent, is a key aspect of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The book has been translated into 11 languages and was named one of the "100 most influential books since the war" by the Times Literary Supplement.

The book also contains a vigorous defense of libertarianism against more extreme views, such as anarcho-capitalism (in which there is no state and individuals must contract with private companies for all social services). Nozick argues that anarcho-capitalism would inevitably transform into a minarchist state, even without violating any of its own non-aggression principles, through the eventual emergence of a single locally-dominant private defense and judicial agency that it is in everyone's interests to align with, because other agencies are unable to effectively compete against the advantages of the agency with majority coverage. Therefore, he felt that, even to the extent that the anarcho-capitalist theory is correct, it results in an unstable system that would not endure in the real world.

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Criticisms

Fellow libertarian (but anarcho-capitalist) Murray Rothbard has criticised Anarchy State and Utopia in his article "Robert Nozick and the Immaculate Conception of the State" [1] on the basis that:

(1) that no existing State has been "immaculately conceived" in the way envisaged by Nozick;
(2) that on Nozick's account the only minimal State that could possibly be justified is one that would emerge after a free-market anarchist world had been established;
(3) that therefore Nozick, on his own grounds, should become an anarchist and then wait for the Nozickian invisible hand to operate afterward; and
(4) that even if any State had been founded immaculately, the fallacies of social contract theory would mean that no present State, even a minimal one, would be justified.

Ayn Rand also critized the book saying, "I don't like bad eclectics, not in politics and certainly not in philosophy, especially when my ideas are the ones butchered."

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