a book
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Robert Nozick · 1974 · 367 pages
Winner of the 1975 National Book Award, this classic work is updated for the first time in 30 years Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a foundational text in classical liberal thought, in which Robert Nozick created the intellectual underpinnings for what is now known as libertarianism. In his exhortation to limit the state to only the most minimal possible role, Nozick stirred tremendous controversy in an era predisposed to look to government as the solution to social injustice. When originally published in 1974, Anarchy, State, and Utopia was dismissed by many scholars as nothing more than a paean to the bourgeois status quo. But American politics have changed dramatically since then. Anarchy, State, and Utopia has become ever more relevant since the country has caught up with Nozick's ideas--as Clinton proclaimed, "the era of big government is over." With fierce argumentation and meticulous logic, Robert Nozick gave birth to a new way of thinking about the relationship between the citizen and the state.
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Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)
“I was once in an advanced political philosophy seminar with a bunch of other grad students, and the reading we were to discuss that week was the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick’s book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. None of us in this seminar were able to mount any plausible arguments against Nozick, not because he’s correct, but because we had so little experience arguing against anything that far right. Everyone in this room was a reasonably intelligent and articulate philosophy PhD student, but we’d all cut our teeth dissecting the little squabbles between Rawls and Habermas, and we had no experience arguing against anything as far right as the political views that most Americans actually hold.”↗
