Anarchy, State, and Utopia at 50 years

And yet, the book abides. This is partially because every intellectual coterie needs a punching bag and partly because much of the book is fun to read. Still, there might be other reasons. To their credit, some of its critics may suspect that Nozick’s conclusions are not totally misguided. Also, the work of a dissident band of libertarian or classical liberal writers since Anarchy, State, and Utopia was published may have made it a bit harder to comfortably dismiss libertarian or classical liberal thought. I hope this David versus Goliath story sparks an interest in reading (or rereading) Anarchy, State, and Utopia. I hope this brief description of some of the content of Anarchy, State, and Utopia reinforces that interest.

As the title suggests, there are three main parts of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Part I addresses the issue of whether any state at all can be justified. Nozick explores in considerable detail the claim of the libertarian anarchist that not even the minimal state—a state that purports to limit its activity to the protection of the rights of life, liberty, and property—can be justified. On the basis of his rebuttal of this anarchist argument, Nozick concludes that the minimal state can be vindicated. Part II addresses the issue of whether any state that is more extensive than the minimal state can be justified. Nozick examines the most salient arguments for a more than minimal state and concludes that none of them provide a vindication for a more than minimal state. Part III addresses the issue of whether the minimal state is inspiring. Nozick argues, while the minimal state is not itself utopia, it should be inspiring for anyone who seeks utopia because the minimal state supports a framework of freedom within which utopia—actually, many utopias—are most likely to be discovered.

In the preface to Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Nozick recounts a long conversation he had—probably in the late 1960s—with the free-​market anarchist Murray Rothbard. Rothbard was the leading advocate of “anarcho-​capitalism.” He held that the consistent application of both the economic and moral arguments for private property and the free market requires one to endorse a free and competitive market among profit-​seeking suppliers of the protection of individual rights.

According to the economic argument, the protection of people’s rights is a vitally important service which, like all other legitimate services, is best provided by firms which compete with one another in the quality of the services offered and the price at which they are offered. Since profit-​seeking firms will need to assure their prospective clients the delivery of peaceful and just resolutions of the disputes among those clients, the firms will cooperate to develop a shared legal code and judicial institutions. According to Rothbard, the establishment of a State with a monopoly on the provision of protective services would have the same sort of unfortunate economic consequences as result from other monopolies. In the absence of competition among suppliers, the services offered will be increasingly shoddy and will be sold to the monopoly’s captive clients at increasingly higher prices.

According Rothbard’s moral argument, while agencies that offer “protection” in the Mafia sense of the term are outlaws and may be forcibly suppressed by agencies that genuinely protect rights, it is not permissible for any agency to suppress any other agency which genuinely protects the rights of its clients. For the provision of such protection is not itself a violation of rights. Since a state can arise only if one of these agencies (or a coalition of them) coercively suppresses other legitimate agencies and such coercive suppression always violates rights, no state can ever be legitimate.

It is especially Rothbard’s moral argument to which Nozick responds in Part I of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. His response is complex and challenging. It delves into such issues as the stringency of moral rights, the nature of procedural rights, the justification for punishment, the plausibility of a “principle of fairness” which purports to justify taxation, and the criminalization of blackmail. Here I can only provide an outline of the core move within Nozick’s main argument against the anarchist.

Nozick maintains—contrary to Rothbard’s economic argument—that competition among non-​outlaw agencies will yield a single powerful agency (or confederation of agencies). He calls this “the dominant protective association” (i.e., the “DPA”). Nevertheless, some niche independent and non-​outlaw agencies will remain in existence. How could the DPA legitimately suppress or otherwise exercise control over these non-​outlaw independents and, thereby, become a legitimate minimal state?

Nozick’s answer is that not all non-​outlaw agencies are equal. Some non-​outlaw agencies may seek to protect the rights of their clients through procedures—of arrest, trial, and punishment—that create significant risks of violating the rights of the DPA’s clients. The risks are not as high as those created by outlaw agencies. Still, these risks are too high to expect the clients of the DPA to tolerate them. On the other hand, these problematic procedures may very well not lead to any violations of rights. How may the DPA respond?

Nozick’s answer is that the DPA needs to split the difference between suppressing the independent’s problematic procedures and simply allowing them. The intermediate and proper response by the DPA is to prohibit the too risky procedures while also providing the independent agency (or its clients) due compensation for this prohibition. (This is like your Homeowners Association prohibiting an owner with epilepsy from driving his sports car around the neighborhood while also keeping him well-​supplied with golf carts.) Nozick extends this prohibit-​and-​compensate response to cases in which an independent agency is deemed to be unreliable because it will not allow the DPA to monitor its activities and judgments to assure itself that the independent’s procedures do not impose too much risk on the DPA’s clients. According to Nozick, in these cases, the DPA may impose its scrutiny and judgments on such unreliable agencies and thereby convert them into dependent affiliates of the DPA. Thus, through a combination of its suppression (with due compensation) of non-​outlaw agencies whose procedures are known to be too risky and its imposition of supervision (with due compensation) on unreliable non-​outlaw agencies, the DPA legitimately establishes itself as the monopoly suppler of coercion and, hence, as a justified minimal state.

Part II of ASU argues that no state more extensive than the minimal state is justified. Nozick examines and criticizes a wide range of arguments for state intervention in or regulation of the structure of the economy or the distribution of income. He is most concerned to rebut the view that ongoing coercive state interference is needed to achieve and sustain the just distribution of income.

Nozick begins by offering a brief sketch of his own “historical entitlement” view. On this view the justice of one’s possession of any object depends upon how it has come into one’s possession. One becomes entitled to a previously unowned object if one has acquired it in accordance with the principle of just initial acquisition. If the object is already justly held by another, one becomes entitled to it if one acquires it in accordance with the principle of just transfer. One’s entitlement to any object one currently possesses depends upon the justice of the sequence of initial acquisitions and transfers that have led up to one’s possession of it. Roughly speaking, if those initial acquisitions and transfers have not violated anyone’s rights, one has a right to one’s current possession. The practical implication of this view is that any existing holding that has arisen through peaceful initial acquisition and peaceful market transfers is just. Any theory of distributive justice that endorses the seizure of such legitimately acquired property must be false. If a holding has arisen through the violation of rights, a third principle comes into play which is the principle of just rectification.

Just as Nozick’s vindication of the minimal state largely depends on the success of his criticism of the anarchist claim that no state can ever be justified, Nozick’s support for the historical entitlement view largely depends upon the success of his criticism of alternative doctrines of economic justice. Here Nozick’s primary targets are theories of “distributive justice” which hold that income should be distributed across members of society in accordance with some favored arithmetical formula. Equality of income is a simple example of such a view. A more complex view of distributive justice that is offered by the philosopher John Rawls is that income should be distributed so that members of the lowest income class receive as much income as possible.

Nozick offers a series of powerful critiques of all “distributive justice” views. Here I can comment on only one of these arguments. Nozick points to a range of different productive capacities that individuals have and utilize in the course of their purposeful and peaceful acquisition and employment of economically valuable items. The realization of any “distributive justice” view requires the expropriation of at least some of the fruits of people’s exercise of these personal productive faculties. According to Nozick, this expropriation of the fruits of people’s exercise of their productive faculties amounts to at least a partial expropriation of people’s time, energy, decision-​making powers, actions, and labor. Any such seizure treats people as though they are at least in part the property of the expropriators. Since each person has moral rights to his or her own time, energy, decision-​making powers, actions, and labor, any such expropriation of the fruits of the exercise of these productive capacities violates their rights and therefore is morally impermissible.

Here is how Nozick makes the point with much greater flair:

Nozick is a bit coy here. He appeals to the notion of self-​ownership without himself explicitly embracing it. Still, it is clear enough that his condemnation of distributive justice principles depends on the Lockean idea that to deprive people of the fruits of their purposeful productive activity is to deprive them of control over their productive capacities, and this violates people’s rights to decide for themselves how their lives will be lived—to decide for themselves what purposes their actions will serve.

It is common to say that the minimal state provides the legal framework within which a competitive market for goods and services can flourish. It is almost as common to say that the minimal state provides the legal framework within which a competitive market for ideas can flourish. Part III of Anarchy, State, and Utopia adds that the minimal state provides the legal framework within which a competitive market for utopias can flourish.

All sorts of people yearn for a life in an ideal community. However, since people are so complex and so different from one another, the ideals they yearn for—from say Walden Two to Galt’s Gulch—are radically different. No sane utopian would think that there is one sort of community which is ideal for everyone. Nor would any sane utopian think that he or she now knows the details about what community would be best for any particular subset of people.

What is needed is free experimentation. Such experimentation requires that people be free to form communities that look ideal (or semi-​ideal) to them and for these people and observers to see how things work out. What is needed is the enforcement of rights of entry and exit so that communities which hope to retain or increase their membership will be motivated to modify their communities to enhance their market appeal. And what is needed is the recognition that many radically different communities will emerge and that as long as they and their members respect the rights of non-​members and of the associations they freely form, none of these communities may be repressed. The minimal state itself is inspiring because it maximally facilitates the search for utopias.

As Nozick writes near the conclusion of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, the minimal state,