Anarchy, State, and Utopia: The Aftershock

I joined the faculty of Tulane University in the Fall of 1975, and I recall that for several years afterwards I would get invitations at least a couple of times a year to be one of the four or five main speakers at some high-​profile political philosophy gathering. It wasn’t until quite a number of years after that, that I began to wonder about why I had been getting those invitations. Only then did I realize that Bob Nozick was getting and declining those invitations and recommending me as his replacement. He never mentioned this to me. We never talked about it. And, of course, one of my big regrets is that I never thanked him.

A seismic shift took place in English-​speaking academic political philosophy during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The dominance of utilitarianism within political philosophy was challenged and substantially replaced by the dominance of non-​utilitarian doctrines of justice or moral rights. The publication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice in 1971 was the earthquake that signaled this shift.¹ The publication of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia in 1974 was the unanticipated aftershock.²

Rawls’ book was a powerful challenge to the reigning doctrine—partly because it boldly restated already known criticisms of utilitarianism and even more because it offered a theoretical alternative to utilitarianism. Rawls’ book quickly became the most highly regarded and authoritative book in political philosophy. Arguably the book remains the most influential work in political philosophy in the English-​speaking philosophical world since John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Utilitarianism in the mid-​nineteenth century.

There is one further reason for the enthusiasm with which A Theory of Justice was and still is embraced. While it offered an interestingly theoretical alternative to the reigning utilitarianism, the general political conclusions that Rawls drew corresponded almost exactly to the existing political views of the elite among academic philosophers, political theorists, and legal theorists. The continued reverence for A Theory of Justice and Rawls’ later work is due in part to the correspondence between Rawl’s general political conclusions and the political commitments of contemporary mainstream political philosophers.

The philosophical elite that embraced Rawls’ book also almost unanimously declared the brilliance of Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia when it was published in 1974. However, that elite also unanimously declared that Nozick’s conclusions had to be wrong because after all they did not conform to the elite’s established political judgments. ASU was worthy of deep, probing examination—as long as the conclusion of that examination was that it was profoundly mistaken. A vast cottage industry of attacking ASU quickly emerged. I would guess that in the fifty years since its publication there have been at least twenty times as many academic books and essays devoted to debunking ASU as there have been defenses of ASU. And, yet the book abides.

One reason that ASU abides is that there are numerous ideas that are shared by almost all political philosophers who were in the mainstream in 1971 or are in the mainstream in 2024 and, in one way or another, ASU challenges almost all of those ideas. Thus, ASU has been a place of refuge and inspiration for non-​mainstreamers and a tantalizingly, seductively dangerous territory for more open-​minded mainstreamers. The prestige of Nozick and the heightened interest in libertarian ideas engendered by ASU opened doors for what is now two or three generations of libertarian or classical liberal political philosophers.³

Nozick had been working intermittently in the late 1960s and early 1970s on the material that was to become one or another of the three parts of ASU. Nozick was on sabbatical at Stanford University during the 1971-1972 academic year. Sometime during that year—it must have been early in the Fall semester of 1971—Rawls sent him a copy of the final galley proofs for A Theory of Justice. According to Nozick,

If it had not been for the earthquake that was A Theory of Justice, we might not have the aftershock of Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

As its title suggests, ASU is divided into three main parts. Part I is devoted to the dispute between the individualist (or free market) anarchist and the defender of the minimal state. In a complex intellectual tour de force, Nozick seeks to refute Murray Rothbard’s contention that respect for individual rights requires the condemnation of even the minimal state—a state which purports to do nothing but respect and protect rights. Early sections of Part I also contain a suggestive defense of the individual moral rights that both Rothbard and Nozick endorse.

Part II is devoted to arguing that the minimal state is the most extensive state that can be justified. Nozick surveys a wide range of reasons that have been offered on behalf of a more extensive state and seeks to rebut them all. Part III is devoted to examining the idea of utopia and to showing that anyone who seeks utopia should endorse the minimal state as the framework within which utopia is most likely to be discovered.

There are an incredible number of complexly related and fascinating themes and arguments in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. And these themes and arguments are connected in all sorts of surprising and illuminating ways. No single paper could even begin to cover more than a few of these main themes and arguments. So, here I must be brutally selective. I have chosen to pursue the earthquake and aftershock theme by focusing on parts of Anarchy, State, and Utopia in which Nozick either appears to follow Rawls or directly confronts Rawls. This will allow me to develop the contrast between the continuing dominant Rawlsian strand in recent political philosophy and Nozick’s libertarian challenge to it. I have had to omit all sorts of great stuff. That includes Nozick’s elaborate defense of the minimal state against Rothbard’s challenge and Nozick’s important discussion of the nature of utopia.

The first issue I will address is Rawls’ and Nozick’s individualist critique of utilitarian political theorizing and Nozick’s affirmation of individual moral rights as the keystone of political judgment. The individualist premises that Rawls employed against utilitarianism were deeply compromised by Rawls as he labored to derive standard welfare state conclusions from those premises. In contrast, Nozick builds his case for libertarian conclusions on similar—albeit, more radical --individualist premises. If the earthquake was the individualist premises through which Rawls disposes of utilitarianism, the aftershock was Nozick’s use of those premises to reach libertarian conclusions.

I then turn to issues concerning the nature of economic justice. To rebut the argument that a more-​than-​minimal state is needed to achieve economic justice, Nozick needs to present a theory of economic justice that explains why economic actors are entitled to what they acquire through free market actions and interactions. Nozick also needs to rebut theories of “distributive justice” that condemn market outcomes and demand state control over the distribution of economic holdings or income so that distributive justice can be achieved. Nozick most wants to refute the state-​friendly doctrine of “distributive justice” that was most prominent and most endorsed when he was publishing ASU. That doctrine of distributive justice was developed and defended by Rawls in TJ.

Rawls defends the view that justice requires that income be distributed so that the members of the lowest income group receive as much income as it is possible to arrange for the lowest income group in society to receive. Rawls calls this rule the “difference principle.” If the earthquake was Rawls’ development and defense of the difference principle, the aftershock was Nozick’s defense of the historical entitlement view and his critique of the difference principle.

Simple unadulterated utilitarianism tells us that each individual should devote his or her life to maximizing the surplus of aggregate happiness over aggregate unhappiness in society. Individuals ought voluntarily to sacrifice their own happiness whenever doing so will increase the general happiness. And individuals ought to impose sacrifices on others when doing so most effectively promotes the general happiness. Utilitarianism calls upon each person to think of and treat himself or herself as merely a means to be employed to serve the ends of others (who themselves are merely means … and so on). And utilitarianism calls upon everyone to think of and treat everyone else as a means to be employed to advance the greatest aggregate happiness.

Rawls and Nozick offer—or seem to offer—a similar criticism of utilitarianism. It is that utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction among or the separateness of persons. It does not sufficiently recognize that each person has ends of his own or her own and that one implication of this is that it is rational for each person to seek the fulfillment of his or her own system of ends. In addition, the fact that others too are beings with ends of their own—with lives of their own—places limits on how any individual may go about fulfilling his or her own ends. That others also have lives of their own constrains how each of us may go about promoting his or her own plan of life. One may not treat others as though they are merely means to one’s own ends. Sacrifices are not to be imposed on individuals even for what seems to be the greater social good.

At the very beginning of A Theory of Justice, Rawls stirringly declares,

Ominously, Rawls immediately backpedals by adding that he has expressed these convictions “too strongly.” Also, notice that Rawls does not say that nothing overrides the inviolability of persons or that nothing vindicates the imposition of sacrifice. Only maximization of the sum of advantages is said to be incapable of overriding the inviolability of persons or justifying the imposition of sacrifices. Perhaps justice itself—as formulated by Rawls—will override or severely constrain the inviolability of persons.

Nevertheless, Rawls says that one must begin with the view that “A person quite properly acts, at least when others are not affected, to achieve his own great good, to advance his rational ends as far as possible.”⁶ How could one possibly get to the seemingly contrary idea that “a society is properly arranged when its institutions maximize the net balance of satisfaction [across individuals]?” Rawls says that one can get to this utilitarian view only if one thinks of individuals as being subsumed within a larger being, viz., society, and that it is really society as a whole that should be pursuing the maximum net realization of its ends.

Rawls then rejects this conflation view of society. For this view misperceives persons as merely parts fused together into a mega-​person who has a life of its own. Utilitarianism, Rawls concludes, fails to “take seriously the distinction between persons.”⁷ So, we are back to the apparently individualist idea that “A person quite properly acts, at least when others are not affected, to achieve his own great good, to advance his rational ends as far as possible.” The problem though is knowing how much scope there is for individuals to advance their rational ends as far as possible when others are affected.

For Rawls, when others are affected, the principles of justice come into play. Those principles are the rules within which each person may pursue his or her personal goals. Compliance with those principles comes first. Devotion to one’s purposes may only come into play within one’s compliance with those principles. If those principles of justice are very demanding, the moral space left for the achievement of one’s own rational ends may be markedly narrowed. In fact, we shall see that the enforcement of Rawls’ difference principle profoundly limits the extent to which some people can devote their time, energy, alertness, talent, perseverance, and labor to serving their own rational ends.

Nozick goes out of his way to employ the same language as Rawls uses in the latter’s critique of utilitarianism. He too asserts that “Individuals are inviolable.”⁸ Individuals are not to be thought of or treated as though they are tools or resources at the disposal of others. And he trenchantly rejects both self-​imposed sacrifice and the imposition of sacrifices on others. Still, Nozick asks, why shouldn’t society itself violate individuals if that would provide more benefit for members of society than it causes loss for the violated? In answering this question, Nozick seems to follow Rawls. For he declares that,

However, Nozick goes well beyond Rawls’ denial of a “social entity” when he says,

Nozick does not proceed merely by ascribing to the utilitarian the mistaken view that individuals are mere fused parts of a composite societal being. Rather, he advances the normative view that each individual’s life has its own separate, free-​standing, importance and value. There is no impersonal standard of value in terms of which the value of the satisfaction of one individual’s ends can be weighed against the value of the satisfaction of any other individual’s ends. So, no so-​called “calculus of social interests”—whether it be utilitarian or otherwise—can be valid.

Beyond that, Nozick says that for each person the fact that other people have lives of their own to lead has moral import. The import is not that each person must balance the satisfaction of his or her ends against the satisfaction of the ends of others. Rather, the import for each person is that he or she must not interfere with others’ non-​interfering efforts to attain their own greatest good. To take seriously the fact that people are ends in themselves in the sense of having their own lives to live one needs to forego treating them as means to one’s own ends. One has to recognize each other person’s right to live his or her own life. Since others’ rights are rights to live lives of their own, one can respect these rights simply by not interfering with others. This leaves moral room for one to live one’s own life. And one’s own moral space is protected by one’s own right against being subordinated to the ends of others.

We have had to pass over Nozick’s Part I response to Rothbard’s critique of the minimal state. Nozick’s conclusion within Part I is that the minimal state is justified. As I have mentioned, Part II of ASU is devoted to arguing that no more extensive state can be justified. The single most important issue Nozick discusses in Part II is the nature of economic justice. Nozick needs to give an account of economic justice in which the role of the state is limited to protecting the economic entitlements that arise though genuinely free economic actions and interactions. He also seeks to refute the most widely endorsed view about economic justice according to which a more-​than-​minimal state is needed for economic justice to be realized. That most prominent view of economic justice is Rawls’ difference principle. Following Nozick, I begin here with a sketch of Nozick’s Historical Entitlement Theory. I will then turn to a series of illuminating critiques of Rawls’ difference principle.

Nozick opens his discussion by noting that the term “distributive justice” embodies a specific background supposition. The supposition is that justice in holdings is entirely a matter of distribution in the sense that J. S. Mill seems to have had in mind when he said that “the problem of production has been solved” and now it is time to solve “the problem of distribution.”

This is to say that no information about how the problem of production has been solved or by whom tells us anything about how the entirely separate problem of distribution needs to be solved.¹¹ Nozick rejects this proposition. What people do in the course of acquiring a bit of income (in the form of currency or in the form of economically valuable objects) matters. It matters whether you have mined and smelted the ore that has been transformed into the one ounce bar of gold that you possess or you have acquired an ounce of gold by ripping fillings out of the mouths of little old ladies.

If you have purposefully transformed some previously unowned material—making it more useful for some project you have—that gives you an entitlement to it. Others wrong you if they seize that transformed object without your permission. If you have traded for some object justly held by another and paid with some object justly held by yourself, that exchange confers upon you an entitlement to the acquired object. If you have retrieved an object which you justly held—like that one ounce bar of gold—from someone who has taken it without your consent, you have regained what you have an entitlement over. These are the sort of rules concerning property rights that sensible people teach their children. They are the sort of rules that we immediately turn to when we think about whether another person’s possession of some object is just or not. When one thinks about whether Jones down the street has a right to the SUV in her driveway, these are the sort of questions we ask ourselves. We do not ask, for instance, whether everyone else has an equally nice car or whether the worst off people have the nicest cars that society can possibly arrange for them to have.

Nozick’s Historical Entitlement Theory is simply an abstract formulation of these sorts of observation. There are three principles within this theory.

A principle of just initial acquisition; a principle of just transfer; and a principle of just rectification. The crucial overall abstract proposition is that one is entitled to some object or to some chunk of income if and only if the object or income has come to one through some sequence of actions all of which have been in accord with one or another of these principles.

Nozick does not attempt to spell out the details of any of these principles. This was wise because the specifics of what counts as acquiring an initial entitlement to say a seam of ore or a field or an animal one is hunting will likely depend upon the particular conventions that have grown up in one’s society for signaling just original acquisition of different types of objects. The details may be filled in differently from one society to another. But the right of each person to possess what they have acquired in accordance with those conventionally set details will not itself be conventional.¹²

Notice an important corollary of this entitlement theory. The judgment about the justice of any given holding is a judgment about that holding. Judging whether Jones is entitled to the car she possesses is one thing. Judging whether Smith is entitled to the car he possesses is another thing. Whatever degree of economic justice or injustice we ascribe to a given society is entirely a matter of the degree to which the distinct holdings of particular economic agents are individually just or unjust. We start with the particulars, not with any global judgment about which array of holdings is best or most just.

There is a whole class of theories of distributive justice that mistakenly presuppose that the justice of holdings has nothing to do with who has contributed to the production of the goods or income that are available for distribution (and who has inhibited their production). Nozick refers to these doctrines as “end-​state” theories. This is how each end-​state theory envisions the determination of which distribution of income (in cash or in kind) is the just distribution:

First, provide a numerical representation of each of the available distributions.

Second, come up with an arithmetical formula for identifying which of the available distributions counts as the just one.

Rawls’ difference principle is an end-​state principle of this sort. Hence, any general critique of end-​state principles applies to the difference principle. To visualize these principles at work, consider this table of available distributions. The letters stand for individuals or income classes and the numbers for the annual income pay-​offs (in cash or kind) within the diverse distributions.¹³

If one holds to the end-​state principle that the just distribution is the one that maximizes total income, one selects D1 as the just distribution.

If one holds to the end-​state principle that the just distribution is the one that is most equal, one selects D2 as the just distribution.

If one holds to Rawls’ “difference principle,” one selects D3 as the just distribution.

Again, all the end-​staters hold that the information within the table suffices to determine which distribution is just. However, this crucial common premise is false.

Suppose D4 is the actually existing distribution. And suppose this is the history of D4. The highly productive and talented A had been enslaved by B and C for many years. Finally, A has thrown off her shackles and now fully enjoys the fruits of her own labor. She has also reacquired from B and C some of the valuable objects that she produced during her enslavement. Also, she has rather mercifully banished the unproductive, sniveling B and C to the neighboring badlands. That is why A now has an income of 120,000 while miserable B and C have merely 21,000 apiece. Notice that only if you are aware of this fact will you realize that to convert D4 into any of the other available distributions is at least in part to re-​enslave A.

If you agree that this historical fact would be relevant to determining whether D4 should be converted into D1 or D2 or D3, you are rejecting the common premise of all end-​state theories that all the information relevant to determining the justice of these alternative distributions is contained in such tables.

Let’s turn to Nozick’s best known criticism of end-​state principles. To keep our focus on Rawls’ difference principle, I will present this criticism as it applies to Rawls’ principle. On the conventional understanding of his criticism, Nozick simply points out that if one adopts the ongoing policy of coercively redistributing income to satisfy the difference principle, one will be continually interfering with people’s liberties. Thus, if one favors liberty, one must disavow the ongoing application of the difference principle. However, this would be a pretty unimpressive argument. The problem is that within it everything depends on the premise that liberty should be favored over adherence to end-​state principles. Yet, no reason is offered on behalf of this preference. In contrast, my reconstruction of the argument focuses on problems that are internal to advocacy of the difference principle. It does not depend upon an unsupported appeal to liberty.

Nozick invites the advocate of the difference principle to imagine that the distribution that he favors—D3—has been selected as the economic justice goal for the coming year. Accordingly, an amazing crew of economic officials have thought up and instituted a batch of regulations—some combination of economic permissions and prohibitions and taxes and subsidies—which are designed to yield a distribution of $32,000 to A, $34,000 to B, and $70,000 to C (in currency or kind) over the course of that year.¹⁴ A, B, and C are informed that they should rejoice because the age of justice—or at least a year of justice—has arrived.

However, despite this plan, as that year rolls along members of the A/B/C society will engage in peaceful and apparently perfectly innocuous—but unanticipated –economic actions and interactions. For instance, suppose that with some of her planned income for that year, B purchases a parcel of raw land, some timber, pipes, glass, and tools and spends her evenings constructing a modest but cozy cabin. The cost to B of this endeavor totals $30,000. This includes $25,000 from her projected $34,000 income and an unanticipated $5000 cost in the form of her time and labor. And near the end of the fiscal year, B sells the cabin and land to C for $70,000.

B’s net income for the year turns out to be $49,000—composed of her $40,000 real estate profit plus the unspent $9,000 of income that has been anticipated by the planners. A’s income is unaffected while C’s income, let us estimate, has exceeded the anticipated $70,000 by $10,000 because C has ended up with a cabin which he will not sell for less than $80,000. Thus, the A/B/C society arrives at D5 rather than D3.

Everything seems fine until the advocate of the difference principle realizes that in terms of that principle D5 is unjust. D5 is unjust because it can be converted into D6 which offers more income to the lowest income person A. Surely our amazing policy experts will be able quickly to come up with a tax on unanticipated windfall income that will provide funds to increase A’s income. The planners duly revise or supplement their original package of permissions, prohibitions, taxes, and subsidies in order to nudge people toward the truly just D6.

This short tale leads to two Nozickian complaints against the difference principle (or whatever other end-​state doctrine might be in play). The first focuses on the proposition that D5 would be unjust. The second focuses on the proposition that a revision of the rules will, at long last, get us to the just distribution.

The first complaint is that, if D3 was just and D5 arises through B and C voluntarily making use of their just holdings under D3 and no one else’s just holdings have been affected, then D5 would not be unjust. For, how could the voluntary and mutually beneficial use of their just holdings infect D5 with injustice? If we take seriously the claim that the first application of the difference principle creates a just distribution, viz., D3, shouldn’t D5 also be just? After all, if my possession of object X is just, surely what I innocently produce with X or what I get in voluntary exchange for X is justly mine. If X is justly mine and I choose to use X to benefit myself without injuring anyone else, I have a just claim to those benefits.

As Nozick rhetorically asks, “… what was [the distribution] for if not to do something with?”¹⁵

If end-​state principles do not assign to people holdings which they may deploy as they choose and reap the benefits of those choices, advocates of end-​state principles must acknowledge that such principles

In short, advocacy of the difference principle is a sort of bait-​and-​switch operation. People are promised holdings to do with as they choose and receive only holdings which they may retain only if those holdings conform to the next application of the difference principle. The advocate of the difference principle might work around this first complaint by saying that, as we learn more about what distributions of income have become available we should think of D3 and D5 merely as non-​just waystations along the road to the truly just D6. The planners should have told people that the road to justice does not end until society gets to D6.

However, this move would be disastrous for any end-​state theorist. For, under any non-​Stalinist regime, there will be individuals who engage in peaceful and voluntary economic actions or interactions that will disrupt the plan of the economic engineers. Due to such unanticipated actions, on the way from D5 to D6 what will actually arise is D7 which must be converted by coercive means into D8 which does more for the worst off than D7. The planners should have told people that D3, D5, D6, and D7 were all waystations on the road to the truly just D8. However, on the way to D8 … and so on. Justice in holdings becomes an ever-​receding target, and the endless attempt to get to that target requires the ever-​recurring coercive interferences with gains that people have attained through the voluntary and beneficial exercise of what was supposed to be their just holdings. Distributive justice continues to turn on itself as long as individuals are free to engage in actions that are not anticipated by the economic engineers.

Distributive justice continues to condemn the distributions that arise from the distributions which it itself declares to be truly just—as long as people retain any liberty to engage in non-​planned economic activities. The only way to stop this process of self-​condemnation would be to eliminate the very liberties that people think are granted to them by distributive justice doctrines.

I turn now to the last Nozickian argument I will consider against end-​state principles and, hence, against the difference principle. With this turn we will circle back to the crucial underlying idea that each person has a right to his or her own life—a right over the purpose-​pursuing agent that he or she is.

In ASU, Nozick repeatedly places himself within the Lockean tradition of political philosophy. Still, one of the two main Lockean doctrines that he skitters past is Locke’s labor-​mixing account of the just acquisition of unowned raw material.¹⁷ According to Locke’s account, just initial acquisition occurs when an individual mixes his or her labor with some unowned raw material. According to Locke, if someone takes from you something you have invested your labor in, that person violates your rights because in taking that object that someone has taken your labor. Apparently to distance himself from any overly literal understanding of Locke’s labor-​mixing doctrine, Nozick rhetorically asks whether one can acquire ownership of the ocean by pouring a can of one’s own tomato juice into it.¹⁸

Nozick steps back from Locke’s singular focus on labor and the role it plays in each case of just initial acquisition. Instead, he 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. Individuals utilize their time, energy, decision-​making powers, alertness, perseverance, actions, and labor. 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. The problem with any such expropriation is that at least to some degree such expropriation treats these productive capacities themselves as though they are owned by the expropriators. So, such expropriation treats people as though they are at least in part owned by the expropriators. However, people are not, even in part, owned by others because each person has moral rights over his or her own person and life.

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

Here Nozick appeals to the notion of self-​ownership without himself explicitly embracing it. Perhaps he is thinking that the language of “self-​ownership” is a bit too old-​fashioned. Nozick engages in similar arm-​distancing when, after referring to “the Lockean rights people possess (under the minimal state”—which rights he himself affirms—he notes that,

Still, it is clear enough that this condemnation of end-​state 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.

Thus, we see that in this argument against state redistributive endeavors Nozick circles back to his earlier conclusion that “To use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, and that his is the only life he has.”²¹