Robert Nozick

Philosopher Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, published in 1974, cemented libertarianism’s place among the political philosophies taken seriously in academia. In it, Nozick defended the “minimal state”--what latter came to be called minarchism-​-​and showed how it could become a “framework for utopias.”

But Nozick’s interests weren’t limited to political theory. He turned his remarkable mind to nearly every branch of philosophy in such wide-​ranging works as Philosophical Explanations, The Examined Life, and Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World.