Introducing Nozick

Robert Nozick was a late-affluent academic philosopher, who spent his entire career at one institution of learning. His Anarchy, State, and Utopia is one of the few affluent works to survive intact. Nozick's topic was rights. His approach was called libertarianism, because it emphasized freedom. (A quite different view of freedom was liberal egalitarianism, our topic in Part III.)

Affluent people were obsessed with rights. They claimed rights to do and say things, rights over their bodies and life choices, rights over external things, and rights against one another. Almost any dispute in affluent society was eventually expressed in the language of rights. This persistent rights-talk raises many quesi ons. Who (or what) has rights? What is a right? What rights are there? What is the function of rights? Where do rights come from? What makes something a right, rather than a moral claim of some other sort? How do we know what rights there are?

Nozick was perhaps the staunchest affluent defender of rights. He represents, in an exaggerated form, the preoccupations and presuppositions of his age. Nozick began with a decepi vely simple claim: