Introduction

The moral basis of Nozick's system rests firmly on rights then: rights of acquisition, rights of transfer, and rights to compensation. It is a system of individuals, separate and inviolable, who may be “social products” in that they benefit from the doings of their contemporaries and their ancestors, but who owe no “general floating debt which the current society can collect and use as it will” (ASU: 95). Morally speaking we enter society from the outside, already fully formed. What sort of society then do we enter?

The main thought for Nozick is that, other things being equal, the less government we have the better. His task is to steer a course between the Scylla of anarchism, the absence of all government, and the Charybdis of the welfare state, or (horror of horrors!) socialism – although to be fair Nozick may have in mind by “socialism” something nearer to communism with its command economy and class war rather than simply the idea that society has a responsibility to care for its less fortunate members, even though he rejects that too. Individuals may have a moral obligation to do so, but it is not an enforceable one. The big names of anarchism belong rather in the nineteenth century than the twentieth (Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Stirner, for instance). But anarchism has its defenders today as well, as we have seen already, and some of the most vigorous attacks have come from them, e.g. R. P. Wolff (author of In Defense of Anarchism), in Paul (1981).