Revisiting Nozick

[PDS]

I confess a fondness for Robert Nozick, perhaps because when I "grew up" intellectually, he was in his prime, and the author of Anarchy State and Utopia had not yet overruled his own best opinion, so to speak. Ghs has recently commented on Nozick's tendency to be too clever by half, which is hard to deny, but sometimes he was clever in exactly the right way, as, for instance, when Nozick used Wilt Chamberlain to prove that income distribution not only violated rights, but also is/was doomed to fail:

Nozick's famous Wilt Chamberlain argument is an attempt to show that patterned principles of just distribution are incompatible with liberty. He asks us to assume that the original distribution in society, D1 is ordered by our choice of patterned principle, for instance Rawls's Difference Principle. Wilt Chamberlain is an extremely popular basketball player in this society, and Nozick further assumes 1 million people are willing to freely give Wilt 25 cents each to watch him play basketball over the course of a season (we assume no other transactions occur). Wilt now has $250,000, a much larger sum than any of the other people in the society. The new distribution in society, call it D2, obviously is no longer ordered by our favored pattern that ordered D1. However Nozick argues that D2 is just. For if each agent freely exchanges some of his D1 share with WC and D1 was a just distribution (we know D1 was just, because it was ordered according to your favorite patterned principle of distribution), how can D2 fail to be a just distribution? Thus Nozick argues that what the Wilt Chamberlain example shows is that no patterned principle of just distribution will be compatible with liberty. In order to preserve the pattern, which arranged D1, the state will have to continually interfere with people's ability to freely exchange their D1 shares, for any exchange of D1 shares explicitly involves violating the pattern that originally ordered it.

Cool stuff indeed. Throw in Nozick's attempt to show how the minimal state might develop naturally, and one can't help but say that Nozick gets an A for effort in AS & U. Of course, as most of us know, from Day One, Nozick was persona non grata in O-world, for all of the usual reasons...a sad and early example of the Objectivist Movement's lack of willingness to engage on the broader intellectual stage, all to its detriment.

For myself, I have always enjoyed Nozick's twilight book, The Examined Life, and highly recommend it. Contra to Nozick's stated goal, there are some "intellectual figure eights" in TEL, but they are worth the trouble, as are most of Nozick's works. The saddest part of TEL is Nozick's reference to his father, and his (implicit) belief that he would live into his dotage. Alas, it wasn't to be.

Nozick died at far too young an age, but he left behind works of significance and relevance for Objectivists, and Objectivism.

Edited December 20, 2010 by PDS

[George H. Smith]

Articles critical of Anarchy, State, and Utopia were published in the first issue of Journal of Libertarian Studies.

Roy Childs, "The Invisible Hand Strikes Back."

Randy Barnett, "Whither Anarchy? Has Robert Nozick Justified the State?"

Murray Rothbard, "Robert Nozick and the Immaculate Conception of the State."

I assume you know that Nozick later retreated from his more radical libertarian views. Indeed, at one point he successfully sued his landlord, novelist Erich Segal (author of Love Story), for violating rent control laws when Segal raised the rent on Nozick's plush apartment. I don't recall the amount that the court awarded to Nozick, but it was substantial.

Here is how Nozick explained this incident in a 2001 interview:

JS: In The Examined Life, you reported that you had come to see the libertarian position that you'd advanced in Anarchy, State and Utopia as "seriously inadequate." But there are several places in Invariances where you seem to suggest that you consider the view advanced there, broadly speaking, at least, a libertarian one. Would you now, again, self-apply the L-word?

RN: Yes. But I never stopped self-applying. What I was really saying in The Examined Life was that I was no longer as hardcore a libertarian as I had been before. But the rumors of my deviation (or apostasy!) from libertarianism were much exaggerated. I think this book makes clear the extent to which I still am within the general framework of libertarianism, especially the ethics chapter and its section on the "Core Principle of Ethics." One thing that I think reinforced the view that I had rejected libertarianism was a story about an apartment of [Love Story author] Erich Segal's that I had been renting. Do you know about that?

JS: I did hear about that. The story that had gone around was that you had taken action against a landlord to secure a certain fixed rent?

RN: That's right. In the rent he was charging me, Erich Segal was violating a Cambridge rent control statute. I knew at the time that when I let my intense irritation with representatives of Erich Segal lead me to invoke against him rent control laws that I opposed and disapproved of, that I would later come to regret it, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do.

Sometimes you have to do what you have to do. It would seem that the examined life is sometimes not worth living.

Ghs

[PDS]

I knew that Nozick essentially overruled himself in TEL, thus my reference above, but I didn't know that he distanced himself from that reversal later, per the 2001 interview you reference. All of which raises two important issues:

1. Shouldn't the author of Love Story be sued for something other than rent control issues, say, perhaps, crimes against humanity?, and,

2. Should I rename this thread "Wilt Chamberlain Shrugged"?

Notwithstanding these issues, I still think reading TEL is better than a poke in the eye...I will read the critical essays re: AS & U in the next few days. Thanks for the references.

[George H. Smith]

I knew that Nozick essentially overruled himself in TEL, thus my reference above, but I didn't know that he distanced himself from that reversal later, per the 2001 interview you reference. All of which raises two important issues:

1. Shouldn't the author of Love Story be sued for something other than rent control issues, say, perhaps, crimes against humanity?, and,

2. Should I rename this thread "Wilt Chamberlain Shrugged"?

Notwithstanding these issues, I still think reading TEL is better than a poke in the eye...I will read the critical essays re: AS & U in the next few days. Thanks for the references.

David Hume somewhere gives an argument very similar to Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain argument. (I briefly looked for this passage last night but couldn't locate it. I'm not even sure of the book in which it appears.) Hume posits a condition of perfect communism in which all property is equally distributed. He then points out that this equality would quickly disappear as people engaged in voluntary exchanges. (I also recall that Rothbard presented the same argument, but I cannot recall the source. It might appear in Power and Market -- the third volume, in effect, of Man, Economy, and State.)

Here is an amusing story. After finishing ATCAG and returning to my parents' home in Tucson to rest up for a while, I audited some graduate seminars at the University of Arizona, including one on Marxism. As the only non-Marxist of around 10 participants (including the professor), I was the main target of attacks and criticisms; and, never the shrinking violet type, I was very upfront about my free-market/libertarian/anarchist views.

In 1974, shortly before Anarchy, State, and Utopia was published, the professor gleefully announced that Robert Nozick -- then widely known as a Marxist wunderkind at Harvard-- had finished a book, and he was looking forward to reading it. Well, I didn't know much about Nozick, but I was familiar with the scuttlebutt in libertarian circles, so I told the professor that Nozick's book would probably be more sympathetic to my views than to his. The professor was incredulous.

Not long thereafter the professor walked into the class with a copy of Nozick's book in hand. He said that he could scarcely believe what he had read. Not only did Nozick defend private property rights, but he also took seriously all that "crazy" stuff about private protection agencies that I had been pushing for the previous two months. I just smiled and shrugged, as if to say QED.

My initial reaction to Anarchy, State, and Utopia , like that of many libertarians, was mixed. Although we appreciated some of Nozick's arguments, many of them were essentially the same as arguments presented previously by other libertarian writers, most notably Murray Rothbard. We felt that Nozick's book got so much praise and attention (including a National Book Award) because of Nozick's academic status as a Harvard professor, not because of its intrinsic merit. We also felt that Nozick had not given sufficient credit to Rothbard.

Nevertheless, we recognized the enormous boost that Nozick's book gave to libertarian ideas. He elevated them from the status of marginal ideas to ideas that should be taken seriously by political philosophers. For this reason, if for no other, Anarchy, State, and Utopia was a watershed in the history of modern libertarian thought.

Ghs

[Brant Gaede]

I wrote RN off when I couldn't understand or make any sense of his "On the Randian Argument" article in The Personalist. I considered it pretentious academic nonsense and never bothered with his books.

--Brant

[BaalChatzaf]

I wrote RN off when I couldn't understand or make any sense of his "On the Randian Argument" article in The Personalist. I considered it pretentious academic nonsense and never bothered with his books.

--Brant

Your loss. Bob Nozick was one the the smartest people I have ever known. Bob and I became acquainted while I was living north of Boston (near Lowell). I had occasion to speak with him several times when he gave public lecture or was promoting his books. So we had a nodding and chatting acquaintance. His loss at the age of 62 was a sad thing. High quality minds are a rare thing. And yes, Bob was a very abstract thinker. One had to work to get a hang of what he was saying, but I found the effort worth it.

Ba'al Chatzaf