Robert Nozick's fascinating and very politically incorrect book Anarchy, State, and Utopia was published 35 years ago. The book makes a philosophically rigorous case for the "minimal state" and against redistributive government. It is a philosopher's charter for something like libertarianism. Nozick was a powerful thinker and writer: the book made a deep impression at the time, and to this day it is the acknowledged intellectual counterweight to John Rawls' left-liberal Theory of Justice, which came out at about the same time.
Comrade Tom's recent reference to Peter Singer - who just wrote a New York Times Magazine piece on "Why We Must Ration Health Care" - reminded me that Singer reviewed Anarchy, State, and Utopia in the New York Review of Books when Nozick's book first came out. It turns out that it was a very interesting review, well worth reading (or re-reading, if you happened to be around in 1975).
The extraordinary thing about Singer's review, from today's perspective, is how fair, respectful, and intellectually honest it is. Peter Singer was and is a left-leaning academic, albeit very much more original, more interesting, and surely more quirky than most of the leftish academic tribe. And the New York Review, of course, was even then a left-leaning paper.
It seems to me unlikely that Singer would write in the same tone and with the same serious-mindedness today. And it is vanishingly unlikely that the New York Review of Books, now far gone in Bush Derangement Syndrome and crude leftist partisanship, would publish such a review. In fact, (re-)reading Singer's review brings out graphically the transformation of American academic life - and American intellectual life more broadly - over the course of the past 25 years. There has been a cascade to the left on campus, in the schools, in the media, and among the NPR-listening classes generally. The New York Review of Books simply panders to its readership in this. And today's leftism is far cruder, more bullying and intolerant, and more a kind of substitute religion than could easily be imagined when Singer reviewed Nozick in 1975.
Said Singer:
Robert Nozick's book is a major event in contemporary political philosophy. There has, in recent years, been no sustained and competently argued challenge to the prevailing conceptions of social justice and the role of the state. Political philosophers have tended to assume without argument that justice demands an extensive redistribution of wealth in the direction of equality; and that it is a legitimate function of the state to bring about this redistribution by coercive means like progressive taxation. These assumptions may be correct; but after Anarchy, State, and Utopia they will need to be defended and argued for instead of being taken for granted.
The position Nozick takes is a radical departure from the theories of distributive justice discussed by most philosophers, especially in recent years... Nozick again follows Locke, although his account is more precise. Then there are legitimate ways of transferring things you own, especially voluntary exchange and gift. As a result there is no pattern to which a just distribution must conform. People may choose to retain what they start with, or give some of it, or all of it, away. They may make profitable investments, or unprofitable ones. They may live frugally and hoard what they have, or dissipate it in a wild spree. They may gamble. So long as their original holdings were justly acquired, and the decisions they made involved neither force nor fraud, the result will be just no matter how widely people's holdings vary. The entitlement theory of justice makes the justice of a given set of holdings depend on the history of those holdings, and not on the conformity of the outcome to a given pattern.
Both the strengths and the weaknesses of the entitlement theory are immediately apparent. On the one hand, can it really be just that one baby should come into the world with a multi-million-dollar trust fund, the best possible schooling, and family connections with the nation's leading politicians and financiers awaiting him, while another baby faces life in a dingy apartment with no money and nothing else to help him on his way in the world? Neither baby at the moment of birth can possibly deserve anything; an equal division would therefore seem the only just one.
On the other hand, if the father of the first baby acquired his holdings legitimately, violating no one's rights in the process, doesn't he have the liberty to give whatever is his to his son, if he should so choose? Isn't it implied in someone's owning something that he has the right to do with it what he will, provided he violates no one else's rights? And surely it is far-fetched to hold that the poorer baby has a right to some of the other baby's wealth, merely because his ancestors were less fortunate, less astute, or less frugal in their handling of their holdings.
Our intuitions lead us in both directions. One must be wrong. Nozick tries to convince us that it is the former set of intuitions—those relating to the injustice of inherited wealth and other inherited assets—that we should give up. He does not attempt the hopeless task of arguing that those born with large fortunes or valuable natural talents have done anything to deserve these assets. Nevertheless, he says, people are entitled to their inherited assets, whether or not they deserve them. In the case of wealth he points out that orthodox theories of justice overlook the right of the donor when they consider the worthiness of the recipient of the inheritance. As for natural talents, people do not violate anyone else's rights by having the natural talents they are born with. An artist has the right to keep a painting he has done even if his artistic talent was inherited and he did nothing to deserve it. So why shouldn't a born entrepreneur have a similar right to the fortune his talents have brought him through legitimate means?...
[W]hat I have said should be enough to show that Nozick's case against compulsory redistribution is strong. Can it be met, and if so, how?
Not by Rawls, whose Theory of Justice, according to Singer, is essentially refuted by Nozick. Singer argues that utilitarianism might justify Big Government redistributionism. But Singer is cautious even about this.
It's a fascinating review: excerpts don't do it justice. Read the whole thing. And, if you haven't, by all means read Anarchy, State, and Utopia. It is 35 years old, and couldn't be more timely.
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