Robert Nozick

1938-2002 · American · Political Philosophy, Ethics, Epistemology, Metaphysics

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.

When John Rawls published A Theory of Justice in 1971 and seemed to settle liberal political thought for a generation, a philosopher at Harvard wrote the rejoinder that split the discipline. Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia appeared in 1974, won the National Book Award, and became the most influential work of libertarian political philosophy ever written.

Topics Robert Nozick addresses

• the entitlement theory of justice
• the minimal state
• side constraints
• the Wilt Chamberlain argument
• the experience machine
• self-ownership
• taxation as forced labor
• patterned versus historical theories of justice
• liberty upsets patterns
• the invisible-hand explanation of the state
• protective associations
• just acquisition
• just transfer
• rectification of past injustice
• the Lockean proviso
• the framework for utopia
• meta-utopia
• the tracking theory of knowledge
• counterfactual sensitivity
• closure of knowledge under entailment
• the Gettier problem
• noncoercive philosophy
• philosophical explanation versus proof
• the Parthenon model of philosophy

Converse with Robert Nozick on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Robert Nozick's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.