Nozick died in 2002 after a prolonged struggle with cancer. He was born in Brooklyn, the son of a Jewish entrepreneur from Russia, and married the American poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Challenging and ultimately rejecting liberal, socialist, and conservative agendas, Nozick boldly asserts that the rights of individuals are violated as a state's responsibilities increase-and the only way to avoid these violations rests in the creation of a minimalist state limited to protection against force, fraud, theft, and the enforcement of contracts. His Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) was a libertarian answer to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, published in 1971. New York: University of Michigan, : "First published in response to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice, Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia has since ingrained itself in contemporary political debates as one of the defining texts in classic libertarian thought. However, it is important to note that Nozick holds to the fundamental principles despite his dismissal of Rawl’s distributive theory. Otherwise, the individuals will still retain some right of self-defending their libertarian rights. For him, an action is just if it doesn’t violate another’s libertarian rights as opposed to Rawl’s theory of justice which is based on merits and moral obligations in determining what an individual is entitled to and what is fair in eyes of the ordinary man in the street.Īccording to Nozick the role of the minimal state is limited to safeguarding the libertarian rights of the individual citizens against theft, torture, and maiming. 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. While on the one hand, Rawl understands justice based on distributive shares based on moral obligations, Nozick proposes a theory of justice based on libertarian rights enumerated above. The main thought for Nozick is that, other things being equal, the less government we have the better. The libertarian rights according to Nozick are original absolute self-ownership, rights of a common use of the external world, rights of primary acquisition. Nozick’s theory of justice holds that an action is just if it does not violate other people’s libertarian rights. Valentyne argues that Nozick holds a libertarian theory of justice as opposed to Rawl’s distributive theory of justice (88).Despite his deviation from Rawl’s distributive theory of justice Nozick believes that sound adult humans have certain undeniable rights including a right to bodily honor which makes illegal murdering, persecuting, or hurting the holder of the right Valentyne (88). So that in the long run, each member of the society gets what is entitled to him or her Rawl (275). It proposes the allocation of opportunities and wealth on the basis of merits and moral obligations. Distributive justice deals with fair allocation of resources on the basis of ethical and moral principles of the society (275). In chapter seven Nozick provides an articulate critique upon Rawl’s theory of distributive justice (150).
He attempts to work in the Lockean framework of. In the first part of the work, Nozick defends. Robert Nozick’s Critique of Rawl’s Distributive Justice Anarchy State and Utopia deals with the idea of minimal state put forward by its author Robert Nozick. So Anarchy, State, and Utopia is an attempt to defend the minimal state from two different kinds of objections. Nozick’s sense of state is that of a coercive organization that for a given territory has effectual domination on the use of weapons to enforce its will and interests Valentyne (87). Therefore, Nozick proposes the replacement of the present state with a minimal state which safeguards people only against violence, theft, fraud, and violation of contract Valentyne (86). According to Valentyne, Nozick holds that it is not possible to have a legitimate state especially one that enjoys absolute legitimacy (86). The state and its legitimacy are one of the main themes in Robert Nozick’s book.
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