Robert Nozick

Early Life and Education

Robert Nozick was born on November 16, 1938, in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family of Russian descent. His father was a businessman. Nozick attended Columbia University, where he was initially attracted to socialism and participated in student radical groups. He later described his conversion to libertarianism as the result of reading economists like F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, combined with philosophical reflection on the foundations of individual rights.

He received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1963, studying under Carl Hempel, and held positions at Princeton, Rockefeller University, and Harvard, where he became a full professor at age thirty and the Pellegrino University Professor.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)

Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) was written partly in response to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), which had provided a systematic defense of redistributive liberalism. Where Rawls argued from the veil of ignorance for principles that would justify significant redistribution, Nozick defended a minimal state — limited to the protection of individuals against force, theft, and fraud — as the most extensive state that can be justified.

Nozick's argument proceeded in three parts. First, he showed how a minimal state could arise from a Lockean state of nature through an "invisible hand" process without violating anyone's rights. Second, he developed the entitlement theory of justice: a distribution is just if it arises from just acquisitions (the principle of justice in acquisition) and just transfers (the principle of justice in transfer). This "historical" conception of justice contrasts with Rawls's "end-state" or "patterned" principles, which Nozick argued necessarily require continuous interference with people's free choices.

The Wilt Chamberlain argument illustrates this: if a distribution is just and people freely choose to pay Wilt Chamberlain to watch him play basketball, the resulting unequal distribution is also just, because it arose from free exchanges. Any attempt to maintain a patterned distribution would require constant interference with liberty.

Third, Nozick sketched a utopian framework: the minimal state as a "framework for utopia" — a meta-utopia in which individuals and communities can freely experiment with different ways of life.

The book won the National Book Award and remains the definitive libertarian response to egalitarian liberalism.

The Experience Machine

One of philosophy's most famous thought experiments, the experience machine (from Anarchy, State, and Utopia), asks whether you would choose to plug into a machine that provides any experiences you desire, indistinguishable from reality. Nozick argued that most people would refuse, which shows that we value more than subjective experience — we want to do things, to be certain kinds of persons, and to live in contact with reality. The thought experiment is a powerful objection to hedonist and experientialist theories of well-being.

Later Work

Philosophical Explanations (1981) addressed epistemology, personal identity, free will, and the foundations of ethics with extraordinary breadth and creativity. Nozick developed a "tracking" theory of knowledge: S knows that p if S's belief tracks the truth — if p were false, S would not believe it, and if p were true, S would believe it. He also explored the question of why there is something rather than nothing.

The Examined Life (1989) offered philosophical reflections on love, death, happiness, and the meaning of life for a general audience. Invariances (2001), his last book, explored the philosophical significance of invariance across transformations.

Nozick died of stomach cancer on January 23, 2002, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at age 63.