ROBERT NOZICK: ANARCHY, STATE, & UTOPIA/MASSACHUSETTS/PHILOSOPHY/SCARCE 1974 1st

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ROBERT NOZICK: ANARCHY, STATE, & UTOPIA/MASSACHUSETTS/PHILOSOPHY/SCARCE 1974 1st ANARCHY, STATE, AND UTOPIA. ROBERT NOZICK. New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1974. First Edition. Scarce. A nice copy of this scarce and fascinating book. Published nearly 40 years ago, this book has long been out of print. Such a nice copy is not likely to come up for sale again soon on ebay. From the Dust Jacket: "Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia is an eagerly awaited work, widely discussed among philosophers long before its publication. For it is nothing less than apowerful, philosophical challenge to the most widely held political and social positions of our age--liberal, socialist, and conservative. "Individuals have rights," writes Nozick in his opening sentence, "and there are things no person or group may do to them without violating their rights." The work that fellows, striking for its wit, depth of insight, and skill of argument, is perhaps the most sophisticated defense of the "minimal state" in contemporary thought. the state is justified, says Nozick, only when it is severely limited to the narrow function of protection against force, theft, and fraud, and to the enforcement of contracts. Any more extensive activities by the state, as Nozick brilliantly demonstrates, will inevitably violate individuals' rights. Two noteworth implications emerge which are then fully explored: "The state may not use its coercive apparatus for the purpose of getting some citizens to aid others, or in order to prohibit activities to epople for their own good for protection." Among the many achievements of this unusually rich worker are: an important new theory of distributie justice; a model of utopia which is favorable to utopian experimentation and which furhter supports the theory of the minimal state; and, finally, an integration of ethics, legal philosophy, and economic theory into a profound and unified position in political philosophy which will be discussed for years to come." Contents include: Why State-of-Nature Theory?; The State of Nature; Moral Constraints and the State; Prohibition, Compensations, and Risk; The State; Further Considerations on the Argument Distributive Justice; Equality, Envy, Exploitation; Demoktesis; A Framework for Utopia; According to Wikepedia: "Robert Nozick (November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American political philosopher,[2] most prominent in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a libertarian answer to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971). His other work involved decision theory and epistemology. Nozick was educated at Columbia (A.B. 1959, summa cum laude), where he studied with Sidney Morgenbesser, and later at Princeton (Ph.D. 1963), and Oxford as a Fulbright Scholar (1963–1964). For Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) Nozick received a National Book Award in category Philosophy and Religion.[4] There he argues that a distribution of goods is just if brought about by free exchange among consenting adults from a just starting position, even if large inequalities subsequently emerge from the process. Nozick appealed to the Kantian idea that people should be treated as ends (what he termed 'separateness of persons'), not merely as a means to some other end. Nozick thus challenged the partial conclusion of John Rawls's Second Principle of Justice of his A Theory of Justice, that "social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are to be of greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society." Nozick suggested, as a critique of Rawls and utilitarianism, that the sacrosanctity of life made property rights non-negotiable, such that an individual's personal liberty made state policies of redistribution illegitimate. This principle has served as a foundation for many right-libertarian arguments in modern politics. Anarchy, State and Utopia claims a heritage from John Locke's Second Treatise on Government and seeks to ground itself upon a natural la... read more

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