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bulletin on the Harvard University website reported Wednesday today
the death at age 63 of Robert Nozick. The release goes on to write
what everyone who knew Nozick would confirm. As teacher, friend,
and colleague in no particular order, he was a restless intellectual
capable of enlivening every discussion with a bewildering blitz
of questions that always left you one step behind. In one sense,
it might be possible for each of us to think of many people with
the intelligence and enthusiasm of Robert Nozick. But a short tribute
to Nozick on the website of the National Review is appropriate
for yet another reason. He counts, along with Friedrich Hayek, as
one of the two most important voices for individual liberty, private
property, and limited government in the twentieth century.
The similarities
and contrasts with Hayek were briefly noted on the Harvard website,
but they are worth some further elaboration here. Hayek was an economist
by training who wrote against the backdrop of the failed experiment
of European socialism. He championed the decentralized systems of
decision-making and rebelled against the planned economy that rested
on dubious social calculations. Hayek was not a believer in the
power of reason to think our way to sound social conclusions. He
believed that markets worked well because prices allowed people
to signal to each other as to the value they attached to certain
resources, without having to give lengthy explanations as to the
uses to which those resources were put. Private information did
not have to be pooled in order to be used. Hayek's overall attitude
was to be suspicious of large constructivist schemes that sought
to impose a rational order on the world, and to rely on a mix between
custom and spontaneous evolution to explain the emergence of those
private practices and public institutions that survived.
Nozick's great
work, Anarchy,
State and Utopia, was published in 1974, when he was about
35 years old, to instant critical acclaim. It shows some influence
of the Hayekian strands, but in many ways takes off in a very different
direction. Nozick did not start his great intellectual journey with
homage to custom of past practices. Rather, he gravitated to the
rational analysis of which Hayek disapproved. For Nozick the point
of departure was that great trope of political and legal philosophy,
"state of nature theory." He asked, as had others before
him, the first hard question, which is why it is that there should
be governments to which ordinary individuals owe any allegiance
at all? In contrast to the strong collectivist urges of his time,
Nozick pursued a fiendishly clever excursus into just about every
corner of the world. Just recently, I have been working on some
questions of animal rights, and sure enough, Anarchy, State and
Utopia has some wise words of caution about efforts to disregard
the interests of animals in dealing with philosophical pursuits.
These intermittent
journeys down intellectual byways, however, had large payoffs both
for political and legal philosophy. Nozick was, as far as I know
not trained as a lawyer (although his daughter Emily is a graduate
of the University of Chicago Law School, Class of 1991), but his
ceaseless curiosity and imagination allowed him to develop by intuition
a theory of justice in holdings that followed closely on the legal
approach to these problems. Anarchy, State and Utopia hit
the streets only three years after John Rawls published his magisterial
Theory of Justice which was then (and to some extent still
is) read as a plea for the redistribution of wealth from those who
have it to those who do not. Nozick's own view of justice was well
summarized by his famous remark that liberty upsets patterns. For
him justice was not simply the some ideal end state, but a process
by which people entered into transactions and made their way into
the world.
Starting with
this perspective, Nozick quickly reached the conclusion that all
individuals begin life with a system of self-ownership, which is
then extended into the world by a principle of justice in acquisition
whereby unowned things in the natural world received single owners.
These owners in turn are allowed by virtue of the principle of justice
in transfer allowed to convey the property to someone else who in
turn inherits all the rights of the owner. No other moves are allowed
in the game. This system of acquisition and voluntary transfers
is then protected against people who wish by force or threats to
secure property already held by others.
Once this system was in place, Nozick was able to show two key points.
First, the repeated applications of these principles allowed for
the creation of complex legal and social arrangements. Nothing dictates
that a transfer be made on an out-and-out basis. All sorts of arrangements
of divided ownership are possible as well, and from these can emerge
our law of partnerships, loans, leases and gifts. So much of the
ordinary stuff of life becomes intelligible by the systematic use
of a small set of core principles. Second, Nozick showed that these
principles of justice were constantly at war with efforts to impose
some fixed, ostensibly just, distribution of wealth, goods, services
or whatever, among individuals. His famous illustration involved
the succession of transactions that made Wilt Chamberlain rich.
Each person who paid to see a game in which he played gave money
to the team which in turn transferred it to him. Each of the links
in the chain of transfer was secure, and so too the ultimate distribution
of wealth that derived from those arrangements. His techniques of
analysis were vastly different from those of Hayek; yet two great
minds came by quite different routes to the conclusion about the
proper system of justice among ordinary individuals.
The impact
that Nozick had on my own thinking was profound. When I first read
his work in the mid-1970s I was struggling as a youthful common
lawyer to figure out how the various pieces of property, contracts
and torts fit into a single coherent whole. The key to many of the
quandaries that I faced were found in the rich pages of Anarchy,
State and Utopia. His analytical powers allowed him to short-circuit
the usual practice of trial and error to see patterns overlooked
by people who are steeped in the particulars of the legal system.
In writing
Anarchy, State and Utopia, Nozick followed the pattern of
inquiry adopted by many great legal and political writers from Hobbes
to the present day. His exploration into the theories of private
rights and duties was done in order to give us purchase on the grand
question of why it was that any ordinary individual owed allegiance
to the state. On this question, I think it's fair to say that Nozick
was not quite able to close the circle. He ingeniously was able
to show how individuals for security would become members of extended
protective organizations. He was less successful in showing how
these repeated voluntary maneuvers were able to generate a single
protective association that would exercise the monopoly power
over force that marks the distinctive role of the state. In my case,
his influence was again profound, because it made it necessary to
find the missing piece of the puzzle to explain why principles of
justice in acquisition and transfer were not quite enough, even
with their repeated application, to create the state. Nozick himself
resisted the use of hypothetical or social contracts, claiming that
these were not worth the paper they weren't written on. My own solution,
put forward first in Takings in 1985 was to argue that we
had to rely on these tricky strategies in order to explain why each
person could be compelled to surrender his rights to liberty and
receive in exchange the security that only a well-constructed state
could provide. Forced exchanges, which he ruled categorically out
of bound, were the key, so long as they worked for the benefit of
those subject to the coercion.
On this occasion,
however, the important point is not that Nozick did not close the
circle, but rather that he single-handedly revived the classical
liberal tradition. In so doing it became clear that he was not a
social conservative, much less a friend of privilege, but was in
fact a committed academic maverick working against the grain, doing
what academics are supposed to do best: taking a thread and working
it through to its maximum intellectual advantage. For his labors,
he was attacked mightily and often in the philosophical literature.
I can vaguely recall one such attack that accused him of having
the moral sensibilities of a filling-station attendant in some midwestern
state. But the frequency and severity of the attacks on Anarchy,
State, and Utopia only provide further evidence of his richness
and profundity. If the book had been refuted but once, it would
have counted for little. That it has been "refuted" countless
times proves that he is the author of one of the enduring classics
of the political philosophy. To be a Nozickian stands for something.
His influence on his own profession, on collateral social disciplines,
and on the law has been enormous. In his later years he refused
to go back in print to the issues raised in Anarchy, State and
Utopia, but instead directed his endless energy to more purely
philosophical inquiries. Doubtless under Harvard's influence, he
even expressed some communitarian doubts about some of the sharp
individualist conclusions that he articulated and defended so ably
in Anarchy, State and Utopia.
It seems fair
to say that he will not be remembered or praised for these latter
recantations, nor even his later work in other disciplines. But
he will long be remembered for what he did best when he was young:
To take up arms against the conventional wisdom in favor of big
government and extensive political power, and in so doing to secure
for himself a place as one of the great political philosophers of
the twentieth century. Harvard was the stronger for having him.
Those of us who knew him will miss him. Everyone on all sides of
the political spectrum will benefit, under a principle of justice
in intellectual transmission, from his spirited intellectual legacy
in the service of liberty.
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