Introduction

When Anarchy, State, and Utopia was published, it received a mixed reception to say the least. Most reviewers praised it as an elegant and elaborate presentation of a very distinctive position, but the position itself was vigorously attacked from all sides, although some assailants admitted to illumination while some were shocked. In the Introduction to his Reading Nozick, Paul (1981: 3) quotes a review by Barry who castigates Nozick for a “sort of cuteness that would be wearing in a graduate student and seems to me quite indecent in someone who, from the lofty heights of a professorial chair, is proposing to starve or humiliate ten percent or so of his fellow citizens … by eliminating all transfer payments through the state, leaving the sick, the old, the disabled, the mothers with young children and no breadwinner, and so on, to the tender mercies of private charity, given at the whim and pleasure of the donors and on any terms that they choose to impose” (Barry 1975: 331–6). Nozick would no doubt reply that this is to blame the messenger for the message. If the conclusions he comes to are the right ones they had better be uttered, whether from lofty heights or from the abyss.

So what are these conclusions? To start with a nutshell account, Nozick holds that each person is a separate individual with inviolable rights to live as he chooses, provided only that he respects the similar rights of other individuals.