Anarchy, State and Utopia

“One view about how to write a philosophy book holds that an author should think through all of the details of the view he presents, and its problems, polishing and refining his view to present to the world a finished, complete, and elegant whole. This is not my view. At any rate, I believe that there also is a place and a function in our ongoing intellectual life for a less complete work, containing unfinished presentations, conjectures, open questions and problems, leads, side connections, as well as a main line of argument. There is room for words on subjects other than last words.”

In this quote, Nozick writes about his own intellectual inquiry and the creation of philosophical works. He challenges the traditional expectation that philosophical texts should offer fully polished and definitive arguments, advocating instead for the inclusion of conjecture, open questions, and incomplete ideas. Although this is not mentioned explicitly, this quote also rejects John Rawls’s style of writing philosophy, which is thorough and systematic and aims for comprehensibility. Nozick prefers continuous exploration and discussion rather than presenting final conclusions. This writing strategy emphasizes Nozick’s libertarian principles, asserting that individuals have the prerogative to question and examine ideas rather than deferring to experts or authorities. It also invites critique and debate.

“The possible ways of understanding the political realm are as follows: (1) to fully explain it in terms of the nonpolitical; (2) to view it as emerging from the nonpolitical but irreducible to it, a mode of organization of nonpolitical factors understandable only in terms of novel political principles; or (3) to view it as a completely autonomous realm.”

Nozick sets up his argument for the minimal state in the first chapter of the book. He uses a traditional Lockean approach, which sets the origins of society in a pre-political realm, namely the state of nature. Nozick believes that this leads to a logical exploration of the just organization of society.

“We may proceed, for our purposes, by saying that a necessary condition for the existence of a state is that it (some person or organization) announce that, to the best of its ability (taking into account costs of doing so, the feasibility, the more important alternative things it should be doing, and so forth), it will punish everyone whom it discovers to have used force without its express permission. […] This still won’t quite do: the state may reserve the right to forgive someone, ex post facto; in order to punish they may have not only to discover the ‘unauthorized’ use of force but also prove via a certain specified procedure of proof that it occurred, and so forth. But it enables us to proceed. The protective agencies, it seems, do not make such an announcement, either individually or collectively. Nor does it seem morally legitimate for them to do so.”

Nozick discusses the difference between the protective agency and a pre-state form of organization for the purposes of protection at the community and state levels. Nozick does not think that an agency’s ability to punish represents a state-like power since the state is more extensive in what it can do, not least through its domination of protection activities.