Anarchy, State, and Utopia

"That’s right. When I was studying political philosophy as a first-year undergraduate in 1980, I was told to read parts of Rawls and parts of Nozick. Interestingly, 30-something years later, we’re still telling students to read those books. Anarchy, State, and Utopia came out in 1974 — three years after A Theory of Justice . Nozick was at Harvard, as Rawls was, and Nozick is one of the people Rawls thanks for having read the manuscript through. Therefore Nozick was fully aware of what was going on in A Theory of Justice long before it was published. As an undergraduate I was given a reading list, and Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia was the first book that I decided to read. In my adolescence I had been interested in anarchism, I’d been reading Kropotkin. I was hanging round with some older people, some musicians who had persuaded me to take anarchism seriously, arguing it is a deeper view than the popular press notion of anarchy as chaos. They made ideas of communal self-government very attractive. So when I saw a book with ‘anarchism’ in the title on my reading list thought, this is just up my street. I had thought that anarchism was essentially Marxism without the state: common ownership, collective production, strong fellow feeling and so on. I read through Anarchy, State, and Utopia with an increasing sense of incredulity because here was someone writing about anarchism as the most pure and developed form of capitalism that you could have. To my astonishment Nozick defended a libertarian position rather than a Communist one. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Rawls and Nozick were both highly intelligent people — probably among the two most intelligent people alive at the time — both very strong at logical argument, both very good at making distinctions, both clear-minded, brilliant philosophers. But, their writing styles are so different. Rawls writes in turgid prose. For one of Rawls’s later books I tell students, “Make sure you keep a bookmark because if you lose your place you’ll never find it again because the pages just seem to be the same over and over and over again.” Nozick is the complete opposite. I was only meant to read certain passages from one chapter and some sections. But I thought, “This is a book about anarchy, I’ll read it from page one.” I sat down and, though I didn’t read it all in one day, I did read it from start to finish. It may have taken me a few weeks but each morning and each evening I’d read some more. I read it in the way you’d read a novel and its very rare for me, to read a work of philosophy like that. The brilliance of Nozick’s writing, the flashiness of it, the wit, the humour makes it a ‘page turner’. He says he writes in a style that he says, maybe slightly misleadingly, is that of contemporary epistemology. What he means by this is the contemporary epistemology of Gettier and Gettier examples, where philosophers put forward a thesis — a strong hypothesis of some sort — and others challenge it by coming up with some fanciful counterexample. Someone would put up a thesis and you’d think, ‘Can I imagine some circumstances in which that would be false?’ Similarly Anarchy, State, and Utopia is full of these completely stupid examples, designed to show that someone else’s view is false. A lot of them are very funny. One of them is about someone who can only get exercise by throwing books through your open window. The question then is, “Do you have the duty to pay for those books?” — and obviously you don’t. So how can the state force goods on you and force you to pay for them if we wouldn’t allow an individual to do that? You think, good point! Then, in his discussion of vegetarianism — the book ranges over all sorts of topics, anything Nozick was interested in gets a discussion — he says “Well, people who eat meat do get pleasure out of it, I’m not going to deny that.” But, he says, is human pleasure so important that animal suffering is an acceptable cost? Imagine someone who can only get exercise by swinging a baseball bat and unfortunately the only place they can do it is in the vicinity of a cow. Every time they swing the bat, it crushes a cow’s head. Would we say, “The pleasures of human beings outweigh animal suffering?” We wouldn’t. What’s the difference between that and eating meat? In both cases, we’ve got a type of pleasure you can’t get any other way and in both cases it inflicts suffering on an animal. You might not think that’s a great example, you might think there are some differences, but he uses these completely unrealistic examples in order to get you to think about the logical consequences of a position. Maybe you realise you don’t hold the position you thought you did because it has consequences you can’t accept. Maybe you hold a different position, and if so what is it? The idea of this style of contemporary epistemology is to try to work out what your theory is by confronting it with counterexamples — however peculiar — and seeing if you really believe it in the face of those counterexamples. The chances are you don’t, so you have to reformulate and reformulate. That’s the style of Nozick’s writing, and it’s a brilliant read. Again, the book adopts a position that I have very little sympathy with. I wrote a book explaining my lack of sympathy with it but, at the same time, explaining why I thought it was such a wonderful book. I recently wrote a paper on the history of analytic political philosophy, and wrote about the contrast between Rawls and Nozick. Intellectually, you may say Rawls has won the debate — or if he’s not won the debate, at least he’s got a very large number of followers. There are many political philosophers who work in the spirit of Rawls and use Rawls almost as a touchstone or as a contrast of they disagree. And if they disagree with Rawls, they have to explain why. But in terms of how people write political philosophy, Nozick has turned out to be much more influential, for good or bad. That was exactly the phrase that was in my head: Nozick makes you think. You can come in and read even just two pages of Nozick, if they’re well-chosen, and have to face up to the idea that maybe your deep beliefs have been challenged in an incredibly strong way — or perhaps they have been supported. Either way you know what you’re meant to be thinking about and you can start thinking. With Rawls, it probably has to be explained to you before you can start thinking about it. As a beginning student, there are parts of Rawls that you might be able to form a view about but I think the first thing you’ll want to know is what is this all about? Why is this important? Why has someone given me this to read? Whereas, with Nozick, it’s absolutely clear right away why people would find this engaging."