The Times Literary Supplement ranks Anarchy, published in 1974, as one of the "100 Most Influential Books Since the War," and that, I think, is underselling it. To this day, left intellectuals remember where they were when they first heard Nozick's arguments against not just socialism but wealth redistribution of any kind. "It is no exaggeration to say," the Telegraph wrote, after Nozick died in 2002, "that Nozick, more than anyone else, embodied the new libertarian zeitgeist which, after generations of statist welfarism from Roosevelt's New Deal to Kennedy, Johnson and Carter, ushered in the era of Reagan and Bush, pere et fils." Prior to Anarchy, "liberty" was a virtual synonym for rolling back labor unions and progressive taxation, a fig leaf for the class interests of the Du Ponts and the B.F. Goodriches. After Anarchy, "liberty" was a concept as worthy of academic dignity as the categorical imperative...
The heart of Nozick's philosophy:
Nozick is arguing that economic rights are the only rights, and that insofar as there are political rights, they are nothing more than a framework in support of private property and freedom of contract. When I study American history, I can see why America, thanks to a dense bundle of historical accidents, is a kind of Lockean paradise, uniquely suited to holding up liberty as its paramount value. This is not what Nozick is arguing. Nozick is arguing that liberty is the sole value, and to put forward any other value is to submit individuals to coercion.
My own take on libertarianism is the same as with any other total belief system, that is to say that I believe they are all equally bunk. Human nature, and the societies we form, are just too complex to be rendered into some perfectly contained model. To argue that your system of viewing the world totally encapsulates all of human society, whether it be libertarianism, Marxism, or religious fundamentalism, is to ignore all the rough edges of society. It is the height of hubris to think that you have figured everything out, and can write it down in under 300 pages.
The world is a complex place, which is why belief can be so comforting. It can be unnerving how many things can be blamed (or credited) on chance. Simple chance, like Hitler surviving the Somme, or Winston Churchill surviving getting hit by a taxi in New York City as a young man, can hold sway over the lives of millions. There is no theory that can encompass that, because a theory can have no loose ends. But it is those loose ends that drive history and undermine any attempt to bottle it into an 'ism'. Belief systems end up stretching themselves in increasingly convoluted ways in order to have every event 'fit' into its model. To have Christian leaders argue that we should defund programs that help the poor, or Marxists arguing that the Soviet Union was true communism, is absurd. The arguments are so far removed from what the belief system is supposed to be that they prove the fallacy of trying to follow a singular and concentrated belief system.
This is not to say that we must have a world without morals, since many turn to their system of belief as their guide to the world. Philosophy and religion serve the same purpose here, as philosophy is just region without the divine. The fallacy of so many of these systems is that they do not fully take into account basic human nature. And since the point of these systems of belief is to guide one's thoughts, their ignorance of human actions is their downfall. Marxism ignores human kinds' greed, while libertarianism exalts it above all other noble goals. Both are equally extreme. To find a proper set of morals, a way of dealing with the rest of society, there is a happy middle ground between these two points. One that preserves your liberty to pursue your goals, while not climbing up on the backs of others. This set of morals cannot come from a book, but rather must come from your own experience in dealing with all the other members of the human race. I do not mean this as a weak-kneed call to split the difference. Rather, we must deal with the world the way it is, not the way we want it to be. We must deal with society as thousands of years of human history has arranged it. I do not believe their is a value-neutral and perfect system that we should govern ourselves by, and Nozick agrees:
"The libertarian position I once propounded," Nozick wrote in an essay published in the late '80s, "now seems to me seriously inadequate...There are some things we choose to do together through government in solemn marking of our human solidarity, served by the fact that we do them together in this official fashion ..."
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