-Caveat Lector- ------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 00:53:03 -0500 To: Matthew Gaylor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> From: Matthew Gaylor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: The Man Who Made Libertarianism Academically Respectable
<http://www.zolatimes.com/V6.4/nozick_rip.html> The Man Who Made Libertarianism Academically Respectable by Tibor R. Machan Robert Nozick, author of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974), who single-handedly made libertarianism academically respectable, died January 23rd, after being ill with stomach cancer for several years. Despite his illness, he had been productive and intellectually active until the very end, having finished perhaps his most ambitious book, Invariances (Harvard 2001), just a few month months before his death. Nozick obtained his PhD degree at Princeton University, where he was an excellent student in philosophy. He quickly rose to prominence, even before he published his first book, and was appointed a full professor at Harvard University when he was only 30 years old. He had been a critic of John Rawls's egalitarian political philosophy after having been convinced by reading some free market economists that his own youthful Leftism simply couldn't withstand the critiques of F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman. But more than that, Nozick found trouble not only with the Left but also with the Right, maintaining that there was no better reason for enforcing what conservatives deemed to be proper conduct on free citizens than enforcing what modern liberals deemed to be principles of economic equality on members of a free society. Nozick's approach was quite daring - unlike previous defenders of individual liberty, Nozick argued by first assuming that we have the right to liberty and then seeing what kind of a society would emerge if this assumption were taken seriously as the foundation of a society's legal system. He concluded that the results would far more readily accord with our understanding of justice than anything either those on the Left or those on the Right had to offer. Both of these were, in fact, fostering a coercive, even tyrannical political order, even though they did this in the name of their (mis)conception of justice. Nozick advanced an especially ingenious argument against wealth redistribution, showing that to establish some kind of equality of welfare a society would need a police state. Suppose that a famous basketball player - his example of was Wilt Chamberlain - earned a lot of money people freely gave him to play ball. To eliminate the inequality of wealth this would create, the next day the authorities would have to come in and take his wealth and distribute it among everyone. But then a great many people would once again pay the ball player great sums to play for them, so the next day the coercive equalization would have to resume - and this would go on endlessly, making the society a police state from top to bottom, something that is much more objectionable, morally, than is the inequality of wealth that is supposed to be destroyed in the process of redistribution. After Nozick developed his case, in which he flatly called taxation "on par with forced labor," he went on to other areas of philosophy and didn't even bother to defend his political views from the hundreds of attacks aimed at him from the primarily Left-oriented political philosophy community. As he noted, he didn't want to keep writing "Son of Anarchy, State, and Utopia." Instead he wanted to explore other areas of philosophy, which he did in such works as The Nature of Rationality, Philosophical Explanations, The Examined Life and, finally, Invariances. Before Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia was published, the idea of the free society had champions mainly in economics departments across the academic world. There were others, such as Ayn Rand and H.L. Mencken, to name just two, who wrote vigorously in support of the free society but academics pretty much ignored these writers. But when Nozick, with his Harvard University credentials, published his libertarian masterpiece, that could no longer be ignored. This, perhaps, isn't the most wonderful manifestation of intellectual life, since it seems to depend more on authority and reputation than on actual argumentation. But one cannot be terribly picky when it comes to why support for a good idea emerges. Following the breakthrough Nozick achieved, many others gained some measure of legitimacy and could more freely advance their pro-freedom ideas, ones that had only a few year before been dismissed summarily by the academic community. Nozick was charming, bright, somewhat quirky man, who loved arguments and who eschewed becoming identified with any point of view, thinking that the most important way to work in philosophy is to explore, experiment, seek out new ways to approach old problems. Thus, appropriately, one of his latest books, a collection of his essays, was titled Socratic Puzzles, in honor of perhaps the founder of systematic philosophy in the West whose method involved asking questions and exploring a great variety of answers to them in order to reach some true conclusions about a topic. Those who love liberty must be grateful to Robert Nozick and can only be saddened by his untimely death. And those who love philosophy must join them in this grief as well. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Machan, who teaches at Chapman University in Orange, California, advises Freedom Communications, Inc., on public policy matters. His most recent book is Initiative - Human Agency and Society (Hoover Institution Press, 2000). His email address is [EMAIL PROTECTED] -30- from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 6, No 4, January 28, 2002 ************************************************************************** Subscribe to Freematt's Alerts: Pro-Individual Rights Issues Send a blank message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the words subscribe FA on the subject line. List is private and moderated (7-30 messages per week) Matthew Gaylor, (614) 313-5722 ICQ: 106212065 Archived at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fa/ ************************************************************************** ------- End of forwarded message ------- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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