Robert Nozick Quotes on Politics
Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) gave late twentieth-century political philosophy its most influential libertarian statement and the principal philosophical alternative to John Rawls’s egalitarian Theory of Justice (1971), against which Nozick’s argument is partly directed. The central thesis is that only the minimal state — limited to the protection of rights against force, theft, fraud, and breach of contract — can be justified without violating the inviolable side-constraints that the strong libertarian rights of self-ownership and just acquisition impose on permissible political action; the more extensive welfare state, however well-intentioned, requires impermissible patterned redistribution that violates these constraints. The framework grounds Nozick’s parallel work in epistemology (Philosophical Explanations) and the broader contemporary libertarian tradition through Murray Rothbard and the Cato Institute lineage of liberal political philosophy.
Quotes
-
“Whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just.”
Ch. 7 : Distributive Justice, Section I, The Entitlement Theory, p. 151 -
“The minimal state is the most extensive state that can be justified.”
Preface, p. ix -
“There is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, with their own individual lives.”
Ch. 3 : Moral Constraints and the State; Why Side Constraints?, p. 32 -
“Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.”
Ch. 7 : Distributive Justice, Section I, Redistribution and Property Rights, p. 169 -
“Individuals have rights and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. How much room do individual rights leave for the state?”
Preface, p. ix -
“Some anarchists have claimed not merely that we would be better off without a state, but that any state necessarily violates people's moral rights and hence is intrinsically immoral. Our starting point then, though nonpolitical, is by intention far from nonmoral. Moral philosophy sets the background for, and boundaries of, political philosophy . What persons may and may not do to one another limits what they may do through the apparatus of a state, or do to establish such an apparatus.”
Ch. 1 : Why State of Nature Theory?; Political Philosophy, p. 6 -
“Ch. 1 : Why State of Nature Theory?; Political Philosophy, p. 6”
Some anarchists have claimed not merely that we would be better off without a state, but that any state necessarily violates people's moral rights and hence is intrinsically immoral. Our starting point then, though nonpolitical, is by intention far from nonmoral. Moral philosophy sets the background for, and boundaries of, political philosophy . What persons may and may not do to one another limit -
“No state more extensive than the minimal state can be justified.”
Anarchy, State, and Utopia(1974) | Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; The Framework, p. 297