THE
PUSHPIN PUNDIT
Four
Years After Death, Nozick to Publish Revised ASU
(posted April 30, 2006)
"It
is disconcerting to be known primarily for an early work." So wrote the late Robert Nozick. He was referring, of course, to his most
famous work, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (“ASU”), published in 1974. ASU
is a powerful and controversial libertarian polemic. It is mistaken, in that it rejects the
welfare-state policies recommended by utilitarianism. Nevertheless, ASU is often grouped with the late John Rawls's A Theory of Justice as one of the major
works of contemporary political philosophy.
According
to amazon.com, a revised edition of ASU
will be published in December, 2006. It
will be interesting to see what changes are made in the revised edition,
especially as Nozick’s views followed a zig-zag course after publication of the
original edition.
For
a time, Nozick drew back from the libertarian position expressed in ASU.
In his 1989 book The Examined Life
(“EL”), Nozick went so far as to say
that “[t]he libertarian position I once propounded now seems to me seriously
inadequate....” EL contains an egalitarian estate-tax proposal and a communitarian
endorsement of the welfare state.
Nozick's
retreat from libertarianism made something of a splash when EL was first published. Subsequently, however, EL faded from the view of distributive theorists. Numerous critiques of ASU appeared after the publication of EL; most of these critiques (including one by me) made scant or no
mention of Nozick's changed views.
Incongruously, ASU continued
to be the intellectual flagship of libertarianism even after its own author had
disembarked from it.
The
last book Nozick published before his death in 2002 was Invariances. In Invariances, published in 2001, Nozick
appeared to return, at least partway, to the libertarian outlook of ASU.
He wrote that the only kind of ethics government could legitimately
enforce was the "ethics of respect", which he associated with the
views he had set forth in ASU. Nozick also gave a very interesting
interview, shortly before his death, to the libertarian writer Julian
Sanchez. In this interview, Nozick
stated: “What I was really saying in The Examined Life was that I was no
longer as hardcore a libertarian as I
had been before. But the rumors of my deviation (or apostasy!) from
libertarianism were much exaggerated.”
With
the revised edition of ASU, will
Nozick place himself back in the libertarian fold? When were the revisions made, and by
whom? It will be interesting to
see. Hopefully, there will be a clear
statement, in the revised edition, as to whether and to what extent the
material in the book reflects Nozick’s actual views at the end of life.
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