Robert Nozick

Robert Nozick (November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher who served as the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard and as president of the American Philosophical Association. He is most famous for *Anarchy, State, and Utopia* (1974), a libertarian rejoinder to John Rawls’s *A Theory of Justice* (1971). In it, Nozick argues that only a minimal state—limited to protecting against force, fraud, theft, and administering courts—can be justified; any larger state would violate individual rights. He held that a just distribution of goods arises from free exchange among consenting adults, starting from a baseline that respects his entitlement theory. To illustrate, he used basketball player Wilt Chamberlain: even if large inequalities result from people freely paying extra to watch him play, the outcome is just as long as all parties consented. The book won a National Book Award in Philosophy and Religion the year after its release.

Nozick’s later work *Philosophical Explanations* (1981) advanced a counterfactual theory of knowledge, earning the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Award the following year. His final book, *Invariances* (2001), proposed an evolutionary cosmology in which invariances—and thus objectivity itself—emerge through evolution across possible worlds. His other writings covered ethics, decision theory, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and epistemology.

Born in Brooklyn to a Jewish family, Nozick’s mother was Sophie Cohen; his father, also originally named Cohen, came from a Russian shtetl and ran a small business. He attended Brooklyn public schools, then Columbia University (A.B. 1959, summa cum laude), where he studied under Sidney Morgenbesser. He earned his PhD from Princeton in 1963 under Carl Hempel, followed by a Fulbright Scholarship at Oxford (1963–1964). He was a visiting fellow at St Catherine’s College, Oxford in 1997. As a young man, Nozick joined the Young People’s Socialist League and founded the Columbia chapter of the Student League for Industrial Democracy. He later moved away from socialism after reading Friedrich Hayek’s *The Constitution of Liberty*, claiming he was “pulled into libertarianism reluctantly” when he could not find satisfactory responses to libertarian arguments. In 1956, he was initiated into the Alpha-Tau chapter of the Kappa Sigma fraternity at Columbia.

After graduating in 1959, he married Barbara Fierer; they had two children, Emily and David, and later divorced. Nozick then married poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg. He died in 2002 after a long battle with stomach cancer and was interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In political philosophy, Nozick drew on John Locke’s *Second Treatise on Government* and its state of nature, but broke with Locke by secularizing natural law rather than accepting it. Instead, he appealed to Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative—treating people as ends, not merely means—which he called the “separateness of persons,” insisting that “there is no social entity…there are only individual people.” Most controversially, he argued that consistent libertarian self-ownership would permit consensual, non-coercive enslavement contracts between adults, rejecting the inalienable rights that Locke and most capitalist-oriented libertarians defended.

Early in *Anarchy, State, and Utopia*, Nozick joined Rawls in discrediting utilitarianism, though his critique focused on hedonism and used thought experiments. Most famously, he introduced the experience machine to argue that ethical hedonism is not what people truly desire: life in such a machine would lack value because we want to actually do things, become certain kinds of people, and engage with reality, not just simulate experiences. Another thought experiment, the utility monster, was designed to show that average utilitarianism could sacrifice the majority’s needs.