Abstract

Robert Nozick's controversial work, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, shares many of the philosophical assumptions about the importance of human moral autonomy that characterize the work of the most famous modem exponent of anarchy, Robert Paul Wolff. Nozick is prepared to recognize the legitimacy of a political authority that is perhaps greater than that which Wolff would recognize, but not much greater. Nozick takes enormous pains to make it emphatically clear that the authority possessed by the "nearly just" political society constructed by John Rawls is definitely not morally legitimate. According to Nozick, not only does Rawls' "nearly just" political society possess more authority than it is morally proper for a state to have, but the very purposes and foundation of the Rawlsian state are also morally impermissible.

In presenting his arguments Nozick devotes the major portion of his work to a discussion of the "minimal state." Unlike a fervent anarchist, Nozick believes such a state is morally justifiable. According to Nozick, however, no more extensive state, is morally legitimate. While I find portions of Nozick's thesis interesting—particularly his often trenchant criticisms of Rawls—there is much in his work with which I take issue. First, I reject many of his assumptions about the overriding importance of human moral autonomy and, more particularly, the conclusions for political theory that Nozick believes are mandated by a commitment to human moral autonomy. I will discuss this aspect of my criticism in the context of a brief review of Robert Paul Wolff's work, In Defense of Anarchism, which shares many of Nozick's basic presuppositions and thus exposes some of the weaknesses of both of their theses. My second and more important criticism, to which the latter portion of my paper will be addressed, is that, given Nozick's assumption about the nature and importance of individual moral autonomy, his minimal state cannot be morally justified.

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