Anarchy, State, and Utopia Thirty Years Later: Nozick on Taxation
It is hard to believe that Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia [hereinafter ASU] was published over thirty years ago. We might compare its career with that of Nozick’s colleague John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, which has sold a million copies or so since its publication. No such sales figures hold for ASU, though its influence has been immense. ASU’s main influence in the philosophical world has been to cause people to equate Nozick’s ideas with libertarianism—so much so that just about any discussion of libertarianism in the academic journals since then has been a discussion of Nozick. While Nozick was certainly a brilliant spokesman for libertarianism, this wholesale equation of Nozick’s ideas with libertarianism is probably on the whole not a good thing. It would be nice if the philosophical world paid more attention to Nozick’s theory itself—especially since much of the attention has been to selected passages that lend themselves rather readily to caricature.
