Robert Nozick and the Immaculate Conception of the State

Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974) is an “invisible hand” variant of a Lockean contractarian attempt to justify the State, or at least a minimal State confined to the functions of protection. Beginning with a free-market anarchist state of nature, Nozick portrays the State as emerging, by an invisible hand process that violates no one’s rights, first as a dominant protective agency, then to an “ultra-minimal state,” and then finally to a minimal state.

Volume 1, Number 1 (1977)