Perhaps the most fundamental question in political philosophy is whether any state is justified. The most impressive modern attempt to justify the state is in part 1 of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Nozick argues that a minimal state, and only a minimal state, is compatible with our having natural rights. Here, I clarify the logic of Nozick’s strategy and show that his attempt to justify the state fails at every step. A central issue is that Nozick implicitly adopts a restricted, rather than absolute or even bounded absolute, conception of natural rights. I argue that the nature of Nozick’s failure should make natural rights theorists doubt that any state is justified. My discussion also clarifies the historical background to Nozick’s work and explains his later (apparent?) turn away from libertarianism.
A state is any organization that claims and exercises a monopoly on central uses of coercive force over a broad geographic area.1 The state is a modern invention. For most of human history, there was no state, no government of any kind. Today, states are nearly ubiquitous. Very few pieces of dry land on Earth are unclaimed by any state.2 The state now seems almost as inescapable to us as water to a fish.
Perhaps for this reason, the question of the state’s justification as such is very far from mainstream concerns. The question of whether any state is ever justified is raised only by those interested in abstract political philosophy.
Different states claim different powers and issue and enforce different laws. Some of these states are unjustified—we all agree on that. Suppose that a given state is justified. It obviously does not follow from this that its powers are unlimited. It does not even follow that citizens in its territory have any special political obligation to obey the laws that it issues and enforces—obligations arising from the political situation beyond any moral and practical obligation related to the content of the laws themselves.3
The fundamental question of political philosophy is whether any state is justified. It is the question of whether a state can exist without thereby being immoral in some fashion. By far the most impressive and influential modern attempt to justify the state is in the first part of Robert Nozick’s (1974) Anarchy, State, and Utopia. There, Nozick presents a complicated argument attempting to justify the minimal (night watchman) state. He does not think that any state with powers beyond the minimal state can be justified.
Read the full article at the Journal of Libertarian Studies.
