Summary
'On Nozick' - Book Review
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Feser on Nozick.
Edward Feser's On Nozick (Toronto: Wadsworth, 2004) is an excellent and pleasing brief introduction to the political thought of Robert Nozick as that thought is embodied in Nozick's now classic Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). The book has three main virtues. First, it provides an accurate and sometimes insightful introductory account of the philosophical contentions of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Second, it places these contentions in the broader context of philosophical defenses of libertarian conclusions and in the context of complementary empirical support for these conclusions. Third, unlike almost all discussions of Nozick's views, it is animated by a strong, but not uncritical, sympathy for Nozick's enterprise, and that sympathy generates some of Feser's most insightful points about Nozick as well as some nice responses to well-known criticisms of the doctrine of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Because of these virtues, I strongly recommend this short work not merely as an introduction to Nozick's political philosophy, but also and more generally as an introduction to rights-oriented libertarian theory.
Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia Before describing in more detail some of the valuable contents of On Nozick and then going on (of course) to register various criticisms, I want to recall the general structure and purposes of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. ...See the full content of this document
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