I was on the bike at the gym Friday night (re-reading Hobbes’ Leviathan) and a smart young libertarian lawyer came by to say hi and to introduce me to a friend who’s a gradute student in political theory. We talked about various thinkers, Robert Nozick included. Predictably, this was mentioned: “But, he rejected libertarianism and ended life as a communitarian, right?” I hear that all the time, and it’s been bandied about by people on the left and on the right, but it was and is false. He wrote some rather cryptic remarks about not endorsing all of his previous arguments and that some of them were “seriously inadequate.” I suggested that my interlocutors should consider what it means to rethink ideas and whether it should be some sort of sign that one is not a serious thinker if one no longer endorses everything in a book one published decades earlier.
Undoubtedly more convincingly, I referred them to Julian Sanchez’s 2001 interview with Nozick. (In addition to the transcript, there are audio clips from the interview.) For further clarification, I recounted (but slightly garbled in a non-essential way) the story that David Schmidtz told at a forum about Schmidtz’s book from Cambridge University Press, Robert Nozick, held October 21, 2002 at the Cato Institute. According to David, Nozick told him that his alleged “apostasy” was mainly about rejecting the idea that to have a right is necessarily to have the right to alienate it, a thesis that he had reconsidered, on the basis of which reconsideration he concluded that some rights had to be inalienable. That represents, not a movement away from libertarianism, but a shift toward the mainstream of libertarian thought.
I did not know Nozick well, but we did meet a number of times and we corresponded casually over the years. Our first meeting was August 1975, when I was 18 and I asked him to autograph my just-purchased copy of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, in which he wrote “The question is: will autographing an unread copy of the book inspire someone to read it?” It did.
UPDATE: I’m listening again to the forum on David Schmidtz’s book and noticed that I was also a commentator, which I had forgotten. (I tell the same anecdote above about Nozick’s autograph.)
Dr. Palmer,
Thank you for bringing awareness to this misconception. I run into it far too often.
I am also grateful for the link to the recording of the forum on Dr. Schmidtz’s book on Nozick. Until your post, I was not aware that the event even occured.
Since we’re on the topic of misconceptions about Nozick, the following tidbit of information is known by not nearly enough who are interested in political theory and also aware of his thought: the foundations he offered for libertarianism changed over time. In ASU, he famously offered no foundations, simply assuming individuals have certain inviolable rights. In Invariances, by contrast, he offers mutual benefit as the foundation for moral norms. This change in his thought was a major coup for Hobbesian/mutual benefit libertarians.
You’re welcome, Michael. I’ll have to check on the treatment in Invariances.
In ASU, he takes the claim that individuals have rights as his starting point. He wants to know whether, if people do have rights, there is space for government (and then how much there should be). So he starts with a premise of individual rights and then asks whether that fills all the space of legal relations, to the exclusion of government. He gives a clever (whether satisfying or not) answer in the negative, for government can be, according to his argument, justified. I don’t have the text before me, but I recall that to the extent that he does offer reasons for rights (or at least for the inviolability of rights) they are Kantian-type “people are ends, not merely the means to the ends of others” claims. If I’m correct in my recollections, then shifting from that to an argument from mutual benefit is interesting, but I should point out that there’s no reason that one should have to choose which of two arguments that converge on the same conclusion one finds convincing. They might, in fact, reinforce each other. Because people have ends, and those ends are diverse, they may find it to their mutual benefit to engage in voluntary association rather than coercion, in which case the “two arguments” are related, rather than presenting a choice of which is the “real” or even the “best” reason for rights.
I admit I’m guilty of thinking this way too: I’d always believed that Nozick ended up as political centrist who potentially supported moderate state interventions into many spheres of human action, based upon his famous, or infamous, essay “The Zigzag of Politics.” I have to say I still find it hard to reconcile this essay with his claims that he remained a libertarian. (I also have to say I saw nothing in “The Zigzag of Politics” that caused me to doubt the main argument of Anarchy, State, and Utopia.)
“I should point out that there’s no reason that one should have to choose which of two arguments that converge on the same conclusion one finds convincing. They might, in fact, reinforce each other.”
That’s an interesting point. At the heart of contractarianism/mutual benefit is the idea that that which is moral is that which each individual would find reasonable to agree to (often in a pre-government state of nature).
At the base of Nozick’s political theory in ASU, by contrast, is, as you correctly point out, Kant’s principle of autonomy: people are ends in themselves, not merely means. (And, although I admit that I am less well-versed in Kantianism than in most other approaches, I believe that Kant thinks we develop our autonomy by accepting his Categorical Imperative because it allows us to determine moral law according to our own individual reason). And it is from Kant’s principle of autonomy — to oversimplify — that Nozick deduces the Lockean principle of self-ownership.
Now, whether these two approaches are compatible is, I admit, something that I have not considered. Good of you to bring it up.
I think that the start of an answer of their compatibility will, ironically enough (for libertarians, anyway), lie in Rawls. This is because he seems to profit from both approaches. If I remember correctly, and I admit that I might not be, it is because of his commitment to Kantian autonomy, that Rawls opts for the veil of ignorance over the pure Hobbesian state of nature for his thought experiment. This, of course, leads him to welfare liberalism instead of Nozickean classical liberalism. But, perhaps, what I am suggesting gives Rawls’ inferences too much credit? Perhaps, instead, the Rawlsian method leads to the classical liberal state. This is an initial query that, I think, requires more thought.
Whatever the case, I think that there is a good paper in your very good suggestion, viz. “On the Compatibility (or Incompatibility) of Nozick’s Early Kantianism and Later Contractarianism.”
You’ve got a great career as a philosophy professor ahead of you, Michael!
One way that a Rawlsian approach could generate more authentically liberal conclusions is by relaxing the requirement that no escape from social groups be allowed and that we not start with the assumption that one not be allowed to escape one’s worst enemy:
“T]he two principles are those a person would choose for the design of a society in which his enemy is to assign him his place. The maximin rule tells us to rank alternatives by their worst possible outcomes: we are to adopt the alternative the worst outcome of which is superior to the worst outcome of the others. The persons in the original position do not, of course, assume that their initial place in society is decided by a malevolent opponent. As I note below, they should not reason from false premises. The veil of ignorance does not violate this idea, since an absence of information is not misinformation. But that the two principles of justice would be chosen if the parties were forced to protect themselves against such a contingency explains the sense in which this conception is the maximin solution.” (ATOJ, 1971, pp. 152-3) Rawls deliberately closes of the exit option in the specification of the bargaining situation. That has received too little attention in the critical literature.
The choice to close off exit options in the specification of the choice situation of the social contract, such that “there is no question of the parties comparing the attractions of other societies” (Political Liberalism, 1993, p. 276) is precisely what creates a problem of agreement, or bargaining, in the first place. It’s what creates the allegedly inextricably joint nature of the products of social cooperation, such that Rawls can speculate about the most rational and reasonable strategies. (By not allowing any withdrawal or addition of any marginal factors of production, whether labor or anything else, the division of the products of social cooperation becomes one of bilateral [or multilateral] monopoly, which does not admit of imputation of marginal product as a foundation for distribution, for the reason that without the ability to add or subtract units, there is no way to know the margin.)
Rawls’s approach is supposed to produce fundamentally liberal conclusions, but it violates at the outset a fundamental liberal principle, the principle of exit rights and freedom of movement, along with important elements of the liberal tradition, viz. cosmopolitanism and internationalism. In doing so, it conjures out of a philosopher’s hat a set of problems that are not generally found in real situations of social interaction. That’s one reason that I find the approach of James Buchanan more interesting and fruitful.
Relaxation of that exit constraint radically changes the outcome, as contracting parties would be allowed to compare the advantages of participation in different cooperating groups.
Thank you for posting this clarification on how Nozick changed his position. It’s heartening to discover that Nozick moved in this direction. I agree with you. With this shift, he did not move away from the liberty mainstream but towards it. It’s too bad this change in his stance is not more widely known.
When his former position is adopted seriously, it troubles me, to put it mildly, and it has for some two decades since I first read ASU. Ever since, I’ve been stewing on ideas related to this misstep, or rather to corrections to this misstep, and a woeful misstep it is.
Last year I came across a wonderful ironic article “The Libertarian Case for Slavery”, which takes this idea and runs with it ad absurdum.
http://cog.kent.edu/lib/Philmore1/Philmore1.htm
There’s a lot more power in the idea of inalienability than meets the casual eye.
Michael,
You may want to check out Loren Lomasky’s article, “Libertarianism at Twin Harvard,” published in Social Philosophy & Policy, volume 22, number 1, p. 178. It’s not directly on point, but you’ll probably find it interesting…
Dr. Palmer,
You are too kind!
And thank you for drawing my attention to the insightful argument that Rawls illberally cuts off the possibility of exit at the outset to force welfare liberal conclusions.
I will keep it in mind for the future. Have you published any papers where you’ve made this argument? (I’d like to read them, or, at the very least, have a copy on hand.)