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Obituary: Professor Robert Nozick
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Issues
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Professor Robert Nozick
One of the leading political philosophers of the 20th century, whose ideas for a minimal State were taken up by the New Right
Obituary
The Times
26 Jan 2002
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Robert Nozick, political philosopher, was born in New York on
November 16, 1938. He died of cancer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on
January 23, 2002, aged 63.
MANY of the intellectual
arguments in the 20th-century Western world had their roots in a
conflict between conservatism and liberalism. If the debate in
economics was between the ideas of Keynes and Hayek and in politics
between the vision of Roosevelt or Beveridge and that of Thatcher or
Reagan, then the equivalent debate in philosophy might be said to
have been between two Harvard philosophy professors, John Rawls and
Robert Nozick. Along with Friedrich Hayek, Nozick became one of the
century's most important advocates of individual liberty, private
property and limited government.
Rawls's Theory of Justice (1971) provided a philosophical
underpinning for the welfare state, by arguing for redistributive
justice: the notion that it was right for the State to redistribute
wealth in order to help the disadvantaged. Nozick replied with
Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), in which he argued that the
rights of the individual are primary and attacked forms of
paternalistic government that forbid capitalistic acts between
consenting adults.
Whereas Rawls wrote that the State can help individuals to help
themselves, Nozick believed that it should be merely a
nightwatchman sufficient to protect against violence and theft,
and to ensure the enforcement of contracts and that justice was
not some end state, but a process by which people entered into their
transactions.
Nozick's first book, Anarchy, State and Utopia won the
1975 National Book Award and was listed in The Times Literary
Supplement as one of the hundred most influential books since
the war. In a discipline known for impenetrable prose, the book was
admired by critics from all ideological backgrounds for its
accessible writing style (there were many diverting parentheses) and
its inventive examples. Nozick at one point made a modest proposal
for redistributing sex appeal by means of plastic surgery.
America's New Right was pleased to have a new philosophical
justification, and the book could have made Nozick the theoretician
of a national political movement, but he was uncomfortable with the
possibility of being used as a political ideologue. Right-wing
people like the pro-free-market argument, but don't like the
arguments for individual liberty in cases like gay rights, he said.
I view them as an interconnecting whole.
Moreover, his own areas of concentration changed during his
career. In fact, he believed that human beings ought to change their
positions over time. He compared his shifts to the world of
politics: for he saw that the goals of fairness and efficiency
cannot be fully pursued except at the expense of each other.
Nozick himself had been a member of the radical Left before a
conversion to libertarianism as a graduate student, largely after
reading works by Hayek and Milton Friedman. Born and educated in
Brooklyn, the son of Max Nozick, an immigrant from Russia, he had
joined the youth branch of the Socialist Party, and while an
undergraduate at Columbia he founded the local branch of the Student
League for Industrial Democracy.
It was as a graduate student at Princeton, where he wrote a
doctorate on theories of rational decision, that he first
encountered arguments in defence of capitalism. The more I explored
the arguments, the more convincing they looked, he said. For a
while I thought: `Well, the arguments are right, capitalism is the
best system, but only bad people would think so. Then, at some
point, my mind and heart were in unison.
After brief periods at Harvard and the Rockefeller University,
Nozick became a full professor at Harvard in 1969, at the age of 30.
At a time which saw an explosion of political theorising in Western
academia, led in Europe by Louis Althusser and Jargen Habermas,
Rawls and Nozick led philosophical debate in America with their
publications in the early 1970s.
His work also came at a time when conservatism in Britain had
reached a crossroads and was about to turn right, based on such
thinking. The social philosopher and bioethicist Peter Singer
characterised Anarchy, State and Utopia as a major event in
contemporary political philosophy since it meant that the right of
the State to bring about redistribution through progressive taxation
would need to be defended and argued for instead of being taken for
granted. Despite the renown of his first book, Nozick tackled very
different issues in his second book, Philosophical
Explanations (1981), taking on epistemology, personal identity,
free will, and the foundations of ethics. It was another example of
his need to remain on the move. He said: I didn't want to spend my
life writing The Son of Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
In giving his explanations, he rejected the idea of strict
philosophical proof, and advocated instead the notion of
philosophical pluralism. There are various philosophical views,
mutually incompatible, which cannot be dismissed or simply
rejected, he wrote. Philosophy's output is the basketful of these
admissible views, all together. Nozick suggested that this variety
of views could be ordered and that even those which were not of the
first rank might offer valuable truths and insights.
The following two books reflected upon different matters
again. The Examined Life (1989) took on a subject that many
philosophers avoid, by discussing what is important in life. He
recalled in the book his first memories of philosophy. When I was
15 years old, or 16, I carried around on the streets of Brooklyn a
paperback copy of Plato's Republic, he said, front cover
facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but
I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful.
His next book, The Nature of Rationality (1993), looked at
theories of rational decision and was described by the political
philosopher John Dunn as enviably clever.
From 1981 until 1984 Nozick was chairman of the philosophy
department at Harvard, and in 1998 he was named University
Professor, Harvard's most distinguished professorial position; at
the time only 17 others in the university held the title. His
teaching, like his writing, was more varied in nature than that of
many professors. One of the courses that he taught was called The
Best Things in Life, which was advertised to students as an
exploration of the nature and value of those things deemed best,
such as friendship, love, intellectual understanding, sexual
pleasure, achievement, adventure, play, luxury, fame, power,
enlightenment, and ice -cream.
Such descriptions were important. His teaching often led to ideas
that he would later present in book form, and he admitted: If
somebody wants to know what I'm going to do next, they ought to keep
an eye on the Harvard course catalogue.
Nozick also taught courses with members of the government,
psychology and economics departments, and at the divinity and law
schools. Recently he taught a new interdisciplinary course,
Thinking About Thinking, with the scientist Stephen Jay Gould and
the law professor Alan Dershowitz.
Nozick was found to be suffering from stomach cancer in 1994.
Before Christmas of last year he taught a course on the Russian
Revolution and until a week before his death he had been talking
with colleagues and discussing their work. His last major book,
Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World, published
in October 2001, presents bold new philosophical theories that take
account of recent advances in science, and discusses whether truth
is relative to cultural and social factors.
Nozick in the course of his career acquired many official
distinctions. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and a Senior
Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. In 1997 he
delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University.
That same year Nozick and Rawls were among six leading political
philosophers who submitted a brief to the Supreme Court which urged
the court to uphold two federal appeals court rulings that mentally
competent, terminally ill patients have a constitutional right to a
doctor's aid in killing themselves. The fundamental principle was
that in deeply personal decisions, an individual must be free to
follow his or her own religious or ethical convictions, without
government interference beyond the minimum needed.
One Harvard professor, Michael Sandel, called the group that
composed the brief the dream team of liberal political philosophy;
Rawls and Nozick, though from different perspectives, believed that
rational agents should have the right to do what they want with
their own body. Neither accepted religous arguments against assisted
death, even though they still disagreed on the role of the State in
the life of the individual. Despite their philosophical differences,
the pair were not only colleagues but friends.
Nozick married twice. In 1959 he married Barbara Fierer. After
their divorce in 1981 he married the poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg,
who survives him, with a daughter and a son from his first marriage.
Robert Nozick, political philosopher, was born in New York on
November 16, 1938. He died of cancer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on
January 23, 2002, aged 63.
The original was published on the The Times website
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chotliAnonymousGeneral Comment2/4/2005lovely summary ... keep it upkaylor lodgekalorlodge_at_adalphia.nethow to right an obituary12/4/2004tell me how to right an obituarybongokuhle204519405_at_nu.ac.zanozeck history3/17/2004this guy is one of the greatest political philosopher
Miss ExistentialistAnonymousExistentialism11/3/2003Thank you for an informative website. Feel free to visit this one about existentialism, Goethe and time travel http://www.angelfire.com/ny5/mahler
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