THE MISCONCEPTION OF SOCIETY

...It also provides the basis for a theory of 'entitlement" in which asocial individuals in an imaginary (and impossible) no-society are cited to justify anti-social conduct in this society...

...Nozick does both...

...If Nozick's method is legitimate, his use of it is not...

...that he fully understood (and analyzed) the function of supply and demand in Volume III before he developed the labor theory of Volume I; and so on...

...Anarchy, State and Utopia is divided into three major parts: a justification of a "minimal state" which shows how, contrary to the individualist anarchist, such a structure would arise out of Locke's "state of nature" without violating anyone's rights...

...Compared to the treatment accorded Marx by that great conservative, Joseph Schumpter, it is a pathetic performance...

...Nozick, on the other hand, is not simply wrong...

...and so did a recent volume by Nozick's chosen antagonist, John Rawls' A Theory of Justice...

...and it is illegitimate to project the values of that myth forward into the actual situations of our antisocial society...

...Such other-worldly imaginings can, of course, have great this-worldly value...

...But the critic of this theory-particularly the snide and arrogant critic-should not commit nine pages of scholarly howlers...

...He has some interesting discussions-I find his comments on the rights of animals quite provocative and disturbing-but on the whole, Anarchy, State and Utopia is the most celebrated and honored bad book of recent times...

...It is legitimate to imagine a non-social and totally individualistic non-society...

...This is not just because I disagree with Nozick's conservative, free-market conclusions...

...It is illegitimate to then project the psyche of the actually existing, interdependent and highly integrated, society back into that otherwise useful myth...

...After a breathtaking display of ignorant incompetence in this area, he comments that perhaps the Marxist theory of exploitation is "the exploitation of people's lack of understanding of economics...

...He himself admits to a certain unease that the people who share his values are often "narrow and rigid" while he is opposed by "most people I know and respect...

...Similarly, he thinks that pollution should be allowed if only the polluters will pay for it-which, in a class and corporate society like ours, assigns control of the earth, air and water of the globe to the rich...

...Some of the more exuberant positivists said those fundamental concerns had been only pseudo-questions, not real questions, and mathematics became the Queen of the Sciences...

...He then hypothesizes how people would be led under such conditions-by an Adam Smithian "invisible hand"-to create a minimal state and would not violate rights in the process...

...This same method can be applied in the social sciences: the first statement of Marx's labor theory of value in Volume I of Das Kapital, takes place under just such purposive simplifications...

...He should have pondered that intuition instead of letting himself become entranced with his own "elaborate arguments, claims rebutted by unlikely counterexamples, surprising theses, puzzles, abstract structural conditions . . . and so on...

...So if I cannot kill you, neither can I require that you pay your fair share for the upkeep of that society which is the precondition of your success...

...Then, once the idealized case is probed, one modifies the conclusions to take into account that ceteris really are not paribus...

...Finally, I might summarize these objections of mine in a methodological comment...

...More damning, in this, and almost every other, case, Nozick constantly refuses to take notice of degrees, equating taxation with forced labor (both, after all, require that you surrender your surplus) and refuting an argument in favor of providing medical care with a sophomoric argument that haircuts should then be given on the basis of need...

...The physical scientist's laboratory controls set up a mythic world in which he or she can focus on what are assumed to be the crucial variables, relegating the rest of reality to that category called "all other things being equal"-which they never actually are...

...Nozick almost answers that they can never be treated as means, but then he admits that he must "tip-toe" around the more troublesome cases, e.g., could you kill an innocent person being used by an aggressor as a shield...

...But then, Nozick proceeds throughout this book on the basis of a fundamental error: He has no conception of society...

...It overlooks a crucial fact which T.W...

...I do not object on principle to Nozick's method in Part I. He imagines a Lockean state of nature in which the individual is free to dispose of his holdings as he sees fit, but not to harm anyone else's life, health, liberty and possessions...

...This style, which he wrongly ascribes to his entire discipline (Rawls does not use it) is basically the posture of an aesthete in the pejorative sense of that word...

...that he never for a moment thought that his theory of value would apply to Rembrandt and said so clearly...

...or even list-all these things...

...Alas, I dislike almost everything else about it...

...Nozick apparently does not know that Marx has a theory of pre- and non-capitalist exploitation...

...There is no sense of the way in which one's un-chosen class position determines (not totally) so much of one's choices...

...However, since Nozick thinks that free market calculations are structured into reality as well as the psyche of people in Locke's state of nature, that makes sense for him...

...Then with the information overload of the twentieth century, philosophy, like everything else, became specialized...

...In the process, Nozick takes on Marx...

...So I like the genre of Anarchy, State and Utopia and greet its reappearance as a good sign in our intellectual life...

...Adorno pointed out some time ago again with regard to computerized sociologists and mathematical economists: there is no rational reason to assume that reality has been providentially constructed so as best to express its truth in "elegant" equations Nor is there cause to believe that the overwhelmingly serious-or perhaps more precisely, the overwhelming- issues of the late twentieth century will yield their secrets to intellectual gamesmanship...

...he is for the most part, cutely, cleverly and irrelevantly wrong...

...For him, sturdy people who "choose" to work harder are being taxed to support the lazy...

...a free market Utopia which reminds me of the proposals for neighborhood autonomy advanced by Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin in the 1969 New York mayoralty race...

...Secondly, he resorts to intellectual sleight of hand after posing a most serious question: Whether people can be treated as means to an end or whether there is (or should be) an inviolable core to their being...

...Spinoza said one should "speak in a manner intelligible to the multitude," Kant and Fichte wrote summaries of their theories for the layman and the young Marx even thought that the proletariat would inherit, among other things, German classical philosophy...

...I can only warn the reader that Nozick's discussion of Marx is scandalously worthless...

...a critique of those, like Rawls, who seek to use the more-than-minimal state for redistri-butionist purposes...

...Robert Nozick's book breaks with this pattern...

...Both are analyses which, even if in a scholarly and complex fashion, treat of matters which Aristotle or Kant or the general reader will recognize as the stuff of social philosophy...

...Now Marx's theory of exploitation is not chiseled in stone and it may be (although I do not think this to be the case) wrong...

...That, I fear, is the underlying assumption of Nozick's book...

...I detest many of Nietzsche's views, yet I see him as one of the most profound thinkers of his age...

...I do not have the space to document...

...And when I am at odds with Rawls or, for that matter, with Milton Friedman, I am usually stimulated and often learn...

...This emperor has no clothes...

...That is, it addressed the question which most thinking people took to be primary: the nature of reality, of knowledge, the meaning of existence and society, and so on...

...First he assumes that people in the Lockean state of nature are all Milton Friedmans, and that they will naturally think in market terms about compensation for transgressed rights...