The agency would monopolize a territory, extending its services to those who do not pay for them to preempt the field from independent enforcers. Property holders would hire a protective agency to guard their holdings. If it did not exist, something like it would arise, as if by an invisible hand, from the moral requirement of protecting property and respecting individual rights. First, Nozick argues ( contra the anarchist) that the modern state, with its claim to monopolize the legitimate use of force, is a moral necessity. In its main outline, Nozick's case is not difficult to follow, though it is presented inelegantly, with long digressions (e.g., on vegetarianism), and an unflagging prolixity in refuting the kind of objection likely to be posed by the fatuous freshman or journalist.
#Anarchy state and utopia professional
If he somehow fails, then the respectful reception accorded Anarchy, State, and Utopia by his professional colleagues must lead us to reconsider the terms on which academic philosophers have lately been addressing themselves to public affairs. If Nozick in fact reaches a libertarian philosophy by a logically compelling route then we must, like it or not, entertain his conclusions until they are superseded. In philosophy, it is not the destination that counts, but how one gets there. Hence it behooves us to consider Anarchy, State, and Utopia as a work of philosophy should be considered-not by whether we like its conclusions, nor by whether we approve of its author's bibliography, but by whether it forces its arguments upon us. Quine, the dean of American logicians, submitted helpful written comments on the entire manuscript and found the final product “brilliant and important.”
Far more impressive in professional circles is the evidence in the acknowledgments and on the dust-jacket that W. The National Book Award of 1975 in Religion and Philosophy has completed the popular certification of Nozick's book as an enduring contribution to American political philosophy. Though some have disputed Nozick's libertarian ideology and regretted his ignorance of social theory, history, and political thought, not even the most hostile has contested his technical proficiency. Another public philosopher, in a long essay in the New York Review of Books, applauded his “razor-sharp analysis.” Tardier reviewers in the general press have tended to confirm these judgments. One of Nozick's colleagues on the editorial board of Philosophy and Public Affairs, the organ of the new wave of public philosophers, promptly acclaimed the author in Harper's for his unsurpassed dialectical skill. From the day of its publication the book has been celebrated. That it succeeds in doing so has been almost unanimously acknowledged. Though Robert Nozick devotes some fifty pages to a critique of Rawls, his ambitious book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, is intended to stand on its own. Now one of Rawls's Harvard colleagues, singled out for mention three times in the final page of acknowledgments to A Theory of Justice, has entered the lists with a self-labeled libertarian work that joins issue with Rawls at several points but which, as befits an attempt at original theory, approaches the problems of justice and the state from a fresh perspective. The success of the book in the marketplace, as well as the high esteem in which Rawls is held by his colleagues and students, has spawned a cottage industry of criticism and commentary on Rawls's “ideal contractualism,” which has been misread in some quarters as a doctrine for levelers. The publication of John Rawls's cumbersome A Theory of Justice surprised Harvard University Press four years ago by becoming its best seller. After a generation in which questions of logic and scientific method have preoccupied the dominant, analytic school of American philosophy, tenured professors are now interested in applying their newly honed conceptual tools to the predicament of man in society, and there appears to be an audience for their writings. For better or worse, academic philosophers are intent on deepening our discussion of political and moral issues.
0 kommentar(er)
