Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Basically Robert Nozick argues for small government because there is no process by which any intervening distribution could be fair.
In fact he may go so far as to be saying that there is no legitimate fairness at all, other than a given impersonal process of arbitration (none of which could ever guarantee fairness).
In essence, he supports small government because there is an absence of genuine legitimacy.
The fact that Nozick supports any given neutral process even given the context of contigency shows us that Nozick is really formally a bureaucrat in disguise.
Nozick however, creates an antinomy here by confusing 1st order phenomenon with 2nd order judgement. For instance:
Fairness is only possible because there are things that are unfair to begin with. I don’t think we can dispute that there isn’t any source of legitimacy. If there was a source then we wouldn’t have to worry about fairness at all. If there was a source (any given source) no doubt it would most likely be arbitrary in its absoluteness. Fairness like beauty is better as a metaphysical guide than an enforced physical standard. That is a difference with 2nd level orders, that they do not exist at the 1st level.
Other than this small quibble, which strikes at the heart of this book, Nozick is concisely written and clear headed. I have a feeling that his obscuration of fairness is deceptive, but that would impart ill-intention on his part. I do however, think that his pursuit of an analytical analysis stems from the same kind of ill-fated kind of origin as logical positivism in its insistence that its transcendental logics be of the same level/kind as the phenomenon it seeks to explain.
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