Government By Insurance Company: the Antipolitical Philosophy of Robert Nozick

Abstract

ROBERT NOZICK'S recent book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, is a spirited and provocative philosophic defense of the minimal or nightwatchman state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on. (P. ix.) Underlying and integral to its argument is a rejection of politics. Nozick's minimal state is not a political order but a business enterprise: a kind of insurance company which sells people protection against the invasion by others of their individual rights. Politics has to do with public things, and there is no place for public things in the relationship of a business enterprise to its clients. Nozick's defense of the minimal state is thus a proposal to privatize and hence depoliticize virtually all of human life. I wish to examine that proposal. I believe that Nozick's minimal state is indefensible. His justification of the minimal state, however, provides a stimulating backdrop against which to inquire into the nature and value of politics, and I hope that the discussion which follows will serve to clarify and heighten our sense of the significance of political life. I shall begin with a brief sketch of Nozick's defense of the minimal state and then analyze in detail certain specific points which illuminate especially well his concept of the state. I shall conclude with an assessment of Nozick's anti