Anarchy, State and Utopia

Winner of the 1975 National Book Award, this classic work is updated for the first time in 30 years

Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a foundational text in classical liberal thought, in which Robert Nozick created the intellectual underpinnings for what is now known as libertarianism. In his exhortation to limit the state to only the most minimal possible role, Nozick stirred tremendous controversy in an era predisposed to look to government as the solution to social injustice.

When originally published in 1974, Anarchy, State, and Utopia was dismissed by many scholars as nothing more than a paean to the bourgeois status quo. But American politics have changed dramatically since then. Anarchy, State, and Utopia has become ever more relevant since the country has caught up with Nozick's ideas--as Clinton proclaimed, "the era of big government is over."

With fierce argumentation and meticulous logic, Robert Nozick gave birth to a new way of thinking about the relationship between the citizen and the state.

Educated at Columbia and Princeton universities, Robert Nozick is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. He rose to eminence in the last quarter of the twentieth century as a creative philosopher who has expressed philosophical truths beyond the reach of analytic argumentation. Honed in the technical intricacies of analytic philosophy, he has nonetheless restored meditation to its proper place in the philosophical canon. Nozick's first book, Anarchy, State and Utopia (initially published in 1974), won the National Book Award in 1975 and became the fundamental text of the Libertarian movement. Nozick's second book, Philosophical Explanations, was given the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of Phi Beta Kappa in 1982. It covers a wide range of basic philosophical topics: the question why there is something rather than nothing, the identity of the self, knowledge and skepticism, free will, the foundation of ethnics, and the meaning of life. Nozick abandons philosophical proof or argumentation as too coercive and opts instead for methods of explanation that promote understanding. This approach has culminated in his third book, The Examined Life.