Robert Nozick

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Robert Nozick (born November 16, 1938 in Brooklyn , New York City , † January 23, 2002 in Cambridge , Massachusetts ) was an American philosopher . He held the Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University . His 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia was a libertarian response to John Rawls ' book A Theory of Justice , published in 1971.

Life

Nozick grew up in Brooklyn and graduated from Columbia University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1959 summa cum laude . In the same year he married. In 1961 he received his master's degree from Princeton University , where he received his doctorate in 1963 with Carl Hempel with a dissertation on decision theory. As a post-doctoral student , he was a Fulbright Scholar at Oxford. He then went to Princeton and Rockefeller University. In 1969 he received a full professorship at Harvard University, where he was Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor in 1985 and Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in 1998 .

plant

With the book Anarchy, State, and Utopia published in 1974, Nozick established libertarian positions in mainstream political philosophy. He tries to establish the minimal state that limits itself to protecting the natural rights of its citizens and their property. According to his “ entitlement theory ”, it is the measure of justice whether a claim has come about legally, namely through just appropriation or through just transfer of property. In his book he argues, among other things, for the position that the distribution of goods is fair if it takes place through free and amicable exchange between adults, even if this process results in large inequalities (and thus also power imbalances). In this line of argument, Nozick relies on the Kantian idea that people should be treated as rational beings.

Later he distanced himself from the libertarian program and professed a republican- communitarian position.

As an important exponent of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, Nozick made notable contributions to almost all important areas of philosophy. In Philosophical Explanations he presented new approaches to the concepts of knowledge , free will and value . The Examined Life - known to a wider audience - examined love , death and belief .

criticism

The US philosopher Thomas Nagel criticizes that Nozick's libertarian theory has no real theoretical foundation because it assumes, without further explanation, that individuals belong to themselves.

The Indian economist and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen accuses Nozick of completely disregarding the social consequences of his libertarian philosophy. With perfect and complete protection of libertarian property rights, severe famines could occur without violating the requirements of Nozick's theory. Nozick had provided the possibility of an exceptional case in the event of the danger of "serious moral catastrophes"; but this does not logically fit into Nozick's theory. In addition, negative effects in all possible degrees of severity are possible. Nozick's approach neglects important variables such as utilitarian theories and is therefore too one-sided.

The economist Nicholas Barr from the London School of Economics criticizes that no scientific dialogue is possible between so-called natural rights libertarians like Nozick and the representatives of non-libertarian positions, since the natural rights libertarians represent a completely uncompromising position. However, this does not apply to empirically arguing libertarians like Milton Friedman .

The economist Veit Bütterlin states that Nozick's right to absolute property would threaten the subsistence law dimension of natural law . By Nozick's extension of natural law - according to which man is the owner of his own person - to an absolute right to property in objects, legal circumstances could arise which in turn would undermine the concept of natural law itself.

Honors

In 1968 he received the Presidential Citation of the American Psychological Association. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1984), Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (1996), Guggenheim Fellow and Senior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard. In 1997 he gave the John Locke Lectures in Oxford, where he was Christensen Visiting Fellow at St. Catherine's College. In 1997/98 he was President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association.

For his book Philosophical Explanations he was awarded the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize of the Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1982 .

Works

  • Anarchy, state, utopia . Olzog, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-7892-8099-3 (Original title: Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974. Translated by Hermann Vetter).
  • About the right, good and happy life . In: dtv . tape 30382 . Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-423-30382-4 (Original title: The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations, 1989. Translated by Martin Pfeiffer).
  • Philosophical Explanations. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1981
  • The Nature of Rationality. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 1993
  • Socratic puzzles. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 1999
  • Invariances. Belknap Press, Cambridge MA 2003

See also

literature

  • Norman P. Barry: On Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism. Macmillan, Basingstoke et al. 1986, ISBN 0-333-32591-5 .
  • Horst Wolfgang Boger: Anarchism and radical liberalism. In: Yearbook on Liberalism Research. Volume 2, 1990, ISSN  0937-3624 , pp. 46-66.
  • Simon A. Hailwood: Exploring Nozick. Beyond Anarchy, State and Utopia. Avebury, Aldershot et al. 1996, ISBN 1-85972-485-X .
  • AR Lacey: Robert Nozick. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ et al. 2001, ISBN 0-691-09044-0 .
  • Jeffrey Paul (Ed.): Reading Nozick. Essays on "Anarchy, State, and Utopia". Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1982, ISBN 0-631-12977-4 .
  • David Schmidtz (Ed.): Robert Nozick. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. 2002, ISBN 0-521-78226-0 .
  • Jonathan Wolff: Robert Nozick. Property, Justice and the Minimal State. Polity Press, Oxford 1991, ISBN 0-7456-0602-4 .
  • C. Roland Hoffmann-Negulescu (pseudonym for Roland Chr. Hoffmann-Plesch): anarchy, minimal state, world state. Critique of the libertarian legal and state theory R. Nozicks, Tectum Verlag, Marburg 2001, ISBN 3-8288-8303-6 .
  • Roland Chr. Hoffmann-Plesch: "From the minimal state to the world state: A legal-philosophical investigation into the Minarcholibertarist justice utopia", 1st edition. Writings on jurisprudence, Vol. 165, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Berlin, 2013, ISBN 978-3865737212 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hermann-Josef Große Kracht: Renaturalization of social inequalities? To Wolfgang Kersting's futile hope of arriving at a liberal welfare state philosophy on the way from John Rawls to Robert Nozick. In: Political quarterly. Volume 45 (3), 2004, pp. 395-413, here: p. 402.
  2. ↑ Amartya Sen : Economy for the people. Munich 2002, p. 84 ff. See also: Poverty and Famines. Oxford 1982.
  3. ^ Nicholas Barr: The Economics of the Welfare State. Oxford / New York 2004, p. 62 f.
  4. ↑ Veit Bütterlin: Critique of Political Philosophy. Tectum Verlag, Marburg 2005, p. 272.
personal data
SURNAME Nozick, Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH November 16, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Cambridge , Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH January 23, 2002
Place of death Brooklyn , New York City