http://mises.org/daily/2650 critiques Nozick’s ideas, but I was under the influence he was against government and for free market. To anyone who has read Anarchy, State, and Utopia, or any of his other books, was he an anarcho-capitalist. Was he Austrian or Chicagonian? Also, maybe some claritfication on Jan Narveson. Thanks everyone.
No.
Neither.
Anarcho-capitalist and a contractarian (a rare breed).
Hoppe rips Nozick to shreds in the introduction to Ethics of Liberty:
Nozick defends the “nightwatchmen state” and believes that one could arise out of the state of nature without violating rights. He basically accepted mainstream microeconomics, but with a Hayekian flavor. Let me know if you have any more specific questions about Nozick. Honestly, it is a shame that Nozick isn’t talked about more on these forums than he is.
Even though i’m a minarchist, I lost any respect for Nozick I might have had upon learning his hypocrisy on rent issues.
Rent issues? Why does learning about one thing cause you to lose respect for one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century?
Nozick used laws which he supposedly opposed to force his landlord to lower his rent. That qualifies as bald hypocrisy in my book.
Lmfao.
Nozick was hailed as the greatest libertarian philosopher of the 20th century by the same Statists whose opinions in every other subject we generally oppose on this site. Since his unprincipled and detached musings posed no threat to the entrenched Statist orthodoxy, they liberally heaped praise upon the palatable, moderate, and toothless Nozick at the expense of the uncompromising, principled, and radical libertarians like Rothbard. So forgive us if some here don’t share as much enthusiasm for him as those who like to praise Chavez to the moon.
I don’t think Nozick is important because statists say so. I think Nozick is important because I have actually read his work and evaluate it is such (it is clear to me that few here have even read Nozick for themselves). Also, there is much more to Nozick then just his political philosophy. He has made important contributions to epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, and decision theory. Yes, it is true that he made a few mistakes in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Even so, his arguments against socialism and other forms of egalitarianism is far superior to anything in the Ethics of Liberty or For a New Liberty. Rothbard doesn’t even attempt to take Rawls seriously enough to refute him successfully.
Like? List them all.
Just a few?
That would be because Rawls is a joke.
"And when political philosophy finally made a comeback in the early 1970s, in the wake of John Rawls and his Theory of justice, the recognition of scarcity as a fundamental human condition and of private property and private property rights as a device for coordinating the actions of individuals constrained by scarcity was conspicuously absent. Neither “property” nor “scarcity” appeared in Rawls’s elaborate index, for instance, while “equality” had several dozen entries.
In fact, Rawls, to whom the philosophy profession has in the meantime accorded the rank of the premier ethicist of our age, was the prime example of someone completely uninterested in what a human ethic must accomplish: that is, to answer the question of what I am permitted to do right now and here, given that I cannot not act as long as I am alive and awake and the means or goods which I must employ in order to do so are always scarce, such that there may be interpersonal conflicts regarding their use. Instead of answering this question, Rawls addressed an altogether different one: what rules would be agreed upon as “just” or “fair” by “parties situated behind a veil of ignorance”? Obviously, the answer to this question depends crucially on the description of the “original position” of “parties behind a veil of ignorance.” How, then, was this situation defined? According to Rawls, behind the veil of ignorance “no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength, and the like. . . . It is taken for granted, however, that they know the general facts about human society. They understand political affairs and the principles of economic theory; they know the basis of social organization and the laws of human psychology.”~
While one would think that scarcity ranks among the general facts of society and economic theory, Rawls’s parties, who supposedly knew about scarcity, were themselves strangely unaffected by this condition. In Rawls’s construction of the “original position,” there was no recognition of the fact that scarcity must be assumed to exist even here. Even in deliberating behind a veil of ignorance, one must still make use of scarce means at least one’s physical body and its standing room, i.e., labor and land. Even before beginning any ethical deliberation then, in order to make them possible, private or exclusive property in bodies and a principle regarding the private or exclusive appropriation of standing room must already be presupposed. In distinct contrast to this general fact of human nature, Rawls’s moral “parties” were unconstrained by scarcities of any kind and hence did not qualify as actual humans but as free-floating wraiths or disembodied somnambulists. Such beings, Rawls concluded, cannot but "acknowledge as the first principle of justice one requiring an equal distribution (of all resources). Indeed, this principle is so obvious that we would expect it to occur to anyone immediatelym7T rue; for if it is assumed that “moral parties” are not human actors but disembodied entities, the notion of private property must indeed appear strange. As Rawls admitted with captivating frankness, he had simply "define(d1 the original position so that we get the desired resukn8 Rawls’s imaginary parties had no resemblance whatsoever with human beings but were epistemological somnambulists; accordingly, his socialist-egalitarian theory of justice does not qualify as a human ethic, but something else entirely.
If anything useful could be found in Rawls in particular and contemporary political philosophy in general, it was only the continued recognition of the age-old universalization principle contained in the so-called Golden Rule as well as in the Kantian Categorical Imperative: that all rules aspiring to the rank of just rules must be general rules, applicable and valid for everyone without exception."
The angry Rothbardian’s will have none of this! Hoppe says he’s evil–discussion over.
Angry? I’m laughing at the lunacy.. and the fact you’ve got no arguments or any kind of response at all to any of it.
Most amusing.
Please, go ahead and defend Rawls & Nozick… be my guest. [:)]
Quoting Hoppe on Rawls doesn’t refute Nozick. Why don’t you build an actual argument against Nozick’s positions? Are you familiar with them?
Perhaps you ought to read the posts that led to his quoting Hoppe…
JosephBright says he was supported by statists (which is supposed to automatically refute him), Conza replied with “lmao,” and Praetyre mentioned the fact that he abused the legal system in order to secure a lower rent. Did I miss something?
That’s bitter Rothbardians to you, mister! [:P]
I can’t speak for the others, but I was responding to his characterization of Nozick as one of the greatest (libertarian) philosophers of the 20th century, an appellation generally awarded to him by the liberal academics of his time.
His reason for quoting Hoppe on Rawls, that being Solid Choke’s post…
… lol