I've decided that now that I'm FREE, FREE, FREE of higher educational study, I can give myself permission not to like this book-despite being sympathetic to its conclusions. In other words, yes, this is the work of a professional academic, a Harvard professor of philosophy who wrote the kind of rigorous book used in graduate studies-it even won the National Book Award. This is as far from a popular treatment of the subject (such as say Ayn Rand or the like) as you can get. This is a work of political philosophy arguing for minimal government, the libertarian counterpart and answer to the liberal John Rawls' A Theory of Justice. It's unfortunate that Nozick missed the opportunity to take down the original position as an analytic method and defend a contextual/historical conception of justice. I just object to mischaracterizing his position so grotesquely. In fact, I do not agree with very much of what Rawls said. You might get the impression that I agree with Rawls, based on this review. That said, this book IS useful as a foil for understanding Rawls better! Also, the descriptions of the way a state would come about in a state of nature through a market system in the beginning of the book is an interesting answer to anarchism. However, there is simply not enough left over to present a persuasive justification of anything. To his credit, Nozick admits some of these missing pieces throughout the book. He assumes without argumentative justification that market efficiency is just. He relies heavily on a barely reconstructed Lockean conception of property without answering any of the objections to Locke. For example, he does not explore rectification, which by his own admission is a critical precursor to any society based on his entitlement theory, since no existing society can claim all property is held according to Nozick's principles of justice in holdings. Nozick's own theory is also full of holes. He assumes Rawls is opposed to any inequalities when the purpose of the second principle is precisely to explain how inequalities can be justified. He misses the point of the heuristic of the original position. He makes two grievous errors: (1) he entirely ignores the first principle, which results in his failure to realize that fundamental individual rights and liberties are prior to the second principle (2) he reads the second principle as "maximizing the share of the least advantaged" instead of "once fair equality of opportunity is ensured, remaining inequalities should function as part of a scheme that benefits everyone, where benefiting everyone is measured by the most demanding standard of benefiting the least advantaged." He also makes a number of other errors that are just as fatal to his argument, for instance, reading Rawls as presenting a "patterned" theory rather than a theory of pure procedural justice. Nozick so fundamentally misreads Rawls that the majority of this book is worthless as a result.
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