The Independent Review

Suppose you say to the proverbial man on the street: The man is likely to respond, “Tell me something I don’t know!” Robert Nozick develops this intuitive line of thought and many more in exquisite detail in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974; hencefor

My mentor David Schmidtz advises his students, “Don’t begin by conceding the moral high ground.” Robert Nozick is inquisitive, introspective, and self-critical—indeed, some of the best objections to his own arguments appear in his footnotes. But it r

In this essay, we argue that liberal egalitarians cannot maintain their commitment to liberalism alongside a commitment to distributive egalitarianism—that is, the view that justice requires the state to bring about a broadly egalitarian distribution

Robert Nozick and his Harvard colleague John Rawls were giants of twentieth-century political philosophy. While no one comes close to Rawls in terms of citations or influence, no one comes closer than Nozick. Nozick said, “Political philosophers now

Robert Nozick’s 1974 book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (hereafter ASU), presented itself fifty years ago as an alternative framing of justice to that of (at least) four distinct schools of thought. Three were at the time the predominant approaches. On

Robert Nozick’s starting point is an individualist anarchist one. His state of nature is like Murray Rothbard’s anarchism. Nozick says: His project is to show how a state might justifiably arise from this starting point, and to understand this projec

In his inimitably provocative style, the libertarian Robert Nozick in 1974 declared that “taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor” (169). A bold claim for a Harvard professor. Nozick’s line stands alongside other famous tax quot

In this essay I want to examine, critically evaluate, and improve upon a central argument in Robert Nozick’s extraordinary Anarchy, State, and Utopia. This is Nozick’s argument from the notion of the separateness of persons to the existence of moral

Suppose, falsely, as perhaps many do, that Christianity is a naive and narrow worldview and its proponents are, at best, good-hearted people trapped by ideology. For, one might think, “God doesn’t exist!” After all, the problem of evil is real, and t

History has largely neglected John Witherspoon (1723–1794). The neglect is unwarranted, for Witherspoon played important roles in the Scottish Enlightenment, the American Revolution, and the formation of the American republic. This article provides a

It is hard to understate the vital importance of Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action. Mises’s 1949 work reminds one of the great works of the eighteenth-century philosophers rather than the narrow works of the modern technical specialists. Yet, Human Act

The noted economist Robert Burton Ekelund Jr. passed away on August 17, 2023, a few weeks shy of his eighty-third birthday. He was my lifelong friend, colleague, coauthor, and confidant. His death is mourned by the many who knew him. Bob was born in

The Department of Justice’s March 21 antitrust lawsuit against Apple has drawn praise (Feiner 2024) and sharp criticism (Abbott 2024; Rinehart 2024). 1 One of us (Shughart 2024) blasted the action by pointing out that the relevant product market defi

By Mark Paul Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. Pp. vii, 329. $26 hardcover. I like utopias. They’re lovely bits of fiction. After finishing a fine bit of utopian fiction, however, the real world always beckons. Mark Paul has put together a

By Scott Sumner Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Pp. ix, 404. $35 hardcover. Scott Sumner gained considerable notoriety in the economics profession when he began publishing a blog called “The Money Illusion” in 2009. At the time, everyone

Edited by Michael D. Bordo, John H. Cochrane, and John B. Taylor Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 2024. Pp. xlv, 432. $19.95 hardcover. Getting Monetary Policy Back on Track collects papers presented at the May 2023 Hoover Monetary Policy

By Ronald J. Pestritto New York: Encounter, 2023. Pp. x, 277. $28.99 hardcover. In America Transformed, Ronald Pestritto makes three bold arguments. The first and most fully developed thesis is that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and other leadi

By Robert L. Hetzel Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. xviii, 688. $45 hardcover. The Federal Reserve: A New History is an incredibly detailed and sophisticated update on the history of the Fed written by Robert Hetzel, a distinguished