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OBITUARIES
A young philosopher’s first book is a runaway success and
thrusts him into the spotlight as a pioneer of American philosophy.
He follows that with years of teaching at Harvard, a University
Professorship there, more books, and myriad honors and commendations.
The success of Robert Nozick ’59 of Cambridge, Mass.,
who passed away on January 23, was predicted early on, according
to classmate Bennett Miller ’59. “I was a junior Phi Beta
Kappa and was invited to select the rest of the small percentage
of the class that may join the group,” Miller recalled. “At
a meeting where we discussed classmates who might be selected, a
senior University administrator — I can’t recall who —
stated, ‘When you’re dead and buried, Robert Nozick’s
name will live on.’ ” That part may certainly prove true,
but did Nozick get in? “Of course,” said Miller. Nozick was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on November 16, 1938. He attended
public school, where he started out on the left by joining the youth
branch of Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party, and came to philosophy
through a copy of Plato’s Republic, which, as he wrote in a
later book, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations
(Touchstone Books, 1989), he read only some of and understood less.
“But I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful,”
he wrote. At the College, Nozick founded the local chapter of the
Student League for Industrial Democracy, which in 1962 changed its
name to Students for a Democratic Society. Nozick earned a master’s
in 1961 and a Ph.D. in 1963 from Princeton while serving as a philosophy
instructor. In his first book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books,
1974), Nozick starkly and vigorously attacked the forms of paternalistic
government that “forbid capitalistic acts between consenting
adults.” The book was a critique of Theory of Justice
(Belknap Press, 1971), written by his Harvard colleague John Rawls,
who argued that it was right for the bureaucratic welfare state
to redistribute wealth in order to help the poor and disadvantaged. Written in a chatty style that was praised for its accessibility,
Anarchy, State, and Utopia won a National Book Award and
was named by The Times Literary Supplement as one of “The
Hundred Most Influential Books Since the War.” Nozick attacked
the liberal orthodoxy that had created and nourished the modern
welfare state. The state, he wrote, is fine, as long as it is minimal,
as long as it does not coerce the individual or usurp his rights
— something he argued that American government did on unexamined
assumptions. He began by defending the “night watchman”
state of classical 19th century theory, or the state in which government
does no more than protect its members from violence, theft and breach
of contract. The book transformed him from a young philosophy professor
known only within his profession to the reluctant theoretician of
a national political movement. Despite a reputation as a right-wing philosopher from Anarchy,
State, and Utopia, Nozick was intellectually diverse in his
writing and teaching. In Philosophical Explanations (Belknap
Press, 1981), he explored the nature of knowledge, the self, free
will and ethics. Nozick took on subjects that many academic philosophers
had dismissed as irrelevant or meaningless, such as free will versus
determinism and the nature of subjective experience, and why there
is something rather than nothing. The Examined Life: Philosophical
Meditations (Touchstone Books, 1990), contained 27 essays on
subjects such as love, happiness and creativity, as well as evil
and the Holocaust. In 1995, he published The Nature of Rationality
(Princeton University Press) followed by Socratic Puzzles
(Harvard University Press) in 1997. His last book, Invariances:
The Structure of the Objective World, was published in October
2001 by Harvard University Press. Nozick’s first book seems to have staying power, though, and
his critique of America’s social welfare system continues to
define the debate between conservatives and liberals. Still in print,
Anarchy, State and Utopia has been translated into 11 languages
and even stood as a prop in an episode of HBO’s The Sopranos.
In a caustic reference to the state’s power to protect, a witness
to a murder is shown reading the book just as he learns from his
wife that the mob boss Tony Soprano is the suspect. Terrified, he
decides not to testify. Nozick was chair of the Harvard philosophy department from 1981–84.
He became Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy in 1985
and in 1998 was named the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor.
Nozick received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the
Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities
and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He
was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member
of the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, a corresponding
fellow of the British Academy and a senior fellow of the Society
of Fellows at Harvard. He served as the president of the American
Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division from 1997–98,
was a Christensen visiting fellow at St. Catherine’s College,
Oxford University, in 1997, and was a cultural adviser to the U.S.
Delegation to the UNESCO Conference on World Cultural Policy in
1982. The American Psychological Association, presenting him with
its 1998 Presidential Citation, called him “one of the most
brilliant and original living philosophers.” Nozick’s 1959 marriage to Barbara Fierer ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and his children from his first marriage, Emily and David.
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