Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of Talking Politics. This week's episode of History of

Ideas, watching and partnership with the London Review of Books is about Robert

Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia, one of the favourite books of the tech billionaires in Silicon Valley.

What is it about this libertarian call to arms from the 1970s that still resonates today?

I want to begin this time by reading out a list of names.

And the question about this list is what do all these people have in common?

You'll have to bear with me because it's quite a long list. You may lose the will to live.

It does end eventually and the payoff comes at the end as well.

So here's the list. What do these people have in common?

Vickinstein, Elizabeth Taylor, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Merton, Yogi Berra, Alan Ginsberg, Harry Walson, Theroux, Casey Stangle, The Lubavitcha Rebbe, Picasso, Moses, Einstein, Hugh Hefner, Socrates, Henry Ford, Lenny Bruce, Babaram Dars, Gandhi, Sir Edmund Hillary, Raymond Lubits, Buddha, Frank Sinatra, Columbus, Freud, Norman Meiler,

Ayn Rand, Baron Rothschild, Ted Williams, Thomas Edison, HL Menken, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Ellison, Bobby Fisher, Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, you, your parents.

That's the end of the list we got there.

So what do all these people have in common?

The list comes from the book I'm talking about today, Robert Nozix, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

And it's a book published in 1974. It's quite a 1970s list.

The first thing I think that stands out about all those people is they're almost all men.

There are very few women on that list. There are Elizabeth Taylor's at the top, Ayn Rand, Emma Goldman.

There are quite a few baseball players on that list. That's slightly odd.

But what do they have in common? The answer, of course, is nothing.

Those people do not have anything in common. They're just famous names.

And the point of the list is to suggest just how ridiculous it would be to try and conceive of a society,

a political arrangement, a conception of justice, a way of ordering the good life, even an idea of what it would be to lead a good life.

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