Partially examined life precognitions introduce philosophical topics for upcoming episodes

to give you a few weeks to do the reading yourself.

They also serve as quick standalone summaries of the work.

You can read more about these topics, get the words we cover, and listen to Partially

Examined Life Conversations at partiallyexaminedlife.com.

Hi, this is Seth Paskin from the Partially Examined Life, and this is the precognition for

Robert Nozix, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, chapters 1 through 3 and 7.

Robert Nozix was a 20th-century American philosopher born in 1938 in Brooklyn, New York, who died

in 2002.

He attended Columbia as an undergraduate, Princeton as a graduate, and Oxford on a Fulbright

Fellowship.

He turned countering the work of Austrian school economist F.A. Hayek in Ludwig von

Mises, the libertarian Murray Rothbard, and the, well, Ein Rand.

Nozix turned his attention to political philosophy.

Remarkably, Nozix I, and most famous book, was Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a defense

of libertarianism.

This work is understood as a counterpoint to a theory of justice by John Rawls, which

we covered in an earlier Partially Examined Life podcast.

Both philosophers taught at Harvard at the same time, and Nozix's book was published

three years after Rawls in 1974.

Nozix opens Anarchy, State, and Utopia by asking the question whether there should be any

state at all, or why not Anarchy.

...