Freeman march 14 banner   Robert Nozick, Philosopher of Liberty
Nozick Gave Libertarian Ideas a Controversial Presence in
Academia   Twenty-eight years ago a Harvard philosophy professor
named Robert Nozick did something unthinkable in polite
intellectual society: he published a book defending
libertarianism.  In 1974 libertarian ideas had virtually no
presence within the academic establishment. Free-market
economists F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman had not yet won their
Nobel prizes (Hayek’s would come later that year, and Friedman’s
two years after that), and the reigning political philosopher
was Nozick’s own colleague John Rawls, whose monumental
treatise, A Theory of Justice, had won widespread acclaim for
its argument that individuals should be allowed to benefit from
their greater wealth, talent, or effort only so long as they
compensate the less fortunate.1 Then came Anarchy, State, and
Utopia.2  As a child in his native Brooklyn, so the tale goes,
young Nozick had been in the habit of asking street-