Robert Nozick

In 1974, Robert Nozick''s book Anarchy, State, and Utopia moved libertarianism from a relatively neglected subset of political philosophy to the center of the discipline, as one of the most cogent critiques of social democracy and egalitarian liberalism.

Nozick developed a rights-based account of libertarianism to show that a minimal state can legitimately arise, that nothing more than a minimal st...