I am reblogging part 6 (see below) of my in-depth review of Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” (ASU). Here, we proceed into section three of Chapter 2 of ASU, where Nozick makes a third conjecture — in addition to his two previous conjectures in section two of Ch. 2 (see my previous post). Specifically, Nozick conjectures that a single, all-powerful protection society — or a small group of territorial protection rackets — will eventually emerge in the state of nature. Once again, however, for the reasons I give in my post below, I take objection to Nozick’s third conjecture. Below is an excerpt from my original post:

“… Nozick doesn’t refer to the economic concept of ‘natural monopoly’; yet he is essentially arguing that protection groups are a kind of natural monopoly. If this crazy conjecture were really true, we would expect cities like Chicago or Los Angeles to have one dominant gang or a city like New York to have one single crime family, not five. While it’s true that gangs and crime families divide up territories and strictly enforce their turf, it’s not for reasons of natural monopoly or ‘economies of scale’. Rather, as soon as we gaze beyond the friendly confines of the Ivory Tower, we see that gangs, crime families, and protection rackets generally are organized … around family ties or for ethnic, linguistic, or other cultural reasons. But culture, family, and ethnicity are all missing from Nozick’s ahistorical account of the state of nature.”