Clarification (June 11, 2020): I wrote and posted this part of my extended review of Nozick’s classic book “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” back in December of 2017. Recently, however, one of my readers brought to my attention that Robert Nozick’s critique of Rawls’s “fairness principle” is based on a misconception (by Nozick himself no less!) of Rawls–namely, that Nozick is wrong to assume that Rawls’ principle of fairness implies “group rights” or “collective rights.” Based on our back and forth in the comments section below, I was persuaded that my reader’s diagnosis is correct, so please keep this in mind (i.e. that Rawls’s principle of fairness need not imply group or collective rights) when you read my original December 2017 blog post below.

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The second subsection of Chapter 5 of ASU (pp. 90-95) marks, to us, a critical turning point in the history of ideas. It is…