FOR Harvard philosophy professor Robert Nozick, who died on January 23rd aged 63, the welfare state was a form of theft, and taxation tantamount to forced labour. His book, Anarchy, State And Utopia (1994), brilliantly criticised the redistributive liberalism of his fellow Harvard philosopher, inspirer and adversary John Rawls. Now in 11 languages, the work, advocating "the minimal state", philosophically underpinned the free market, anti-welfarism of the approaching Reagan-Thatcher era.
Robert Nozick made the individual, and rights to life, liberty and property, fundamental and inviolable. No more than a minimal state was warranted, he argued, exercising the nightwatchman role of protecting its members from violence, theft and breach of contract, and ensuring the just acquisition and transfer of property, while not interfering in the right to pursue one's own ends.
He condemned "distributive justice" as implying that society has resources to distribute, whereas only individuals do, and are entitled to hold or transfer them. "From each as they chose, to each as they are chosen," was Robert Nozick's rewriting of Karl Marx.
He took his arguments on self-ownership and liberty to their consistent conclusion - harm-free sexual licence and the decriminalisation of prostitution and drugs. But he also advocated restoration of property to those wrongfully deprived of it, such as native Americans. What had driven him to libertarianism was the coerciveness of socialism. The libertarian state he proposed was a framework for Utopia, but people should be free to live in whatever community they wanted - socialist, capitalist or anything else.
Born in Brooklyn on November 16th, 1938, to Russian immigrants, he transformed himself from a fat, anxious, but precociously clever boy, into one of the 20th century's greatest political theorists. He was first attracted to philosophy as a teenager by reading Plato's Republic, which he said he carried ostentatiously about Brooklyn after school.
After graduating from Col- umbia College, he got his Ph.D at Princeton in 1963, and, after two years as an assistant professor there, spent four years at Harvard and Rockefeller universities before becoming a full professor at Harvard in 1969. During his graduate studies, he gravitated from the left - he had been a member of the youth wing of Norman Thomas's Socialist party, and of the precursor of Students For A Democratic Society - to right-wing libertarianism.
Always enamoured of logical puzzles, he had a vital, effervescent intelligence, was superb in live debate, and could never resist producing devastating arguments against himself. He changed the way political philosophy was done, not just through his ideas, but because he applied the techniques of analytical philosophy to them, arguing by counter-example and bizarre thought experiment.
Robert Nozick only did political philosophy for four or five years. His curiosity drove him to teach new topics and he famously, only once, taught any course twice. In Philosophical Explanations (1981), The Nature Of Rationality (1993), and his last book, Invariances: The Structure Of The Objective World (2001), he made major contributions in epistemology, rational choice theory, philosophy of mind and ethics.
He developed an analysis of knowledge which holds that, for someone's belief to count as knowledge, it must "track the truth". Someone knows that it is raining, for instance, if, were it not raining, they would not believe that it was raining, and were it, in fact, raining, they would believe it.
He opposed utilitarianism and had an intuitive and compelling counter-argument to its obsession with amassing private pleasure. If, as utilitarianism contends, what is good is simply the greatest possible amount of subjective states of happiness, we should surely want to be permanently attached to "experience machines" which gave us the experiences we would desire in real life - without these being caused by what would ordinarily cause them. The fact that we find it repugnant to each to be "alone in \ particular illusion" is because we "care about things in addition to how our lives feel to us from the inside", and shows the absurdity of treating happiness as the only value.
In later life, Robert Nozick ren- ounced extreme libertarianism, and even proposed some scheme for checks on unlimited inheritance. He said he had wanted to develop a theory of human nature and ethics to bolt on to his political theory and ground his notion of rights, but had failed. Where he did tackle human nature, the personal, "the holiness of everyday life" and its meaning, in The Examined Life (1989), he was disappointingly schmaltzy. Yet he carried many of the principles mentioned in that book into practice.
Told seven years ago that he had six months to live, he responded with high-spirited defiance, and pushed his body to tremendous exertions - and to far greater longevity than anticipated.
He chaired Harvard's philosophy department from 1981 to 1984, and became university professor - the institution's highest academic position - in 1998.
His first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife Gjertrud Schnackenberg and his two children from his first marriage.
Robert Nozick: born 1938; died, January 2002