Prof: An important
transition today.
We're going to start talking
about the social contract
tradition.
 
We've come a long way.
 
It's still only February,
but you've really worked
through two of the major
Enlightenment traditions of
thinking about political theory.
 
To get into the social contract
tradition we have to go back
again to Locke,
who is a kind of hovering
presence throughout the whole
course,
and Locke's idea of
workmanship, which we thought
about mainly in relation to
creation of objects of value,
the theory of property in
Locke, and how that plays itself
out in the labor theory of value
developed by Marx that we've
been talking about for some time
over the past couple of weeks.
Well, alongside the economics
of workmanship,
if you like,
that goes back to Locke,
there's a politics of
workmanship, because just as we
own what we make in the material
sense,
in Locke's story,
we also own the political
institutions that we create.
 
And if you cast your minds back
to the early lectures I gave on
the Enlightenment project a big
part of that claim was that we
could have maker's knowledge of
the political institutions we
create just as we have maker's
knowledge of the economic and
social relations that we create.
 
And not only do we have maker's
knowledge so we can have this
kind of certainty the early
Enlightenment theorists were
looking for,
but we also have maker's
authority over what we create.
 
Remember I told you that Locke
was engaged in this debate with
other natural law theorists in
the 1660s,
where the big question was
whether or not God is
omnipotent.
 
And the question was that if
you said God is omnipotent it
seemed to threaten the
timelessness of natural law
because he'd be in a position to
change it.
On the other hand,
if you said that God does not
have the power to change natural
law that seemed to undermine his
omnipotence.
 
So either the timelessness of
natural law or the omnipotence
of God, but it seemed like you
couldn't have both.
And Locke wrestled with this
question his whole life,
but in the end came down on
what's sometimes called the
voluntarist side,
the will-dependent side,
the side which got him into the
whole workmanship ideal.
So we know what we make and we
own what we make because God
gave us the capacity to be able
to operate as miniature gods and
to operate in a god-like fashion
creating institutions,
and economic relationships,
and social relationships over
which we have the same kind of
control with the caveat that we,
as God's property,
were bound by God's wishes
which appear to us as natural
law.
Whereas, in the things we
create, so long as we don't
violate those constraints,
us as God's creatures,
we can do what we like.
 
And that is the idea that
informs Locke's argument in
The Second Treatise where
he says,
to remind you,
there's no earthly authority
that can settle disputes about
natural law and so it's every
person for themself if there
really is a disagreement,
and I'll come back to the
implications of that more fully
later when we talk about
majority rule.
But the most important point to
take away for right now is that
we are constrained by natural
law in the natural law tradition
because we're God's property,
and he has maker's knowledge
over his creation which we are,
but with the constraint or with
the caveat that he rejects the
traditional idea--
he was arguing against Filmer
and others about that there's
anybody,
whether it's the Pope,
or the King,
or anybody else,
who has the right to say what
natural law means in the case of
a dispute.
 
And that's the beginning of
modern individualism for Locke;
that we're miniature gods on
the one hand,
and yes, we're constrained by
natural law,
but it's not much of a
constraint, really,
because we're the ones who get
to say what natural law means in
a disputed circumstance.
 
So the individual comes into
the center of thinking about
politics.
 
Now, Nozick,
Robert Nozick,
is the person we're going to
use to ease our way into modern
social contract theory.
 
In a way it's an odd choice
because Nozick is actually a
critic of John Rawls,
who we're going to read next,
and probably wouldn't have even
written the book that he wrote
but for the existence of Rawls's
book to which he was reacting.
But I'm choosing to do Nozick
first for pedagogical reasons.
One is because Nozick
explicitly builds off a Lockean
set of intuitions,
and secondly because his
formulation of the social
contract is another variation of
the rights-utility synthesis
that we looked at in connection
with Mill,
but it's one that purports to
solve the main problem that we
were left with in Mill,
which is the Marxian critique
of markets.
If you recall from the end of
our discussion of Marx,
we said that one of the things
that is left untouched by all
the problems with Marx is Marx's
critique of markets from the
standpoint of the status quo,
the starting point's problem,
the garbage-in/garbage-out
problem.
That if you have an unjust
status quo,
and then a lot of market
transactions,
all those transactions are
going to be infected by the
injustice that goes into the
status quo,
If the corn dealer really is a
starver of the poor,
to use Mill's example in the
chapter on free speech,
Nozick thinks he has an answer
to that.
Nozick thinks that he has a
reformulation of the
rights-utility synthesis that
answers that problem,
and we'll only get to how he
thinks he answers that problem
next Monday,
but he thinks that he has an
answer,
and in fact it's a brilliant
answer.
 
And even those of you who don't
like that answer are going to
find it very difficult to
respond to Nozick's point.
But before getting into the
details of Nozick's argument I
think it's worth just pausing
for a minute to notice two
problems that any social
contract theory has,
and has long been known to
have, which anybody who tries to
come up with a social contract
theory has to deal with.
It's long been known,
first of all,
that because there never was an
actual social contract,
that assumptions you make about
natural man tend to be loaded
with assumptions about human
beings from your own society.
This critique is maybe not as
old as the hills,
but it's certainly as old as
Rousseau's critique of Hobbes.
Writing in the eighteenth
century, Rousseau said,
the problem with Hobbes'
Leviathan,
which is another version of the
social contract that we're not
reading in this course--
Rousseau said the problem with
Leviathan is that Hobbes
takes assumptions from the
people of his own day,
and attributes them to natural
man,
projects them on to the idea of
natural man,
and you can't do that.
And so Rousseau's own version
of the social contract is much
more historical.
 
It attempts to take account of
the evolution of people from
some kind of almost pre-human
condition to a condition in
which social and political
relationships evolve.
But this claim is made time and
again when people talk about the
social contract as moving from a
condition of pre-natural,
pre-political man to a social
and political condition people
say,
"Well, the problem with it
is Rousseau's problem with
Hobbes."
That what people in fact do is
take a set of assumptions about
human beings that are the
product of the society that's
been created and attribute them
to natural man.
And so you get this problem
that what you put into it
is--it's a different but related
kind of garbage-in/garbage-out
problem.
 
The assumptions you make about
human nature are taken from the
society you want to justify,
and then you present them as
though they were features of
pre-social,
if you like, human nature.
 
And so the argument goes.
 
What we now know from 200 years
of anthropology is that actually
Aristotle was right.
 
There never was a pre-social
condition.
Human beings are naturally
social creatures and you can't
analyze them apart from their
social and cultural environment.
You just can't do it.
 
Anything you try to do in that
general direction will be--it
will obscure more than it
reveals.
You'll end up with tendentious
assumptions about human nature
that will allow you to derive
the conclusions that you want,
but at the end of the day this
is only going to persuade the
people who agreed with you
before you began and it's not
going to convince the skeptics,
so what's the point?
So this is one problem that has
long been known to attend social
contract theory,
and anybody who's going to roll
one out has to deal with it.
 
And what you find with the
modern social contract theorists
like Nozick and Rawls is they
say,
"Granted,
we don't disagree that there
never was a social
contract."
And indeed, even if you look at
the--
those of you who are students
of American history will know
even if you look at the social
contract that came the closest
to being an actual social
contract to create a society,
namely the creation of the
American Republic,
even there if you look it
didn't come about as the result
of an agreement.
 
The Federal Constitution was
put in place in violation of the
Articles of Confederation.
 
It was largely imposed by the
Federalist forces who were
stronger than the
anti-Federalists,
than the Confederation forces.
 
So even the American example,
which is the one that inspires
Nozick's book,
is not a case of a creation of
a society from whole cloth by
agreement;
it's neither out of whole cloth
because there were already
social and political
arrangements before,
and it's not really by
agreement because it was imposed
on those who didn't want it
pretty much by force.
We'll come back to the extent
to which it was imposed later,
but the basic fact remains.
 
Nozick knows all of that.
 
He's not a fool,
and he's not ignorant,
but he says,
"Let's suppose society
could be created by unanimous
agreement,
could be created by consent,
what would it look like?"
And we're not saying
pre-political,
pre-social beings,
people like you and me.
If we were in a situation where
there was no state what kind of
state, if any,
would we create?
And we'll see when we come to
do John Rawls,
after the break,
he has the same approach.
People often get Rawls and
Nozick wrong.
They're not saying,
"We can imagine what
people would be like if a state
didn't exist in the sense that
Hobbes did and Locke did,
and Rousseau criticized them
for doing."
 
Rather he's saying,
"You and me,
considering ourselves as we
are, if the state didn't exist
what kind of state would we
create?"
We know it's a thought
experiment.
We know it's a hypothetical
exercise;
nonetheless,
if we can answer that question,
it gives us a standard by which
we can compare existing
institutions that didn't come
about in that way from the
standpoint of this normative
ideal of consent.
What would people have chosen,
even though they never did
choose it,
tells us something about
existing institutions,
namely those that are closer to
what people would have chosen
are better,
and those that are further from
what people would have chosen
are worse.
 
So it's the search for a
normative ideal based on a
hypothetical contract.
 
Whereas, Hobbes and Locke
thought the state of nature was
a condition that had actually
existed in the world and to
which people could return.
 
Hobbes thought England,
during the Civil War,
actually went into a state of
nature.
Locke thought much of North
America, in the seventeenth
century, was in a state of
nature.
So it's a very different
exercise in that sense.
It's a hypothetical social
contract,
not an actual one,
designed to generate a
normative standard,
a standard for evaluating
institutions as they exist in
the real world.
That's all.
 
So that's the first thing.
 
You have to have an answer to
this there-never-was-
a-social-contract critique,
and the answer of the modern
social contract theorists is,
"Yes, we know,
but it's still a useful
hypothetical exercise."
The other problem that anyone
rolling out a social contract
theory has to address is that
nobody really buys natural law
arguments in the way that was
often hoped that they would.
Now, it's important to get
clear about this because what we
don't want to do is to buy into
a rather simplistic,
comic strip version of the
history of ideas that sometimes
shows up in textbooks.
 
The comic strip version goes
something like this:
well,
there used to be natural law
theory and that solved the
problem of how we get higher
values for judging existing
institutions,
but then along came the decline
of natural law and secularism,
and we lost belief in natural
law, and so now everything is a
sea of relativism.
 
Once you start down that path
you wind up with Stevenson.
You wind up,
remember, emotivism and all
that?
 
We talked about it in relation
to Mill.
Once you start down the path of
rejecting natural law you're
going to wind up with extreme
relativism and subjectivism.
You're going to wind up with
the idea that everybody's moral
judgment is just as good as
everybody else's.
And the problem with natural
law theory is it's a throwback
to this era when people believed
in natural law.
And so now people don't,
and that's the problem.
And so how can you generate a
natural law theory when most
people don't accept the idea of
natural law?
That's the cartoon strip story.
 
And the cartoon strip story has
one very big problem with it,
which you are in a position to
know about because of what we've
read with respect to Locke.
 
Namely, that there never was
agreement on what natural law
required.
 
I talked to you about the
disagreement between those who
favored the timeless universal
conception of natural law and
those who favored the so-called
voluntarist or workmanship
theory that Locke embraced.
 
But actually that's only the
tip of the iceberg.
You go and read a book like
Richard Tuck's book on medieval
natural law theory and what
you'll discover is that in the
fifteenth,
sixteenth, seventeenth
centuries the disagreements that
they had within the natural law
tradition about politics were
just as extensive as the
disagreements we have to today.
 
That is to say you could find
people defending everything from
what we think of today as the
far left,
to everything that we think of
today as the far right within
the idiom of a natural law
vocabulary.
But there wasn't less
disagreement.
There wasn't less political
disagreement.
There were huge political
disagreements that led to
enormous--to civil wars,
to religious wars in the
sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.
So the notion that appealing to
natural law is some sort of
panacea,
and that the problem is that
the world we've lost is a world
in which there was natural law,
doesn't get us anywhere because
we know that natural law,
whatever its virtues and
deficiencies,
is not something that can solve
political disagreements.
As I said, there was a natural
law theory that was compatible
with every political position
you could imagine,
and many that you couldn't
imagine which existed.
If you want examples of that go
and read Christopher Hill's book
called The World Turned
Upside Down,
which is a book about ideas and
political movements that got
nowhere in the seventeenth
century,
and you'll see that natural law
could be lined up with any
politics you could possibly
imagine.
We don't want to say that the
problem is that natural law used
to constrain and now it doesn't
because people agreed;
we know that they didn't.
 
Nonetheless,
that still leaves the
analytical problem that if there
are going to be any constraints
on what it is that people can
agree to,
that are not simply the result
of what we have found in the
world,
they must come from somewhere.
And if you're going to roll out
a natural law theory that
doesn't depend upon natural law,
you've got to find some other
basis for doing it,
right?
I mean, just to give you one
more example to underscore this,
we saw that the inequalities
among people--
we talked about this some and
we're going to talk about it
more in connection with John
Rawls--
they're a big problem for us
because why should some people
get more than others just
because they're smarter or more
hard-working than others,
right?
If you're a Lockean there's no
problem with that proposition
because if some people are more
able to create wealth than
others it must have been part of
God's plan, right?
But once you secularize
workmanship and chop off the
idea of natural law and God's
plan,
and all that,
then you get into the sorts of
problems we got into when we
were dealing with Marx's theory
of exploitation.
 
Remember when we introduced the
stay-at-home spouse,
and the contributions of Sunday
school teachers or anybody else
to the creation of value we got
this over determined set of
entitlements that didn't lead us
anywhere.
So once you secularize
workmanship it seems to lead
everywhere.
 
If you no longer have the
constraint that Locke had,
well what we see where must be
God's plan because this is how
he created it;
so what are you going to use
instead?
 
That's the question.
 
What are you going to use
instead of natural law?
And the modern social contract
theorists appeal to a nineteenth
century German philosopher
called Immanuel Kant,
eighteenth and nineteenth
century thinker who came up with
an idea that stands in for
natural law,
and that is the idea of--wait
for it;
I told you people don't like to
say in words of one syllable
what can be said in words of
five--
universalizability,
universalizability,
nine-syllable word.
 
And the basic intuition here is
the following:
the basic intuition is,
if you could choose something
from every conceivable
standpoint,
then it has the force of a
moral law.
Anyone know what the
philosophical term for this was
that Kant came up with,
anyone who took a philosophy
course?
 
Student: Categorical
imperative.
Professor Ian Shapiro:
Categorical imperative.
Well, what was the categorical
imperative contrasted with?
Somebody? Anyone know?
 
No reason that you should.
 
The categorical imperative was
contrasted with the hypothetical
imperative.
 
And the idea of a hypothetical
imperative was if/then.
So if you want your society to
thrive don't create big
government.
 
That's a hypothetical
imperative.
Categorical imperative is,
don't create big government
ever under any circumstance.
 
So the idea of a categorical
imperative is that it's not
dependent on an if/then
statement, right?
So that's the notion behind
Kant's ethics;
that we should look for
propositions that we would
affirm regardless of the
consequences.
That's the notion of a
categorical imperative.
Now Rawls goes into this in
some detail of what its
implications are for
contemporary political theory,
and we'll talk about that after
the break.
Nozick just takes it for
granted, and one of the reasons
I'm starting with Nozick is I
don't really want to dig into
the question yet of whether and
to what extent Kant's ideas are
applicable to contemporary
politics.
Nozick says,
"Let's just try them out
and see,"
basically,
so one of his slogans is,
"Kantianism for people,
utilitarianism for
animals,"
right?
 
And the notion here is for
human beings this idea of
respecting principles that can
be affirmed from every point of
view,
that's going to replace natural
law.
 
That's the move that Nozick
makes, and it's the move that
Rawls makes as well.
 
Does anyone happen to know what
the famous categorical
imperative was,
the example that Kant gave of
something that rises to this
level of a categorical
imperative?
 
It isn't just merely
hypothetical.
 
 
Well, the example he gave was,
"Always treat others as
ends in themselves,
not merely as means to your own
ends."
 
The bumper sticker for this is
autonomy, "Respect people's
autonomy."
 
This is our rights piece of the
rights-utility synthesis,
right?
 
And Kant's view was that is a
proposition everybody would
affirm regardless of the
empirical consequences,
regardless of what effects it
has.
You'll always say that,
no matter who you are,
that we should respect the
autonomy of others understood in
this way.
 
Yes, we all have to use one
another to some extent.
He doesn't say,
"Never use people as means
to your own ends";
he says, "Never use people
exclusively as means to your own
end."
So that's his example,
and that's what Nozick takes
over in his conception of
individual liberty which he puts
out there right at the beginning
of Anarchy,
State, and Utopia,
when he says,
"There is no social entity
with a good that undergoes some
sacrifice for its own good.
 
There are only individual
people, different individual
people, with their own
individual lives.
Using one of these people for
the benefit of others,
uses him and benefits the
others.
Nothing more."
 
So there's a strong libertarian
stance identified with this
Kantian notion of respecting the
autonomy of others.
We can't use people for some
greater good because then we're
using them.
 
We're violating their rights,
and this is where Nozick is
headed.
 
And what he does is disarmingly
simple,
and easily dismissed,
and you make a mistake if you
dismiss him because you'll not
see what turns on some of his
claims that turns out to be very
interesting and important.
So what he does is,
he says, "Let's imagine
there was no government."
 
We're not talking about
primitive people.
We're talking about people like
you and me.
Let's imagine there was no
government.
What would happen?
 
What would people do if there
was no government?
 
 
And Nozick is aware that you
could make different assumptions
about that.
 
Like Hobbes makes the
assumption in Leviathan
that people will be so afraid of
one another that they will try
and kill everybody around them.
 
Then you'll get civil war.
 
The fear that others are going
to do something to you will be
so great that unless you impose
an authoritarian state on people
they're going to have a civil
war,
and there's no other
possibility.
And so by making the state of
nature very benevolent Locke
thinks he's going a different
way,
because by making it malign
it's easy for Hobbes to justify
authoritarianism;
the state of nature is so
terrible that anyone would put
with an authoritarian system
rather than the civil war in
which life is "solitary,
poor, nasty,
brutish and short,"
as Hobbes put it in
Leviathan.
So Nozick says,
"Let's not do that.
Let's go with Locke,
and let's make the state of
nature relatively benign because
it'll make our argument more
convincing."
 
It'll make our argument more
convincing because if you make
the state of nature relatively
benign it's harder to justify
the creation of a state.
 
And we want to make it hard for
ourselves to justify the
creation of a state because then
it'll make our argument more
convincing to skeptics,
right?
So we want to make this
intellectual problem as hard for
ourselves as we possibly can.
 
Now there's something of an
intellectual slight-of-hand
going on in this that I'm going
to come back to,
but I'll just flag for right
now.
And the way he sets it up,
he says, "Let's make it
hard to derive the idea of a
state."
So he says, "Imagine a
world in which there's no
government."
 
It's a hard thing for us to do.
 
Just to make this real;
do you know when police were
created?
 
The first police force was
created in Britain before here.
No reason you should,
1830 Prime Minister Peel
created the--the first police
were called Peelers,
named for the Prime Minister.
 
But imagine,
just you think about it.
Think about living in a world
where there were no police.
I mean, it'd be a very,
very different world,
right?
 
Think about the ways in which
just in a day in New Haven,
the number of things that go on
that are somehow affected by the
hovering presence of police.
 
And so Nozick wants you to do
that in a more radical way.
What would happen if there was
no government?
Well, it wouldn't be a very
efficient circumstance.
 
 
Even if we don't think that
everyone would be out chopping
one another to pieces with
machetes it still wouldn't be a
very efficient situation because
everybody would be the enforcer
of natural law themselves.
 
This is the Lockean story,
as you know.
So if I were in here lecturing
to you, I'd have to worry maybe
somebody's grabbing my car and
making off with it.
So I would have to find some
way to protect my car while I
was in here doing this,
and maybe I could do it,
but it's going to be a very
inefficient thing for me to do.
And so how am I going to do
that?
How is life going to go on if
people can't even know that
their property is going to be
protected?
Well, they're going to form
protective associations.
I'm going to say to some
colleague, "I'll tell you
what.
 
You watch my car on Mondays and
Wednesdays while I'm lecturing
and I'll watch your car,"
a sort of block watch kind of
idea, right?
 
People are going to form
associations to protect
themselves and to protect their
property because in the absence
of that,
it's a very inefficient,
highly inefficient system.
 
So you would imagine there
would basically be like block
watch,
but even that would be not
particularly efficient because
the truth is,
not only do I not want to watch
my car on Mondays and
Wednesdays,
I don't really want to watch
somebody else's car on Tuesdays
and Thursdays either,
right?
 
So what would happen is we
would start to have a division
of labor.
 
We would start to have a
situation in which we paid
somebody to watch cars,
and they would be sort of like
little militias.
 
They would be businesses that
sold protection.
And so you could imagine a
group of us joining one
association that promises to
protect cars,
but others would join a
different association that
promised to protect cars.
 
So we'd have the New Haven
business that sells car
protection,
but we'd have the Hamden one,
and we'd have the Orange one,
and there would be these
different businesses selling
protection for people's cars.
But, and this is one of
Nozick's most important
analytical claims with
application to politics,
he says, "The thing about
coercive force--
protection--is that it's a
natural monopoly."
 
 
What do you think he might mean
by that, anyone?
It's bringing an economist
category to think about a
non-economic topic,
but what do you think he might
mean?
 
Anyone want to try this?
 
It might seem puzzling.
 
 
 
Think about a country in which
there are many militias like
Lebanon in the 1980s or Russia
after the collapse of the Soviet
Union where you've got these
organized crime syndicates,
more or less,
or Chicago, for that matter,
during the heyday of organized
crime.
What happens when you have
multiple entities selling
protection?
 
 
 
Yeah, take the microphone.
 
Student: They start fighting
with each other.
Professor Ian Shapiro:
They start fighting with each
other, why?
 
You're dead right,
but why do they fight with each
other?
 
Student: It's like fighting
over territory in a way.
Professor Ian Shapiro:
Territory, what else?
Student: If one member gets in
a fight with a member from a
different group they have to
protect that member and so does
the other group,
so they have no other choice
but to fight each other.
 
Professor Ian Shapiro:
Exactly right.
I mean, you just go and watch a
movie like the Godfather,
or Goodfellas,
or any of those and you know
what the dynamic is.
 
I say to you,
"You pay me protection
money and I'll make sure you're
taken care of,"
but then some bigger thug comes
around the next day and says,
"You might think Shapiro
can protect you,
but what do you think that wimp
on the Yale faculty can do for
you?
 
Forget about it.
 
You're going to pay me,
and what's more you're going to
pay me much more."
 
And so that's going to go on,
and how will it end?
Generally what happens?
 
Yeah?
 
Student:
>
Professor Ian Shapiro:
Exactly.
In civil wars somebody wins,
usually, or else they drag on
but eventually somebody wins,
right?
That's the claim about a
natural monopoly force.
For coercive force to be a
good, it has to be exercised as
a monopoly.
 
For coercive force to be a
good, it has to be exercised as
a monopoly,
and that's one claim Nozick
wants to make,
and the other one,
which is just as important is,
"It is the only natural
monopoly."
 
Coercive force is a natural
monopoly,
where we unpack that to say,
"In order for it be a
good,
it has to be exercised as a
monopoly,
and there's no other natural
monopoly."
 
 
 
This morning when I was coming
in, Glenn Beck was complaining.
How many of you know who Glenn
Beck is?
Yeah.
 
Who's Glenn Beck?
 
Somebody want to tell us,
who's Glenn Beck?
 
 
Anybody? Yeah?
 
Student: He's a conservative
talk show host and just a social
commentator in general.
 
Professor Ian Shapiro:
He's a conservative talk show
host and social commentator who
sees himself as kind of
disciplining the Republican
Party to keep it close to what
he sees as conservative
principles that are defined in a
strongly libertarian way.
 
And so what was his complaint
this morning?
His complaint was that Mike
Huckabee had Michelle Obama on
his show,
or did some event with Michelle
Obama,
agreeing with Michelle Obama
that obesity is a big problem in
America.
And he said,
"How dare Mike Huckabee do
that?
 
Of course obesity is a big
problem in America,
but that doesn't mean it's an
invitation for the government to
get involved in stopping
obesity.
The government should only do
one thing;
protect us from the bad
guys."
In that sense he was--he's
probably never heard of Nozick
and all of Nozick's argument,
but he was embracing this idea
that coercive force is the only
natural monopoly.
So Nozick wants to say,
if we go back into our thought
experiment,
he wants to say,
"Because coercive force is
a natural monopoly somebody's
going to win.
 
They're going to either buy up
the other protective
associations,
or defeat them,
wipe them out,
or marginalize them,
make them irrelevant by being
so much more powerful that
nobody pays attention to them.
 
So in effect you're then going
to have one dominant protective
association, right?
 
 
 
Once you have one dominant
protective association it's
something pretty much like a
government,
 
 
but still there are going to be
some people who don't recognize
it,
and these are the people that
Nozick calls independents.
 
 
 
And Nozick spends a lot of time
discussing these people,
and you might think,
"Why?"
There's this very long and
difficult to understand chapter
on the incorporation of
independents into his system.
And you will find it confusing
to read and you'll think there's
something wrong with you that
you can't follow it.
Actually even though most of
what Nozick writes is extremely
clear, the confusion is
Nozick's, so you shouldn't beat
yourself up too much.
 
And I'm going to unpack it in
more detail on Wednesday what
he's saying and why it matters,
but this is the basic
intuition: he has to worry about
independents for two reasons.
One is just to complete his
account of how a government
would form,
but the other one is normative
because remember that the social
contract argument depends on the
idea of consent.
 
Remember we said the
utilitarian tradition is
maximizing happiness,
the Marxian tradition is about
ending exploitation,
the social contract tradition
is about consent as the basis
for political legitimacy.
So even if the whole story
about force being a natural
monopoly is correct there are
still going to be sort of loony,
principled anarchists out
there, who don't recognize the
legitimacy of the state,
you have to worry about.
Nozick, writing in 1974,
isn't thinking about the sorts
of people we're thinking about
today in this connection,
and so he talks about some
anarchist wandering around who
wants to protect their own
rights,
and it has something of a
contrived quality to it in his
discussion.
 
But think about,
when you read
"Independent,"
think Osama bin Laden or
Mr. Stack who flew his plane
into the IRS building the other
day;
these are Nozick's
independents,
these people.
They say, "We don't
recognize the legitimacy of your
state.
 
We don't recognize your
protective association.
We're not going to accept
it."
These people are a big problem
for Nozick, as I said both as a
sort of empirical theoretical
matter;
he's saying what would happen
with these people,
but then as a normative matter
as well.
So what is his point about
compensation and all of that?
I'm going to dig into that on
Wednesday.
I'm just going to tell you now,
briefly, because we're out of
time, what happens.
 
He's going to basically say,
"These people are going to
be forcibly incorporated into
the social order,
and the theory of compensation
is an account of what makes that
forcible incorporation
legitimate,"
and I'll dig into that on
Wednesday.
 
 
We're out of time now,
so we'll pick up with that
right at the beginning.
 
Cheers.
 
 
 
