episode-header-image

Apr 2021

45m 58s

Nozick on Utopia

TALKING POLITICS

About this episode

Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) was designed as a rebuttal to Rawls but it was so much more than that. It offered a defence of the minimal state that appealed to the writers of The Sopranos and a vision of utopia that appealed to the founders of Silicon Valley. David explores what Nozick wanted to achieve and identifies the surprising radicalism behind his political minimalism.

Recommended version to buy

Going Deeper:

Robert Nozick, The Examined Life (1989)

Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick: Property, Justice and the Minimal State (1991)

Stephen Metcalf, ‘The Liberty Scam’, Slate (2011)

[Video] Shelly Kagan, 'Hedonism and Nozick's Experience Machine' (from Open Yale Courses)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Up next

History of Ideas Q and A

A special episode in which David answers some of the audience's questions about the second series of History of Ideas. From how he chooses which writers and works to talk about, to whether Boris Johnson is the ultimate Benthamite and whether the idea of a pleasure machine isn't - ... Show More

Shklar on Hypocrisy

Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices (1984) made the case that the worst of all the vices is cruelty. But that meant we needed to be more tolerant of some other common human failings, including snobbery, betrayal and hypocrisy. David explores what she had to say about some of the other ... Show More

Rawls on Justice

John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) changed the face of modern political philosophy by reinventing the question of what constitutes fairness. From ‘the veil of ignorance’ to ‘reflective equilibrium’ it introduced new ways of thinking about the problem of justice along with ne ... Show More

Recommended Episodes

History of Ideas: Hobbes on the State

Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) reimagined how we could do politics. It redefined many of the ideas that continue to shape modern politics: representation, sovereignty, the state. But in Leviathan these ideas have a strange and puzzling power. David explores what Hobbes was tryi ... Show More

The Nudge Revolution

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s bestseller ‘Nudge’ was released on 8th April, 2008, catapulting a new method of behavioural economics into the public psyche - and the hands of policymakers, including David Cameron and Barack Obama. The book challenged the notion of humans as r ... Show More

What Communes and Other Radical Experiments in Living Together Reveal

“Today’s future-positive writers critique our economies while largely seeming to ignore that anything might be amiss in our private lives,” writes Kristen Ghodsee. Even our most ambitious visions of utopia tend to focus on outcomes that can be achieved through public policy — thi ... Show More

67 TEASER | What is Liberalism? III. John Rawls and Political Liberalism

In this episode we finally get down and dirty with the big dog of Anglophone political philosophy, John Rawls. We discuss his 1993 book Political Liberalism, which expands on his earlier theory of justice to develop an account of the pluralistic tolerance at the heart of a libera ... Show More

Crack-Up Capitalism w/ Quinn Slobodian

Featuring Quinn Slobodian on Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. Radical libertarians, including anarcho-capitalists like Murray Rothbard, envision a world of micro-polities governed by private property and contract. In fact, we alread ... Show More

History of Ideas S2 E1 : Rousseau on Inequality

This is episode 1 of the new HISTORY OF IDEAS series from Talking Politics. To hear the remaining 11 episodes, please subscribe to History of Ideas!Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (also known as the Second Discourse) tells the story of all human history to answer ... Show More

Michael and Us: My Orwell Left or Right

George Orwell's popularity is at a new high in the post-Trump era, and he's been claimed by both the left and right. We discuss NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1984), Michael Radford's feature-film adaptation of Orwell's most famous novel, and try to rescue a self-described socialist from ... Show More

Ep. - 240 - TIGER KING BEHIND THE SCENES WITH AUTHOR AND PODCAST HOST ROBERT MOOR JERSEY SHORE REVIEW

Robert Moor is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, On Trails, and he spent four years reporting a podcast miniseries about the life of Joe Exotic, which is available now from Wondery, called Joe Exotic: Tiger King.” The Netflix docu-series Tiger King delves into th ... Show More

Listen to millions of songs and podcasts on Anghami