> The Liberty Scam
> Why even Robert Nozick, the philosophical father of libertarianism, gave
> up on the movement he inspired.
> By Stephen Metcalf
>
> http://www.slate.com/id/2297019/pagenum/all/#p2
This essay seems to me to be full of errors.
E.g., Keynes' verdict on "The Road to Serfdom" was not at all the one quoted at the start of the essay, but rather that, "Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement." There's no reason at all, it seems to me, beyond the superficial verbal parallels, to link up Mrs Thatcher's "no such thing as society" remark with anything to do with Nozick (Hayek was her guru, not Nozick, and if we want an additional source, we'll find it in the policy pamphlets that Angus Maude was producing in the bowels of the Conservative Party in earlier decades, rather than in anything coming out of Harvard). The account of Anarchy, State and Utopia the writer offers is quite misleading: it's far more a book about *rights* and *property* than it is one about liberty, though you'd never guess that from the presentation here. The claims made about Nozick's influence are dramatically implausible. Some of the pop sociology of post-war American academia is quite fun, if you like that kind of thing. But the essay as a whole strikes me as full of Wrongness, and best treated with extreme caution.
Chris