Over at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Eric Mack has an excellent (and long overdue) new entry on Robert Nozick’s political philosophy.

The essay covers Nozick’s theory of rights as side-constraints, his defense of the minimal state against the individualist anarchist, the Entitlement Theory of justice, and Nozick’s argument that the minimal state constitutes a kind of “framework for utopia.”

Eric Mack knows Nozick, and the neo-Lockean natural rights libertarianism Nozick developed, better than just about anybody else alive today. And he’s produced here a terrific resource for anybody learning to get a relatively brief overview of Nozick’s political philosophy. But even those of you who are fairly familiar with Nozick’s thought will find material in this essay to chew on. Here’s one passage on Nozick’s view of the minimal state that struck me as particularly interesting:

We have already noted that Nozick’s minimal state differs from common depictions of the minimal state because it does not impose taxation to finance its services. In many other ways as well, it is more like a business enterprise than a state. There are no rulers, no legislative body, no political elections, no contending parties and citizens. There is no sovereignty and no state territory. There are, instead, executives, a board of directors, shareholders, clients, and the assets of the enterprise. But the fly in the enterprise ointment is the absence of competitive market constraints on the price or the quality of the services offered by this monopoly. (If there is enough market competition to keep prices of protective services down and their quality up, there will be too much competition for this enterprise to count as a state.) It appears that the only other way to keep this monopoly in check would be through some sort of political-constitutional constraints. However, Nozick makes no mention of these. Of course, a protective association in pursuit of customers might commit itself to constitution-like constraints on its decisions and conduct as a way of reassuring potential clients.

Way too much good stuff in here to excerpt. Go read the whole thing yourself.