Anarchy, State, and Utopia

What Hacker News says

1. skissaneApr 2023
   My own personal introduction to philosophy came from Edwards and Pap's now rather dated 1965 textbook A Modern Introduction to Philosophy–my father did an introduction to philosophy course at university in the late 1960s, and that was the main textbook they used, and teenage me was rather excited to discover it on his bookshelf. I myself did 1st year philosophy at university in 2000, but only one unit (logic) actually had a textbook, the others I did (epistemology, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, political philosophy) just used photocopied books of readings (I remember we had readings from Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, Hume, Berkeley, Kant–and some more recent authors whose names escape me now). I found a site with a whole set of free university-level philosophy textbooks – https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/subjects/philosophy – although I can't vouch for them since I haven't read any of them myself

   Some philosophers whose works I've read and enjoyed: Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia; Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons; Peter Singer's Practical Ethics; Graham Priest's In Contradiction; Graham Oppy's Arguing about Gods; Edward Feser's Five Proofs of the Existence of God – that's a rather eclectic and idiosyncratic list, including books by authors which radically disagree with each other (e.g. Feser's book tries to prove God exists, Oppy's book argues all known proofs of God's existence fail) - but you definitely won't find any of that "critical theory" cant in any of them

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2. t0bia_sDec 2022
   Anarchy, State, and Utopia - Robert Nozick

   When you question competence of state, usefulness of bureaucracy, purpose of police, laws and basically dependence society on state.

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3. t0bia_sDec 2022
   Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) - Robert Nozick

   When you question competence of state, usefulness of bureaucracy, purpose of police, laws and basically dependence society on state.

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4. BlackstratFeb 2022
   When I see comments such as a book needing a "trigger warning", or concerns with the race or gender of the author, I can only shake my head with sadness. Those who believe such things have been poorly served by their education. Those who recommend books such as Das Kapital are either trolling the thread or historically ignorant of the death and destruction caused by Marxism. Try something like Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Nozick and quit being part of the granfalloon.
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5. trutannusMay 2021
   Good assessment. I'd disagree that it being an edge-case isn't illustrative also, but that's a moot point. Appreciate you not trying to hammer me into agreement!

   If you, or anyone else for that matter, is ever interested in at least understanding this sort of position I highly recommend Robert Nozick's work in response to John Rawls A Theory of Justice entitled Anarchy State and Utopia.

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6. mumblemumbleJan 2021
   The situation reminds me a bit of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. It's a great bit of political philosophy where he argues pretty convincingly that an anarchist society cannot exist for any appreciable length of time. Because the arrangement is fundamentally unstable, and will inevitably be replaced by certain minimal set of social mechanisms in response to some basic social forces. Those mechanisms are, collectively, things that we recognize as basic features of government, such as police and taxation.

   Bitcoin strikes me as an experiment to see if the same kind of thing happens in economics. It would seem that it does.

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