In 1971 John Rawls's "A Theory of Justice" had refounded modern liberal political philosophy by arguing that wealth should be redistributed so as to benefit the poorest members of society. Three years later, his colleague in the same Harvard corridors, Robert Nozick (1938–2002), published "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" (1974), opposing it from start to finish. The two books began the most fruitful debate of contemporary political philosophy.

Nozick's starting point is individual rights — especially the right to oneself and to property justly acquired. For him these rights are so strong that they forbid using persons as a means to others' ends. From this follows a striking conclusion: redistribution through taxation — taking from the rich to give to the poor — is in fact a seizure of people's labour, akin to a kind of forced labour. The state may not take people's earnings, without their consent, for a "fairer" outcome.

Nozick therefore justifies only the "minimal state": a "night-watchman" state that protects citizens against violence, theft, and breach of contract, and goes no further. Any state that does more violates individual rights. He defines justice not, as Rawls does, by the "distribution" of the outcome but by how that distribution was reached — whether acquisition and transfer were just (the "entitlement theory").

Nozick's views drew intense criticism; he himself softened some of them in later years. But the book laid bare, with a sharpness nothing could conceal, the tension between individual liberty and social justice. Rawls and Nozick, as the two poles of modern political philosophy, framed the question of how much the state should intervene — a debate that continues today.