Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a powerful, philosophical challenge to the most widely held political and social positions of our age -- liberal, socialist and conservative. "Individuals have rights," Nozick writes in his opening sentence, "and there are things no person or group may do to them without violating their rights." The work that follows is a sophisticated and passionate defence of the rights of the individual as opposed to the state. The author argues that the state is justified only when it is severely limited to the narrow function of protection against force, theft and fraud and to the enforcement of contracts. Any more extensive activities by the state, he demonstrates, will inevitably violate individual rights. Among the many achievements of the work are an important new theory of distributive justice, a model of utopia, and an integration of ethics, legal philosophy and economic theory into a profound position in political philosophy which will be discussed for years to come.

罗伯特·诺齐克（Robert Nozick，1938-2002） 二十世纪最广为人知、影响最大的哲学家之一，美国哈佛大学教授。因1974年出版第一本著作《无政府，国家和乌托邦》（Anarchy, state, and utopia）一举成名。该书获得美国国家图书奖，并被评为二战后最有影响力的一百本书之一。

另著有《哲学解释》（Philosophical Explanations，1981）、《被省察的人生：哲学沉思》（The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations，1989）、《个人选择的规范理论》（The Normative Theory of Individual Choice，1990）、《理性的本质》（The Nature of Rationality，1993）、《苏格拉底的困惑》（Socratic Puzzles，1997）、《恒常：客观世界的基本结构》（Invariances: the Structure of Objective World，2001）等，涉及哲学、政治学、伦理学等多个领域。