| My aim is to uncover the single developmental logic which one must assume underlies, and can rest a textual unity from, the disparate, mutually exclusive "books" Robert Nozick's works now represent. Only when viewed as fragments of a single unified text can one recognize the critical warrant his later works possess. Nozick's early Libertarian treatise, Anarchy, State and Utopia, is a work theoretically grounded in an atomistic epistemology. His later works, have, however, for reasons never fully articulated, abandoned this atomistic orientation and taken an interpretive wholistic turn. It is my belief that Nozick finds himself conceptually constrained to make this move when, in Philosophical Explanations, he first attempts to theorize the identity of the subject. (An identity his early libertarianism had simply and uncritically presupposed.) Nozick at this point finds that the atomistic conception of identity, assuming as it does a "soul pellet", a monad like, perduring and relationless, self identical subject, is pre-critical in the Kantian sense. Thus the basic premise upon which his libertarian doctrine, through its ordered sequence of deductions, was constructed, the atomistic individual, cannot simply be accepted as the constitutive given libertarianism assumed it to be. As this archeological project will attempt to reconstruct, Nozick hopes, through a succession of discursive transitions, that in his extant writings remain unmarked, to respond to the felt inadequacies of the libertarian conception of identity. Resting as it implicitly does on an atomistic epistemology, this attempt to give adequate theoretical expression to the subject eventually necessitates a complete theoretical inversion, leaving Nozick in the interpretive wholistic position his later work articulates. |
