Category: Thought

To each as they choose, from each as they are chosen.

Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Ch. 7: Distributive Justice, Section I, Patterning, p. 160.

A slogan to counter the socialist principle of distributive justice, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” The full, non-slogan version of Nozick’s “entitlement theory” of justice, expressed roughly in this form, appeared a few sentences before:

From each according to what he chooses to do, to each according to what he makes for himself (perhaps with the contracted aid of others) and what others choose to do for him and choose to give him of what they’ve been given previously (under this maxim) and haven’t yet expended or transferred.

“This,” Nozick admitted, “has its defects as a slogan.” Which is why he provided the shorter version.

It’s not the best sign for your society when comedians are the political commentators. In a much better world, I should be nowhere near any of these topics. However, when the kind of ruling elite has become so corrupt and so embarrassing and so pathetic that even a regular comedian can just absolutely destroy them and see through all of their nonsense, I do think that role becomes more necessary and more important.

Dave Smith, comedian, in conversation with Glenn Greenwald during his first appearance on Greenwald’s System Update (Rumble).

Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Taylor, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Merton, Yogi Berra, Allen Ginsberg, Harry Wolfson, Thoreau, Casey Stengel, The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Picasso, Moses, Einstein, Hugh Hefner, Socrates, Henry Ford, Lenny Bruce, Baba Ram Dass, Gandhi, Sir Edmund Hillary, Raymond Lubitz, Buddha, Frank Sinatra, Columbus, Freud, Norman Mailer, Ayn Rand, Baron Rothschild, Ted Williams, Thomas Edison, H.L. Mencken, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Ellison, Bobby Fischer, Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, you, and your parents. Is there really one kind of life which is best for each of these people?

Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Ch. 10 : A Framework for Utopia; The Framework, p. 310.

When asked to condemn terrorism, another liberal leader in the Duma, Ivan Petrunkevich, famously replied: “Condemn terror? That would be the moral death of the party!”

Not just lawyers, teachers, doctors, and engineers, but even industrialists and bank directors raised money for the terrorists. Doing so signaled advanced opinion and good manners. A quote attributed to Lenin — “When we are ready to kill the capitalists, they will sell us the rope” — would have been more accurately rendered as: “They will buy us the rope and hire us to use it on them.” True to their word, when the Bolsheviks gained control, their organ of terror, the Cheka, “liquidated” members of all opposing parties, beginning with the Kadets. Why didn’t the liberals and businessmen see it coming?

That question has bothered many students of revolutionary movements. Revolutions never succeed without the support of wealthy, liberal, educated society. Yet revolutionaries seldom conceal that their success entails the seizure of all wealth, the suppression of dissenting opinion, and the murder of class enemies.

Gary Saul Morson, “Suicide of the Liberals,” First Things (October 2020).

Whilst we were offering up vows at the shrine of Liberty, and sacrificing hecatombs upon her altars; whilst we swore irreconcilable hostility to her enemies, and hurled defiance in their faces; whilst we adjured the God of Hosts to witness our resolution to live free or die, and imprecated curses on their heads who refused to unite with us in establishing the empire of freedom; we were imposing upon our fellow men, who differ in complexion from us, a slavery, ten thousand times more cruel than the utmost extremity of those grievances and oppressions, of which we complained. Such are the inconsistencies of human nature; such the blindness of those who pluck not the beam out of their own eyes, whilst they can espy a moat, in the eyes of their brother: such that partial system of morality which confines rights and injuries, to particular complexions; such the effect of that selflove which justifies, or condemns, not according to principle, but to the agent.

St. George Tucker, A Dissertation on Slavery: With a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of it, in the State of Virginia (1796).

When asked to condemn terrorism, another liberal leader in the Duma, Ivan Petrunkevich, famously replied: “Condemn terror? That would be the moral death of the party!”

Not just lawyers, teachers, doctors, and engineers, but even industrialists and bank directors raised money for the terrorists. Doing so signaled advanced opinion and good manners. A quote attributed to Lenin — “When we are ready to kill the capitalists, they will sell us the rope” — would have been more accurately rendered as: “They will buy us the rope and hire us to use it on them.” True to their word, when the Bolsheviks gained control, their organ of terror, the Cheka, “liquidated” members of all opposing parties, beginning with the Kadets. Why didn’t the liberals and businessmen see it coming?

That question has bothered many students of revolutionary movements. Revolutions never succeed without the support of wealthy, liberal, educated society. Yet revolutionaries seldom conceal that their success entails the seizure of all wealth, the suppression of dissenting opinion, and the murder of class enemies.

Gary Saul Morson, “Suicide of the Liberals,” First Things (October 2020).

Not the equality of men, but the equality of their claims to make the best of themselves within the limits mutually produced, has all along been my principle. . . .
The equality alleged [in Social Statics] is not among men themselves, but among their claims to equally-limited spheres for the exercise of their faculties: an utterly different proposition.

Herbert Spencer, in a letter to W. H. Hudson, a former assistant, rejecting his consent to Hudson dedicating his book on Jean-Jacques Rousseau to him (January 7, 1903). The book went on to be published as Rousseau and Naturalism in Life and Thought (1903), dedicated to Dr. Frederick James Furnivall. Spencer went on to say, in that letter, that the “equality” he had alleged in his first book, Social Statics (1851), “is not among men themselves, but among their claims to equally-limited spheres for the exercise of their faculties: an utterly different proposition. [T. H.] Huxley confused the two and spread the confusion, and I am anxious that it should not be further spread.”

Civil rights, as we may remember, are reducible to three primary heads; the right of personal security; the right of personal liberty; and the right of private property. In a state of slavery, the two last are wholly abolished, the person of the slave being at the absolute disposal of his master; and property, what he is incapable, in that state, either of acquiring, or holding, in his own use. Hence, it will appear how perfectly irreconcilable a state of slavery is to the principles of a democracy, which form the basis and foundation of our government.

St. George Tucker, A Dissertation on Slavery: With a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of it, in the State of Virginia (1796).

Slavery is in itself an arrogant denial of human rights, and by no human reason can the power to establish such a wrong be placed among the attributes of any just sovereignty.

Senator Charles Sumner, in his “The Crime Against Kansas” speech (May 19-20, 1856).

The first steps of the slaveholder to justify by argument the peculiar institutions is to deny the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence. He denies that all men are created equal. He denies that he has inalienable rights.

John Quincy Adams, “Letter to the 12th Congressional District” (June 29, 1839).