Metcalf, Stephen. "The Liberty Scam: Why Even Robert Nozick Gave Up On the Movement He Inspired." SLATE June 20, 2011.

The Times Literary Supplement ranks Anarchy, published in 1974, as one of the "100 Most Influential Books Since the War," and that, I think, is underselling it. To this day, left intellectuals remember where they were when they first heard Nozick's arguments against not just socialism but wealth redistribution of any kind. "It is no exaggeration to say," the Telegraph wrote, after Nozick died in 2002, "that Nozick, more than anyone else, embodied the new libertarian zeitgeist which, after generations of statist welfarism from Roosevelt's New Deal to Kennedy, Johnson and Carter, ushered in the era of Reagan and Bush, pere et fils." Prior to Anarchy, "liberty" was a virtual synonym for rolling back labor unions and progressive taxation, a fig leaf for the class interests of the Du Ponts and the B.F. Goodriches. After Anarchy, "liberty" was a concept as worthy of academic dignity as the categorical imperative.

As a moral philosopher, Nozick was free to stretch liberty further than even an Austrian economist. That is, he was able to separate out a normative claim (that liberty is the fundamental value of values, and should be maximized) from an empirical claim (that the most efficient method for allocating goods and services is a market economy). Free to pursue liberty as a matter of pure principle, Nozick let nothing stand in his way. Should we tax the rich to feed the poor? Absolutely not, as "taxation of earnings is on par with forced labor." (Or more precisely: "Taking the earnings of n hours of labor is like taking n hours from the person.") Well, isn't at least some redistribution necessary on the basis of need? "Need a gardener allocate his services to those lawns which need him most?"

To the entire left, Nozick, in effect, said: Your social justice comes at an unacceptable cost, namely, to my personal liberty. Most distressingly, to this end Nozick enlisted the humanist's most cherished belief: the inviolability of each human being as an end unto himself—what Nozick, drawing on Immanuel Kant, calls "the separateness of persons." For Nozick, the principle of the separateness of persons is close to sacred. It affirms, as he writes, "the underlying Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not merely means; they may not be sacrificed or used for the achieving of other ends without their consent. Individuals are inviolable." . . . .

http://www.slate.com/id/2297019/pagenum/all/

See, too, the following responses:

• "Nozick, Libertarianism, and Thought Experiments" by Julian Sanchez (here: http://www.juliansanchez.com/2011/06/21/nozick-libertarianism-and-thought-experiments/) and
• "Misunderstanding Nozick, Again" by David Boaz (here: http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/misunderstanding-nozick-again/).

Schaefer, David Lewis. "Robert Nozick and the Coast of Utopia." NEW YORK SUN April 30, 2008.

In 1971, a previously obscure Harvard philosophy professor, John Rawls, published a book that ultimately brought him acclaim as “America’s greatest political philosopher.” In the book, A Theory of Justice, Rawls set forth an account of justice in the form of two principles, ordaining respectively that people’s “equal basic liberties” — such rights as freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the right to vote — should be maximized, and that inequalities in social and economic goods other than liberty are acceptable only if they promote the welfare of the “least advantaged” members of society. (He termed the latter the “difference principle.”) Three years after the appearance of Theory, a departmental colleague of Rawls, Robert Nozick, published a libertarian response, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which argued that nothing more than a “minimal state” devoted to protecting people against crimes like assault, robbery, and fraud could be morally justified. Nozick’s book was far more concise than Rawls’s Theory, and Anarchy, State, and Utopia did not go unnoticed: It won the 1975 National Book Award and was later listed by the Times Literary Supplement as one of the 100 most influential books of the 20th century. Anarchy remains a staple of the syllabus in courses on political theory, where it is usually juxtaposed with selections from Rawls to suggest that Rawls’s welfare-state liberalism and Nozick’s libertarianism represent the full spectrum of possibilities for contemporary liberal democracies. Nonetheless, Nozick’s reputation and influence in the academy — to say nothing of his name recognition in the broader world of law and politics — have never rivaled those of his colleague. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nysun.com/sports/reconsiderations-robert-nozick-and-coast-utopia.