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.

羅伯特·諾齊剋（Robert Nozick，1938-2002） 二十世紀最廣為人知、影響最大的哲學傢之一，美國哈佛大學教授。因1974年齣版第一本著作《無政府，國傢和烏托邦》（Anarchy, state, and utopia）一舉成名。該書獲得美國國傢圖書奬，並被評為二戰後最有影響力的一百本書之一。

另著有《哲學解釋》（Philosophical Explanations，1981）、《被省察的人生：哲學沉思》（The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations，1989）、《個人選擇的規範理論》（The Normative Theory of Individual Choice，1990）、《理性的本質》（The Nature of Rationality，1993）、《蘇格拉底的睏惑》（Socratic Puzzles，1997）、《恒常：客觀世界的基本結構》（Invariances: the Structure of Objective World，2001）等，涉及哲學、政治學、倫理學等多個領域。