Upcoming Seminars

Host: Marcus Pivato

Abstract. This paper offers the very first formal model of Robert Nozick’s model of possible worlds and his vision of a utopian society, as outlined in Part III of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Nozick envisioned utopia as a meta-utopia – a collection of self-organized, voluntary sub-communities – arguing that such an institutional framework is equivalent to the minimal state justified in earlier parts of his book. Nozick’s strategy was to define utopia (the best of all possible worlds) in terms of stability achieved in his possible worlds model, where individuals can create and migrate to any world they imagine. However, Nozick left many key components of this model informal and underdeveloped. This paper fills these gaps by providing a rigorous formal model of Nozick’s possible worlds. We introduce a new stability concept, Nozick stability. We demonstrate that Nozick stability imposes stricter requirements than other established solution concepts such as core and Nash stability, making the existence of a stable framework significantly more difficult to achieve. We then identify sufficient conditions for the existence of a Nozick-stable framework. However, these conditions are highly restrictive and unlikely to hold in reality. Furthermore, contrary to Nozick’s conjecture, individuals may receive far less than their marginal contribution within Nozick-stable frameworks, and, in this sense, Nozick-stable frameworks may institutionalize and perpetuate systemic exploitation. These findings cast doubt on whether Nozick’s minimal state can genuinely function as an inspiring utopian ideal, as he claims.

(Joint work with Susumu Cato)