If you’re looking for a non-consequentialist, rights-based defense of libertarianism, the locus classicus is Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia. It’s a big, sprawling and dense book, so perhaps you’d be better served reading a summary on the internet (like this IEP article), although if you’re up for tackling the book, I think you’d find it rewarding. To get a quick sense of the way Nozick argues, here’s a famous thought experiment from the book.
A good, up-to-date, consequentialist argument is Allan Meltzer’s Why Capitalism?. It’s short, engaging and available for the Kindle.
Neither of these books give much time to arguments for socialism, so you’ll have to look elsewhere for that. G. A. Cohen’s Why Not Socialism? is a good counterpoint to Nozick, and Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal complements Meltzer. Krugman has a reputation for prioritizing partisanship over dispassionate analysis, but this book is not nearly as polemical as many of his NYT columns.
To get a quick sense of the way Nozick argues, here’s a famous thought experiment from the book.
Curious. My first thought was “Since the author seems to be abusing emotional connotations to make his point, what is the most subversive position about this thought experiment that I can still defend? ” And my answer is, it is possible to frame the very first situation in terms of non-slavery, simply because the master is so far above the slave that it’s borderline meaningless to attribute him agency. You might as well call humans slaves of chance.
If you’re looking for a non-consequentialist, rights-based defense of libertarianism, the locus classicus is Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia. It’s a big, sprawling and dense book, so perhaps you’d be better served reading a summary on the internet (like this IEP article), although if you’re up for tackling the book, I think you’d find it rewarding. To get a quick sense of the way Nozick argues, here’s a famous thought experiment from the book.
A good, up-to-date, consequentialist argument is Allan Meltzer’s Why Capitalism?. It’s short, engaging and available for the Kindle.
Neither of these books give much time to arguments for socialism, so you’ll have to look elsewhere for that. G. A. Cohen’s Why Not Socialism? is a good counterpoint to Nozick, and Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal complements Meltzer. Krugman has a reputation for prioritizing partisanship over dispassionate analysis, but this book is not nearly as polemical as many of his NYT columns.
Curious. My first thought was “Since the author seems to be abusing emotional connotations to make his point, what is the most subversive position about this thought experiment that I can still defend? ” And my answer is, it is possible to frame the very first situation in terms of non-slavery, simply because the master is so far above the slave that it’s borderline meaningless to attribute him agency. You might as well call humans slaves of chance.