By David Gordon, Mises Wire | October 23, 2026
Michael Luntley, a professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick, is best known for his work in the philosophy of language, and he has written about Michael Dummett and Wittgenstein; but he is interested in political philosophy as well, and in this early book he defends an unusual variety of socialism. He makes some philosophically interesting moves, and in what follows, I’ll discuss some of these but will concentrate on his criticism of libertarianism.
His target is Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State. and Utopia (Harvard, 1974). He challenges what I would have thought an obviously true statement, the famous opening sentence of the book: “Individuals have rights, and there are things that no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights.)” The problem Luntley has with it is that it starts with the individual, not from society:
It seems plausible to think of Nozick’s entitlement theory of justice as the default option unless some compelling argument can be provided to sustain something stronger. The reason why this is plausible is connected with the predominance of liberalism in our political culture. As noted on many occasions, we are too often tempted to start with the individual who stands alone and for whom we must construct arguments to compel into altruistic concern for others. Given that base, we need an argument why others should be treated as equals worthy of equal concern with ourselves and our immediate family. The starting point is unambiguously endorsed in the opening sentence of Nozick’s book[which Luntley then quotes]. . .Of course, the whole point of my argument so far has been against this starting point.
Luntley’s argument is that the proper starting point for ethics is “The Good Principle: there is more to the achievement of the good life than the satisfaction of individuals’ actual preferences.”. In his view, this principle requires beginning with society rather than with “atomistic” individuals. Morality is relative to tradition and history, a fact which does not make it subjective. To the contrary, this relativity is essential to the objectivity of morality, which must be distinguished from the claim that morality has an “absolute description”, which he rejects: “A description d is absolute if an only if a creature c of any biological kind whatsoever could, without amending its biological nature, come to be suitably placed to assess the truth or falsity of d.”
As a criticism of Nozick, all of this is radically misplaced. Nozick’s opening sentence does not say anything at all about atomistic individuals who need arguments to compel them into altruistic concern for others. The sentence just says that individuals have rights. They can be as loosely or tightly organized into social bonds as you please, as egoistic or altruistic as you wish; they still have rights. Why are these rights dependent on a conception of the good? In Nozick’s view, and that of other libertarians like Murray Rothbard as well, they constrain what can be done in pursuit of the good and need not vary with conceptions of the good, nor are these rights relative to particular societies, though they may be recognized to a greater or lesser extent, and their application must take note of particular circumstances. So far as egoism and altruism are concerned, Luntley would have been well advised to consult Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations (Harvard, 1981), in my opinion his greatest book. There he would have found that Nozick allows for what he calls ethical “push” and “pull,” the latter corresponding to the demands that the value of others make on us.
Given what I have said so far, you would expect Luntley to be more favorable to Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (Harvard, 1971) that to Anarchy, State, and Utopia, but it turns out that he is not. Rawls’s theory is also too individualistic for his tastes, and Nozick’s “historical entitlement” view is much to be preferred to Rawls’s account:
Concern for others is different from concern for self, that is why there is a problem of justifying anything beyond an entitlement theory once we accept the liberal starting point. That is why I said it is plausible to take Nozick’s theory as the default option if no argument away from it can be sustained. Rawls has not offered such an argument.
Luntley does not reject the market altogether, and he is well aware of the dangers and inefficiencies of a centrally planned economy. But some goods are too important to be left to the market to distribute:
Here and now, the choice is between a version of liberalism and something that offers a theoretical alternative in our analysis of the ills of contemporary society. I choose the latter option. . .Choosing the former option we lose the normativity of the socialist position which envisages some end state of how things ought to be rather than as they actually are. On the former option what is desirable collapses into a function of what is desired. We then lose the distinctive idea of their being such a thing as the good life altogether. We lose the normative edge that comes from admitting the social dimension to the good life, the idea that socialism requires a good society and not just good individuals. That is the fundamental reason why socialism must reject the liberal model.
Luntley wrongly assumes that the free market denies the existence of the good beyond the preferences of individuals, but it does nothing of the sort. The free market does leave the pursuit of the good up to individuals and denies that they can be coerced into accepting some notion of the “good principle.” The market need not lead to what Luntley calls “the fragmentation of our reference groups and the dissolution of the normativity of the good.” It leaves people who value tradition and accept an objective theory of the good entirely at liberty to act in accordance with these views. The market is a process, not an agency that pressures people to worship money. Oscar Wilde said that a cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Luntley confuses capitalists with Wilde’s cynic.
David Gordon is Senior Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He was educated at UCLA, where he earned his PhD in history. He is the author of Resurrecting Economics, An Introduction to Economic Reasoning, An Austro-Libertarian View (three volumes), and Resurrecting Marx. He is also editor of Secession, State, and Liberty and coeditor of H.B. Acton’s Morals of Markets and Other Essays.
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