Nozick and the invisible hand of racial injustice

Contemporary western democracies like the United States and the United Kingdom bear the imprint of historical racial injustice – slavery, segregation, discrimination, and mistreatment and neglect by public authorities. Libertarian political theory might appear well placed to contribute to debates about attaining racial justice, given its emphasis on individual rights and strict limits on state action, but Charles Mills claimed libertarians largely ignored questions of race and often opposed measures aimed at achieving racial justice. This article reexamines Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia in the light of Mills’ claims. Nozick endorses libertarian beliefs about the ability of free markets to eliminate injustice, the role of the state in creating injustice, and the danger of political projects that propose to engineer a just society, but his work also shows that these beliefs do not exhaust questions of race and racial justice. Analysis of Nozick’s work illuminates the potential for invisible-hand processes to reproduce as well as eliminate injustice, the impossibility of establishing a just starting point for the series of voluntary exchanges that have led to real world holdings of income and wealth, and the fact that injustice concerns more than harms inflicted on specific persons by identifiable individuals. A form of universal basic income may therefore be justified to rectify historical injustices while minimising the risk of future political exploitation.