Robert Nozick

author Anarchy State And Utopia ISBN:0465097200

MatthewYglesias says Now I'm not sure whether anyone out there really believes in Nozickianism at the end of the day (Nozick repudiated it in favor of a utilitarian defense of a milder form of Libertarian-ism - think Milton Friedman - before he died) but as witnessed by Jonah Goldberg it's certainly an influence on a certain amount of rightwing commentary.

Roderick T Long wrote In 1987, however, Nozick announced that he now found his earlier political writings "seriously inadequate"; in his new view, individual rights were merely one value among others and could legitimately be "overridden or diminished in trade-offs" against such other values as the "symbolic" significance of "official concern with issues or problems, as a way of marking their importance or urgency" - a position that disturbingly approaches an endorsement of "expressive violence." Nozick was widely perceived as having repudiated libertarianism, though he has denied doing so. In any case, Nozick appears to have returned, toward the end of his life, to a position closer to that of ASU; in his last book, Invariances, he identified Voluntary Cooperation (Voluntary Association) as the "core principle" of ethics, maintaining that the duty not to interfere with another person's "domain of choice" is "(a)ll that any society should (coercively) demand"; higher levels of ethics, involving positive benevolence, represent instead a "personal ideal" that should be left to "a person's own individual choice and development."