Published three years after Rawl’s A Theory of Justice, Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia is another influential work of analytical political philosophy. As a critic of Rawl’s work, he proposes a limited role for government, focusing on protections against theft, fraud and preventing attacks on individual rights

Nozick’s approach to humanity is that they are ‘ends in themselves’, and with natural rights, including self-ownership, and defends libertarianism. He also devised a thought experiment called the ‘experience machine’, proposing that if given the choice to have only pleasurable experiences through artificial means, people would reject the opportunity, challenging the classic utilitarian view that pleasure is the main driving force in ethical judgements.