In this paper I want to identify a number of seriously flawed presuppositions that underlie Robert Nozick's interesting discussion in Anarchy, State and Utopia of whether law and the state could be succesfully disjoined. 1 Concentrating upon these mistaken presuppositions is important not simply because it illustrates that there are some serious problems with Nozick's analysis, but also because it sharply raises difficult issues that must be confronted by any coherent account of the nature of political authority.
In Part I of Anarchy, State and Utopia Nozick argues that governmental institutions performing certain minimal functions would inevitably emerge out of the state of nature as conceived by Locke, and that they would do so through the operation of an 'invisible hand' process which involved no morally impermissible behavior on anyone's part. In order to grasp what is at stake here one must focus upon an important way in which the concepts of coercion, moral justification, and political authority are inter-related. Though philosophers disagree in their accounts of the nature of coercion there are two unanimously agreed upon points about it. First, other things equal, any given coercive act transgresses moral rules and as such requires a moral justification; second, an essential feature of the state is that individuals acting in its name regularly and systematically coerce other individuals in a muttitude of ways. These two points yield the philosophical problem of political authority; namely, how if at all, can one morally justify the existence of an institution, the state, whose constitutive rules provide for the regular and systematic coercion of some individuals, namely subjects, by other individuals, namely, state officials?
Nozick answers this question by first hypothesizing an appropriately described hypothetical initial situation of freedom and equality among individuals, the Lockean state of nature. He then suggests that the individuals in Locke's state of nature would attempt to deal with its inconveniences by turning to 'protective associations' owned and operated by private entre-