So political philosophy should become more historical, or, rather, it should recognise explicitly that it has always had an important historical dimension that, to its cost, it has tried its best to ignore. "All individuals obviously have rights; let's see what follows from that" is not a good starting point for philosophical reflection. However, some historically more specific questions are good starting points. These include the following: "Is it possible to organise a 'complex modern' society without the use of the concept of a 'right,' and if it is impossible, why is it impossible?" or "What is it about our specific form of society that makes 'individual rights' so convenient and plausible? What are the advantages (and disadvantages) of this?" or "If we find it hard to imagine a society without subjective rights, or hard to imagine that we could live a full and rich life in such a society, why is that the case? What exactly puts us off?" This is not reducing philosophy to history, but replacing a rather useless set of questions with a potentially more interesting and fruitful set. It is not that [Robert] Nozick got something wrong by specifying the wrong set of rights or making mistakes of argumentation, but that he does not ask the right questions, and by presenting "rights" as the self-evident basis for thinking about politics, he actively distracts people from asking other, highly relevant questions. It is not that there is some other foundation for all thinking or even all "normative" thinking about human society, namely, some foundation that does not appeal to "subjective rights." Rather, why assume that one can begin to think at all systematically and to any effect without being critical about the assumption that politics needs foundations of this kind? Being appropriately critical about this requires that one be historically informed.
(Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics [Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008], 69-70 [italics in original])
Note from KBJ: Geuss's questions are good ones, but so are Nozick's. There is a disposition among philosophers to bracket off certain questions as "uninteresting" or "unfruitful." What that means, invariably, is that the philosopher in question finds them uninteresting or unfruitful. I find Nozick's question—namely, what sort of state, if any, is compatible with individual rights?—interesting and fruitful, as do many other philosophers. Geuss seems upset that this is so.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 