Far more impressive in professional circles is the evidence in the acknowledgments and on the dust-jacket that W. The National Book Award of 1975 in Religion and Philosophy has completed the popular certification of Nozick's book as an enduring contribution to American political philosophy. Though some have disputed Nozick's libertarian ideology and regretted his ignorance of social theory, history, and political thought, not even the most hostile has contested his technical proficiency. Another public philosopher, in a long essay in the New York Review of Books, applauded his “razor-sharp analysis.” Tardier reviewers in the general press have tended to confirm these judgments. One of Nozick's colleagues on the editorial board of Philosophy and Public Affairs, the organ of the new wave of public philosophers, promptly acclaimed the author in Harper's for his unsurpassed dialectical skill. From the day of its publication the book has been celebrated. That it succeeds in doing so has been almost unanimously acknowledged. Though Robert Nozick devotes some fifty pages to a critique of Rawls, his ambitious book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, is intended to stand on its own. Now one of Rawls's Harvard colleagues, singled out for mention three times in the final page of acknowledgments to A Theory of Justice, has entered the lists with a self-labeled libertarian work that joins issue with Rawls at several points but which, as befits an attempt at original theory, approaches the problems of justice and the state from a fresh perspective. The success of the book in the marketplace, as well as the high esteem in which Rawls is held by his colleagues and students, has spawned a cottage industry of criticism and commentary on Rawls's “ideal contractualism,” which has been misread in some quarters as a doctrine for levelers. The publication of John Rawls's cumbersome A Theory of Justice surprised Harvard University Press four years ago by becoming its best seller. After a generation in which questions of logic and scientific method have preoccupied the dominant, analytic school of American philosophy, tenured professors are now interested in applying their newly honed conceptual tools to the predicament of man in society, and there appears to be an audience for their writings. For better or worse, academic philosophers are intent on deepening our discussion of political and moral issues.
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