Robert Nozick maintains that "[t]he fundamental question of political philosophy, one that precedes questions about how the state should be organized, is whether there should be any state at all" (1974, 4). Perhaps we disagree with Nozick and believe that other questions in political philosophy are more fundamental--for example, whether individuals have the "strong and far-reaching" rights that Nozick himself believes they have. He might reply that the question of the existence or justification of individual rights does not belong to political philosophy, but rather to moral philosophy. In any case, however, this latter issue is a trivial, terminological matter, not something that requires disputation, and we may easily distinguish it from the important, substantive question of whether a state should exist.

In attempts to answer that important question, however, the terminological issues are not usually easily distinguished from what ultimately matters. Nozick himself seems to fail in this regard. This failure is important because it conceals the considerable gap between the substantive moral stance at which he arrives and what one might think that stance is on the basis of his endorsement of the "state." Nozick maintains that one of his main conclusions in Anarchy, State, and Utopia is "that a minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified" (1974, ix). But even if one accepts that all of his arguments are sound, what he vindicates is something quite short of what the anarchist opposes. Nozick may be right in claiming that, according to certain set of standards, "the protective association dominant in a territory, as described, is a state" (118, emphasis in the original). Yet the worry is that we might base our position with regard to the state's legitimacy on something about which there should be no occasion for dispute, as the campers do in William James's story about the squirrel going around the tree.

I

James begins chapter 2 of Pragmatism as follows:

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find every one engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute. The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel--a live squirrel supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk; while over against the tree's opposite side a human being was imagined to stand. This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the mango round the squirrel or not? He goes round the tree, sure enough, and the squirrel is on the tree; but does he go round the squirrel? In the unlimited leisure of the wilderness, discussion had been worn threadbare. Every one had taken sides, and was obstinate; and the...