ABSTRACT
In this most important sense, then, spontaneous social order is not spontaneous and the invisible hand is not invisible.119 Nozick rather concedes this, I feel, by allowing that it is necessary to have a minimal or ultraminimal State within which the market can allocate goods.120 For this concession, Nozick has been excoriated by outright libertarians, who perceived that it cuts against their fundamental anarchism.121 In this they are right. One may wish to keep the State as small as possible, and in the light of the attitude to intervention taken here, ceteris paribus one could have no disagreement with this. But once one recognises the vital public role in constituting all social institutions, including the regulatory basis even of markets in which one does not then intervene, then, on pain of contradiction if one does otherwise, one must accept the primacy of the public dimension of all social institutions. The liberal conception of the ‘nightwatchman’ State,122 the strong distinction between negative and positive rights,123 and private property124 are indefensible as statements of ‘natural liberties’.125 These are social institutions the form of which is (even when this is denied) and should be (though often it is not in any open way) publicly determined. The private, as a category in itself, does not exist, for the private is a public construction, the limits of which are then a matter for public debate. It is in this sense that we should understand the disappearance of the private or the merger of the private and the public.
