ABSTRACT
Robert Nozick is a professor at Harvard, but in his student days he was one of those who agitated with so much success "against the war", as such people used to say: this being their favorite euphemism for "against the anti-Communist side in the war". Nozick's political ideas were then pro-Communist ones. The result is a display, as in a war museum, of the gruesome and disabling wounds which were inflicted on American life, and on American intellectual life in particular, by the defeat in Vietnam. The whole book in fact breathes self-satisfaction, because in Nozick's eyes every war wound is a symptom of health and strength, and one of the signs that one has entered into a new and better era. The completeness of Nozick's composition is remarkable: he touches somewhere in the book, however lightly, almost every note on the keyboard of American decadence.
