The Impossible Dream: Transcendental Idealism in Liberal Utopian Thought Robin Hill – HUP-201 “One must require from each one the duty which each one can perform,” the king went on. “Accepted authority rests first of all on reason. If you ordered your people to go and throw themselves into the sea, they would rise up in revolution. I have the right to require obedience because my orders are reasonable.” The Little Prince , Antoine de Saint-Exupery 119 The claims of transcendental or utopian liberalism rest on two key conceptual elements. The first is the assertion that there is some necessary relationship between the prosecution of individual rights and an entity satisfying some criteria of statehood, and the second is that both states and basic human rights are more than hypothetical ideals. Neither is clear prima facie . In his book Anarchy, State and Utopia , Robert Nozick outlined a philosophically justifiable state, often called the nightwatchman state, whose limits were in securing natural and universal rights, which may be called human rights, in property 120 . His work remains highly influential and widely discussed, as does the liberal contractualist tradition to which it belongs. In order to examine the merits of Nozick’s claim as expressed above, it is first necessary to examine that tradition since Nozick echoes its logic and conclusions. The liberal contractualist tradition has three founding texts, Hobbes’ Leviathan , Locke’s Two Treatises of Government , 119 Saint-Exupery, A. de, The Little Prince , Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1963, p. 46 120 Nozick, R., Anarchy, State and Utopia at https://joseywales1965.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/0001_anarchy_state_an d_utopia.pdf, retrieved 14/04/2016 at 13:49 p.m.
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