Very good overview article of the progression from Nozik’s encouragement of what would become Neo-LIbertarianism to his discouragement. Also does a good job of noting how FDR’s New Deal made such an argument even possible…
Even in 1975, it took a pretty narrow view of history to think all capital is human capital, and that philosophy professors, even the especially bright ones, would thrive in the free market. But there was a historical reason for Nozick’s belief: the magnificent sieve. Harvard’s enrollment prior to World War II was 3,300; after the war, it was 5,300, 4,000 of whom were veterans. The GI Bill was on its way to investing more in education grants, business loans, and home loans than all previous New Deal programs combined. By 1954, with the Cold War in full swing, the U.S. government was spending 20 times what it had spent on research before the war. “Some universities,” C. Wright Mills could write in the mid-’50s, “are financial branches of the military establishment.” In the postwar decades, the American university grew in enrollment, budget and prestige, thanks to a substantial transfer of wealth from the private economy, under the rubric of “military Keynesianism.” As a tentacle of the military-industrial octopus, academia finally lost its last remnant of colonial gentility.