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Philosopher David Schmidtz recounts the interesting experience. I'm curious what readers make of this claim: "The difference in the styles of Rawls and Nozick was momentous. Rawls cultivated apostles. Nozick did not. Nozick had no interest in becoming a religion." Signed comments will be preferred (full name, valid email address.)
I’m glad Dave wrote up this story, which I had heard about from him once before. Thanks to an introduction from Ruth Anna Putnam, I got to know Rawls pretty well from the late 70’s until his death. I attended seminars he gave, talked with him a fair amount about especially Part 3 of Theory of Justice, Sandel’s critique, his thoughts about Kohlberg’s work, and the linguistic analogy. We corresponded some until his death in 2002. I would have said this: Rawls had many disciples, but he did not seek them. He was as many have reported on the shy side. I’ll be interested in what his actual PhD students say.
In compiling my account of the Rockefeller Philosophy & Logic programs I learned this from grad student Jules Coleman: Coleman was already a graduate student at University of Michigan interested in philosophy of physics when he came to Rockefeller, planning to work with Earman. He arrived in NYC early in the summer, before Nozick left for Harvard, and Nozick advised him somewhat along the following lines: 'Whatever our technical skills may be, we are most likely to spend our careers as consumers rather than producers of technical work. It is far better to take those skills and apply them in areas of political philosophy where others have not done so than it is to produce second class technical work that cannot stand on its own.' Coleman adds: "In the end Nozick's suggestion was the single most influential and beneficial advice I have ever received in my academic career."
Both Nozick and Rawls were members of the Harvard Department when I did my doctoral work there in the 1980's. I spent much more time with Rawls, who directed my dissertation (of which more in a moment) and for whom I once TA-ed. But I did spend time with Nozick on a couple of occasions.
My experience of Nozick was like Dave's: I found him warm and curious. I also found him spontaneously generous. One sunny May Saturday, I and a couple of other graduate students ran into him on a walk along the Charles River. On the spur of the moment, he invited us to his house to watch — of all things — the Kentucky Derby. I don't remember any other senior faculty member doing anything remotely like that. A more memorable and lengthy encounter came when Nozick gave a talk at Notre Dame while one of his children was in law school here. At dinner afterwards, it was clear that Bob was immensely and touchingly proud of his child, and not at all interested in talking about himself.
As I said above, I had the privilege of writing a dissertation under Rawls. That experience left me with a quite different impression than Dave has. Graduate students were drawn to Rawls for obvious reasons, and he was genuinely gratified if they came to share his views. Some became disciples, but I would not say that discipleship was something he "cultivated", since that suggests a persistent attempt to make converts. On the contrary, one of the things I most admired about Rawls was his willingness to let students go their own way. For reasons I won't go into, I wrote a dissertation on Aquinas under him. He never tried to dissuade me, and was ever encouraging.
There's much I could say about Rawls, and students of his who knew him better than I could say more. For now, suffice it to say that I thought Rawls's treatment of his students was like his treatment of everyone else. It showed his deeply democratic sensibility and his deep commitment to autonomy. In those, and in many other admirable ways, he was own his theory of justice personified.
I agree with a few of the other commenters here. Indeed, the notion that Rawls *cultivated* disciples makes me wonder whether Schmidtz really knew him at all, or whether that straw man serves as a (needless) contrast in an interesting anecdote about Nozick.
Dave Schmidtz claims that Rawls "cultivated apostles." A Nozick remark that Dave quotes may shed light on this surprising suggestion. Nozick wrote, “Political philosophers now must either work within Rawls’s theory or explain why not” (ASU 1974, 183). Dave adds, "There is truth in the compliment, but when it came to explaining why not, no one did more than Nozick."
The "why not?" rests on the idea that there is some abstract sense to be made of an individual's fractional contribution to the products of social cooperation: a quantum that the baker brings to the table, so to speak, that is isolable from the contributions of the farmer, the farmhand, the miller, and so on. This intuition seems to be what grounds Dave's claim that Rawls made the same kind of mistake as the one Rawls charged utilitarianism with, of failing to take the separateness of persons seriously, i.e., their separateness as producers. This was not quite the point of Nozick's example of the 10 Robinson Crusoes on their 10 separate islands (ASU 150–51), which was rather to suggest that there is a pre-cooperative notion of just entitlement which might be extended to the cooperative case.
A significant fraction of those who have attended to the issues Nozick (and others) raised have not concluded that they are compelling enough to warrant discarding Rawls's framework (this fraction may have including Nozick himself, if his later published reflections are an indication). Calling members of this fraction "apostles" is hyperbole. Surely, Dave did not mean to suggest this stubborn fraction exists owing to Rawls's effort to bewitch impressionable minds.
At the beginning of my senior year of college, I knew that I wanted to write a senior thesis, and I knew I wanted to write something about Kant and Hegel on self-consciousness, but I didn't know any more specifically than that what I wanted to write about. So while my classmates were submitting very detailed and articulate proposals for their senior theses, I submitted something that candidly admitted that I really didn't understand Kant or Hegel on self-consciousness, and I wanted to devote myself to figuring out what they had to say, and trying to articulate it. For some reason that I've never understood, Rawls volunteered to direct my thesis. He had no professional incentive to do so, and he certainly didn't know anything about me at the time. But he agreed to meet with me weekly to talk to me about whatever I wanted to talk about. Although we met weekly to discuss Kant (we never even got to Hegel), at no point did I feel as if he was leading me somewhere that I hadn't already been wanting to go. So the idea that he cultivated disciples is very hard for me to square with my own experience of the man. I suppose his conduct may have contributed to his having disciples, but it's hard me to imagine his cultivating disciples in any other way.
Dear Professor Leiter,
How about my Nosh with Noam? I was stunned to see Professor Chomsky walk into the faculty lounge at Henry Ford CC in Dearborn MI, back in the early 1990s. I walked across the room to verify that unlikely impression and was graciously invited by his host to sit down for lunch. It turned out that he was there to give two lectures, on corporate media and American foreign policy. He also ended up gently disabusing me, over the course of the next two WONDERFUL hours, of my inchoate Lockeanism on language acquisition (a philosophical lesson subsequently buttressed by the ease with which my own children came to speak). I then ran home to get my copy of Aspects of a Theory of Syntax, for his autograph. It has recently earned me 'cred' among my youngest daughter's philosophically-minded friends. How could I not be the man's disciple?
Respectfully yours,
Robert Allen
Nozick's generosity and curiosity were legendary. He read the last chapter of my dissertation on skepticism before he'd written on the subject, and I like to think it might have spurred his interest in it and the work he did on it which was so important. Rawls, who sat in on my dissertaion defense, couldn't have been more open-minded and objective about everything anyone did whether he knew them well or not. It's odd that they're brought up in connection with cultivating (or not cultivating) disciples, since there were members of the department who were guilty of that, namely Cavell and Dreben. It was a very strange climate, but not because of Nozick and Rawls.
On reading the footnote about Nozick's rent control case, I couldn't help but wonder if his landlord was THE Erich Segal, the author of the novel and later romantic tearjerker film, Love Story. Indeed one and the same! Here's the story as well as an exploration of the ethics of rent control (with Rawls!) by the former NYTimes columnist and libertarian, John Tierney: https://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/14/magazine/the-big-city-two-bedroom-quandary.html
I would not have needed to say anything comparative about Rawls in order to make the point I wanted to make about Nozick. So, too bad. In fact, I did not know Rawls. I barely knew Nozick. I did know more than one of Rawls's former students over the years who felt that way about him and held it against him. And that was in my mind as I was trying to make a point about how strikingly hands-off Nozick evidently was. But that's just the history of how a sentence made it into the final draft, not justification. Thanks for reading.
This thread may sometimes confuse cultivating apostles with cultivating disciples. Apostles (the few) are chosen from among disciples (the many who are called). Given the competitiveness of the job market, it would not be surprising if there were instances of Rawls appearing to have, and in fact having, preferred some students to others.
I met Nozick only once at a little conference at Union Theological Seminary for the Dali Lama. Nozick and a couple of philosophers of physics (me, David Albert…) were invited because the Dali Lama wanted to hear about quantum mechanics and cosmology. It was an amazing event organized by Robert Thurman professor at Columbia who brought his daughter Uma and others. My wife Kati Balog and I had dinner with Bob Nozick. He already had stomach cancer. We had a wonderful conversation first about Eastern Europe and then about why anything exists. I remember him telling me that his teacher Sidney Morgenbesser would answer when asked "Why is there something rather than nothing?" "Even if thee were noting you would still complain." There is a lot more I could say about this amazing event. I wished I gotten to know Nozick better. He had a great mind for philosophical puzzles.
I don't know how many philosophers know this, but Nozick was married to Gjertrud Schnackenberg, one of the greatest poets of her generation, whose book "Heavenly Questions" is an extended elegy to him
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