Robert Nozick was born in Brooklyn, New York, graduated from Columbia University in 1959, and received a PhD from Princeton University in 1963. After stints at Princeton University and the Rockefeller University, Nozick went to Harvard University in 1969, at age thirty, as full professor. There he was named Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy in 1985, then Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in 1998. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and served as president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association.

Nozick and his Harvard colleague John Rawls were the giants of twentieth-century political philosophy. Where Rawls stuck to one task, elaborating and defending his magisterial Theory of Justice, Nozick was notably restless and interested in everything. He once said, "I didn't want to spend my life writing Son of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Return of the Son, and so on...