First edition, first printing. 8vo. xvi, 367, [1] pp. Original brown cloth, spine lettered in green, top edge in red, fore and bottom edges untrimmed, dust jacket (neat ownership inscription to front free endpaper, contents otherwise clean and unmarked; minor creasing and a touch of chipping to extremities of jacket, light fading to spine panel, but still not as severe as usually encountered, a very good copy indeed). New York, Basic Books, Inc, 1974.
A foundational text of modern libertarianism, originally published in response to John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971), being a classic statement on free-market libertarianism, proposing an entitlement theory of the minarchist state over more virulent forms of anarcho-capitalism. The book is widely “recognised as a classic of modern political philosophy, widely credited with breathing new life into the discipline in the second half of the twentieth century. It effectively moved libertarianism from a relatively unimportant subset of political philosophy to the centre of the discipline” (Bader & Meadowcroft).
