Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia provides a counterpoint to Rawls’s framework by centering on individual rights and limiting government intervention. Nozick argues that redistributive policies, as seen in Rawls’s difference principle, unjustly violate individuals’ rights to their earned resources. Instead of equalizing outcomes to benefit the least advantaged, Nozick contends that a minimal state should exist solely to protect basic rights—such as life, liberty, and property—without interfering in free market transactions. Thus, the focus shifts from patterned justice to historical entitlement, emphasizing that any pattern of distribution resulting from voluntary exchanges should be preserved, even if it leads to inequality.