Do two individuals gain or loose rights by forming or living under the rule of a State?

I bumped into an interesting article the other day, on an Icelandic website called Vefritid.is (the humble name "The Web-magazine" in loose translation). The article is called "The rights of individuals and libertarianism" and discusses a seemingly obscure book-review by Thomas Nagel, who seems to be a philosopher who sometimes dips into the political debate. The book under review is the famous but fuzzy "Anarchy, State and Utopia" by Robert Nozick.

According to the Icelandic article, Nagel's critic on Nozick attacks Nozick's claim that individuals have rights and those rights cannot be violated. Nagel's stand (according to the article, I repeat) is the following: "The fact that the rights of governments (!) are derived from the rights of individuals does not imply that we can find out about the rights of individuals without considering the State; this can be seen by the fact that since the properties of molecules rest on the properties of atoms does not mean that we can find out about the properties of atoms without studying molecules."

Amazing statement, but the argument doesn't end here. It goes into a Rawlsian mode where individuals don't have rights of their own, but rights derived from the kind of society we would "like" it to look like. In other words, rights of individuals derive from the rights of groups of individuals who in one way or another live under the rule of the State.

Of course it is always tempting to imagine how society "should" look like, for example by writing a book about some non-existing think-tank of human ghosts who own nothing (not even a body of their own) but have some kind of knowledge in economics and other science. But how does this shake the libertarian theory? It doesn't. It might make a dent in Robert Nozick's complicated, self-contradicting fuzzy-logic about the minimal state, but casts no shadow on a more robust and radical libertarian theory.

You are an individual who chose to read these few words without asking permission. You thereby took charge over your own body, and by doing so, and not physically subjecting other individuals to the same task, admitted your self-ownership of it. No smart philosopher can write you out of that stone-cold fact.