Jerry Cohen is dead

This is rotten news. Cohen was – in my few interactions with him – kind, funny, and devastatingly sharp. I wish I’d known him better.

Oh god — this is devastating news … I only met him once, but he was such an inspiration and such a just all-around delightful and sweet as well as brilliant person.

I never met him unfortunately, but have a great appreciation for his work. Very sad.

In case anybody wants to listen to a bit of Jerry in action, I’m told that http://social-justice.politics.ox.ac.uk/events/Cohen/pcast.asp should work, though I can’t get it to.

Perhaps my computer is in shock, like me.

Another possibility, posted by Les Green on Facebook, is http://social-justice.politics.ox.ac.uk/materials/Conference/cohen_pcasts/Cohen%20comments.mp3?CAMEFROM=podcastsGET

You’ll want his ‘closing comments’, especially the last 5 minutes.

Slight correction, information about the performance of “Solidarity Forever” is incoorect. This version was recorded in 1941 by Pete Seeger (lead) and the Almanac singers and reissued with new material by Folkways as an LP in the 1950s (now available from Smithsonian Folkways). Personel of the Almanac Singers included Cis Cuningham, Woody Guthrie, Bess Lomax Hawes, , Lee Hayes, Millard Lampell, Josh White, Cisco Huston, and Arthur Stern.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almanac_Singers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_Union_&_Other_Union_Songs

Other players that came and went, or recorded with various Almanacs, included Carol White, Butch Hawes, Sonny and Terry, Alan Lomax, Lead Belly, Burl Ives, and doubtless countless others.

I mean the information on Youtube about the performance in incorrect it’s not by the Weavers.

I knew Jerry quite well. He had a wonderful sense of humour – inimitable, and was one of the most remarkable and lovable among brilliant people I ever met. He and I disagreed about political and social matters down through the decades, and I feel I’m much the better for having known his work, even if I never managed to persuade him to my way of thinking (nor he me to his). The philosophical world will really miss him, for his brilliance, his wit – and by the way, for his inadvertent contributions to the demise of the Marxism he spent too much of his life defending.

I’ve only read “Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence” — forgive me! grad study in science is my day (and night) job — and found it be a model of clarity and logical rigor in its reconstruction of historical materialism. So much so that I abandoned rigid historical materialism, but that’s much to his credit; if I had turned to, say, Althusser, I would be cloaking hismat’s deficiencies in a cloud of meaningless verbiage like “relative autonomy of the superstructure,” etc.

I suppose it’s time to finally read “Self-Ownership”..

I wish I could have heard that discourse on Samuel von Pooped.

This is sad news.

Like everyone else, I’m in shock. There definitely won’t be another one of him again. He visited here at McGill, his alma mater, for two terms, fall 2000 and fall 2001; I’m pleased to have been part of bringing him here. His seminars those terms, which lots of us went to, were a real center of intellectual life for the department. And his warm-up routines were memorable (he also did a separate comedy night): I remember especially “Nine Types of Moral Concern” and the Isaiah Berlin lecture and the Quine interview. We had hoped to bring him back again for another semester–I ran into him on the street a year ago, when he was visiting his brother in Montreal and showing his wife and stepdaughter around town, and he’d expressed interest in returning. It would have been wonderful. Apart from everything else that was remarkable about Jerry, as a philosopher and a person, for us here he was a link to the past, not just of McGill but the Yiddish working-class radical past of Montreal, lovingly recalled in “The Future of a Disillusion” and in his Gifford lectures, which was the source of so much human and intellectual energy. Old friends of Jerry’s from his teenage days would turn up at his events here, and it was wonderful to see them and to see him reconnect with them. It’s a world that’s now gone, and Jerry was one of its most brilliant products; and for all his success in England, and his international fame as a philosopher (and I think he was an absolute model of clear thinking and getting to the heart of the matter in political philosophy, he put Rawls and Nozick and the rest of them to shame), he never forgot where he came from.

Like will u. I’d just like to express what a wonderful work I found his Marx’s Theory of History, and what a great impact it has when you read it. His style certainly wrenched me out of Marxian dogmatic slumbers, though probably not with the consequences he might have liked back then. When somebody who affects you in such a way dies, you forget that you’d never met him.

I’m just writing by postgraduate dissertation on Rescuing Justice and Equality and this has really upset me. I’m actually trying to defend Constructivism against Cohen, but having spent the last few weeks living in this book and swimming in the words, I must confess to finding him to be a complete and utter genius, with the most beautifully open, free and easy writing style, full of personality and humour. I was looking forward to meeting him at a conference at Manchester in November and although I have never had the pleasure of meeting him, this terrible news has left me feeling numb. His words will live on forever.

NPTO — do you have a citation for the article on bullshit in France? I would love to get a copy of that.

I owe Jerry Cohen a lot for, among other things, his early support of my career. I mention this because I’m not alone. I recounted that story and thanked him publicly at the beginning of my talk at the January Oxford conference in his honor. Many other such testimonials begin those recorded talks, all available for download here:

http://mediaplayer.group.cam.ac.uk/pod/mode,vpodcast/domain,itunesucategory/cat,Social.Science.110,Political.Science.101/feed.rss

Friends and admirers might enjoy browsing through the beginnings of those talks for some moving stories about the way Jerry affected the lives of these scholars.

When we lose a Jerry Cohen, I can’t help but wonder whether the next generation of philosophers (that’s us) can somehow carry the load forward: His moral conviction, his red-hot analytical mind, his crucial comedian’s sense of perspective, his affectionate but uncompromising fostering of students from several generations, and, above all, his intellectual honesty.

He said that he felt more than adequately well-thanked and honored, which is comforting, but the real tribute might be to turn this trepidation (if you share it with me) about whether we’re up to the task, into a commitment to try, somehow, in our own way. As of today, there’s no one like Jerry Cohen. But I hope we’ve learned from him, and I hope, at least collectively, we can keep some of that red-hot philosophical intelligence alive.

A great man who will be sorely missed. My own small tribute is here:
http://the-brooks-blog.blogspot.com/2009/08/obituary-g-cohen-1941-2009.html

I am deeply sad and surprised of his death. I met him first in Oxford in 2005 while I was writing my phd on his relation to Marxism. I had sent him eleven questions. He took me in a office and left me with his answer to my questions in 32 points. Yet we only could discuss on six of them. He had such a great intellectual involvement and a very subtle sense of humor.

Jerry Cohen was so full of life that it’s impossible to fathom the spark leaving him. He was a mass of energy that sent out flashes — of philosophical brilliance; of humane kindness, especially where his students were concerned; of wit that left your belly aching from the laughter. His love of humanity, of philosophy, of life itself, were infectious. We’re fortunate that he left so much of himself in his articles and books. I’m especially glad that he finished Rescuing Justice and Equality before leaving us.

He was in Toronto only last fall — another thing I’m grateful for — and gave us his lecture on conservatism, punctuated with songs and the exegesis of their lyrics as an integral part of his philosophical argument about particular value. That evening, at the dinner in his honour, he serenaded us with songs from “My Fur Lady,” the Canadian musical produced by the Red and White Revue at McGill in 1957. (I can’t find information about whether he was involved in writing or performing it, but he certainly knew his lines, five decades later.) The next morning, as a warm-up to a seminar on his book on Rawls, he performed a pantomime of the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy.

There’s no one like him in the world. It’s smaller without him in it.

I took Jerry’s M.Phil course in 1997 – none of us had seen that combination of brilliance and kindness before. I hadn’t and haven’t laughed as much in a philosophy seminar. And there was the seminar he gave on humor. It wasn’t until his 60th birthday celebration at Yale that I learned of his love for Judy Garland songs when he led the audience on a sing-along. What a voice, what a mind, a huge loss for us all.

I met Jerry once only — and it was memorable. The year was 1994 or 95, and he had invited me to lunch at All Souls on the day, as it happened, that the Queen Mother was visiting the College. As we walked to the dining hall, he tapped every colleague we came upon on the shoulder and asked: “Excuse me, but are you the Queen Mother?” This continued until he did so to a middle-aged woman who responded indignantly “Do I look like the Queen Mother?” Jerry looked perplexed and wounded: perplexed that anyone could not see the humour in his stunt, and wounded that he’d evidently caused some hurt. The lunch discussion ranged widely over many political issues, but none more passionately by him than the modern Jewish condition. A few days later, a card arrived carrying the image of R.B. Kitaj’s oil and charcoal, “The Jew, etc…”, inscribed with humble thanks for the lunch. The very inverse of who owed whom. On the eve of his funeral, one realizes, again, that the College of which he was a star fellow could not be more appropriately named.

bullshit the world is full of indeed, but compassion, now that’s a rare (& often unsought for) creature. remembering mr cohen is remembering that humour, precision, intellectual honesty & daring, fun, clarity, compassion, joy in pleasures, pleasure within humanity, & the freedom to say this is who i am & this is what i believe (absolutely not saying this is who i am & thus this is who is right) plus the ability to love & be loved . . . now that is cool.
so under the pavings still is the beach.