There has been much attention online to a piece by Joseph Heath arguing that analytical Marxism disappeared because the analytical Marxists all turned into Rawlsian liberals. At a certain level of resolution (blurred, zoomed out) the argument has something going for it. But at that level, all it amounts to is the claim that this group of thinkers shifted their attention over time from critical investigation of the normative and positive claims made by Karl Marx to concerns about justice, and, particularly, distributive justice. Heath’s piece also contains some startling inaccuracies:
- Heath claims that Cohen abandoned the Marxist view, summed up, according to Heath in the belief “that workers are entitled to the fruits of their labour, and so if they receive something less than this, they are being treated unjustly” and Heath associates this view with a commitment to the labour theory of value. But, as any scholar of Marx knows, Marx himself rejected the view that workers are entitled to the full fruits of their labour in the Critique of the Gotha Programme because of the need to make deductions, among others, for those unable to work. Moreover, Cohen rejected the labour theory of value and declared its relationship to the charge of exploitation to be one of irrelevance in his essay “The Labour Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation” (available in his History, Labour and Freedom).
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Heath claims that Cohen, worried about the way that Marx’s theory of exploitation rests on similar premises to Nozick’s views (as he was), spent “spent the better part of a decade agonizing, and wrote two entire books trying to work out a response to Nozick, none of it particularly persuasive.” Well, by my count, Cohen wrote exactly one book responding to Nozick, namely Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality. Of course it is up to Heath what he finds persuasive, but, personally, I think the great achievement of that book is its focus on the principle of self-ownership and its rejection of that principle.
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Heath writes: “Then one day (as he tells the story) he decided to leave Oxford and spend some time at Harvard. Upon arriving in America, he discovered that none of his fellow left-wing political philosophers had been losing any sleep at all over Nozick’s arguments. Why? Because they were egalitarians.” This is a bizarre bowdlerisation of what Cohen says on p. 4 of Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality where he recounts that he was exercised by Nozick’s arguments when they first saw the light of day in 1973-4 and was “puzzled and heartened” when visiting Princeton to discover that neither Thomas Nagel nor Tim Scanlon were discomfited by Nozick’s arguments. But far from being a “road to Damascus” moment that put an end to his engagement with Nozick and shifted him towards Rawlsianism, Cohen retained his concerns which he pursued for the next twenty years, with Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality being published in 1995.
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Heath appears to be using “Rawlsian” as a portmanteau word to cover the entire family of liberal egalitarians. But while Cohen and other “analytical Marxists” did engage in arguments with such philosophers they tended to be more exercised by the “equality of what?” debate sparked by Ronald Dworkin and Amartya Sen in the 1980s. This led to Cohen embracing a version of “luck egalitarianism”, particularly in his essay “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice” (1989). As I understand his evolution, Cohen had by the end of his life come to a pluralist view that endorsed luck egalitarianism as one component of justice but he never renounced the view that there is such a thing as exploitation and that exploitation is unjust.
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Far from being a Rawlsian, Cohen’s last big book (as opposed to collections of essays), Rescuing Justice and Equality (2009) was a comprehensive attack on Rawls’s views on distributive justice and their metaethical foundation in favour of a more thoroughgoingly egalitarian view that most liberals would (and do) reject because of its implications for, for example, occupational choice.
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While it is true that analytical Marxists were drawn into arguments about distributive justice with liberal egalitarians and engaged in them using a similar idiom (both sides being, after all, “analytical”) there remained deep divisions between the two camps about what justice requires and, importantly, about the scope of distributive justice, with most of the so-called liberal egalitarians being “liberal nationalists” insofar as they restricted the application of strongly egalitarian principles to people under a common political authority. Cohen expresses his own doubts about the restricted scope view in chapter 10 of If You’re an Egalitarian How Come You’re So Rich? but wrote little explicitly on the topic of global distribution. As a general proposition, however, I think I’m safe in asserting that the (former?) analytical Marxists, including Cohen, Roemer and Van Parijs, have all favoured giving egalitarian principles global scope as a matter of principle, whatever the obstacles in terms of immediate policy.
As I say, none of this completely undermines a very broad-brush version of Heath’s general story which involves a shift in attention from a reconstruction of Marx’s claims to a concern with distributive justice. But getting the intellectual history right is important, and Heath has been far too sloppy about that.
{ 32 comments }
Michael 08.29.24 at 12:57 pm
Speaking of getting things right, how about getting Heath’s actual claim right? He does not say that analytical Marxists all became Rawlsians; what he says is that Rawls, and the theoretical turn he initiated, put paid the project of analytical Marxism and paved the way for its adherents to become egalitarians (and effectively but not avowedly liberals) instead. The reference to Nozick should have alerted you to this, as Nozick was sharply at odds with Rawls, yet impelled Cohen et al to change their approach. So they could hardly have become Rawlsians, any more than they would become Nozickian libertarians. Rawls himself died a socialist, of the liberal stripe (as of course had Mill as well as the Marxist C.B. Macpherson, among others).
And while we’re on the subject, it is patently absurd to claim that Marx rejected the labor theory of value. What he did was deepen and broaden it to coincide with his theory of history. What he rejected was the bourgeois version of the theory. As Postone showed again and again, Marx’s critique of capitalism makes no sense absent its focus on the commodification of labor. His (silly) prediction of the decline of the rate of profit and the ensuing class conflict is based precisely on this postulate.
Heath can be forgiven for his loose understanding of the intellectual history; he’s a philosopher (schooled in Critical Theory) not a historian of ideas. But those taking him to task on that score should at least get their own facts straight.
Harry 08.29.24 at 1:01 pm
I read Rescuing Justice and Equality differently, and do think it is Rawlsian (but not Rawlsist?) — I think of it as rejecting Rawls’s reading of his own theory and offering a better reading of it (though for sure he rejects Rawls’s constructivism, but I think of that as being orthogonal to the actual theory).
Another inaccuracy — he says that all the early NBSMG abandoned Marxism, but some were never Marxists in the first place (at least Hillel Steiner), Bob Brenner is still a Marxist, and Erik Olin Wright remained a Marxist throughout his life. It’s true that Erik was a liberal egalitarian though, albeit one with a perfectionist (roughly Raz-ian, though I’m pretty sure Erik didn’t ever read Raz) orientation.
Trivial — though analytical, Buchanan was never a Marxist, though I admire his book on Marx a great deal (as I do the rest of his work!).
I agree that the broad brush picture is basically right when it comes to philosophy. But I’d guess that many of the analytical Marxists think of Marxism as having real insights in sociology and economics which still influence their thinking.
Chris Bertram 08.29.24 at 1:13 pm
@Michael “it is patently absurd to claim that Marx rejected the labor theory of value.”
Since you are so keen that I get things right, as am I, perhaps you should re-read what I wrote. I wrote that Marx “rejected the view that workers are entitled to the full fruits of their labour” and that Cohen (not Marx) “rejected the labour theory of value”.
Jerry Vinokurov 08.29.24 at 2:29 pm
I don’t know enough to comment on the intellectual history outlined by either Heath or the response. What interests me is something more basic: why should there be a conflict at all between “liberal egalitarianism” and “Marxism?” These two ideas seem much more complementary than oppositional to me.
LFC 08.29.24 at 3:03 pm
I can’t leave a v. long comment right now, but just to say, wrt point #6, that I think quite a few egalitarians (whatever their relation to Marxism) were not comfortable with the restriction of strongly egalitarian principles to national societies (or those under “a common political authority”).
Forrester discusses some of this in ch.5 of In the Shadow of Justice, though I’m not sure I agree with her argument that there was a shift from the 1970s theorizing of, e.g., Beitz and Barry, which (wrt global justice) was both empirical and “diagnostic” as well as normative, toward more abstraction and more emphasis on ideal theory (in the ’80s and after).
Cervantes 08.29.24 at 3:20 pm
This particular deep weed patch not being where I wield my wacker, I can only take a high level view. Let me say, first of all, that whether you choose to call yourself a Marxist or something else is just a personal peccadillo. If you’re doing anything but regurgitating Marx, and coming up with original thoughts of your own, your debt to Marx is a question of degree.
But my salient point is that Marx was a much better diagnostician than a clinician. His analysis of history and the situation in the industrialized and industrializing countries of the mid-19th Century obviously holds up a lot better than his predictions of the future, and he was always quite vague about how he thought the world would work and should work. I presume he would have been appalled by what has been done in his name. His vision for society, such as it was, is not of much use today.
So what we are really arguing about his how we might get to a world with less inequality, less exploitation, and less suffering from a starting place that would be entirely unfamiliar to Marx. People may believe they share his values and find his critique of capitalism a useful starting place, acknowledging that it requires considerable extension and some redaction to apply to current circumstances. But I really don’t care what sort of “ist” you want to put after your name and I think that even discussing that is a waste of energy.
Chris Bertram 08.29.24 at 3:30 pm
@LFC I think that’s fair, but note what I take to be the central figures in liberal egalitarianism, Rawls, Dworkin and Nagel, together with other more minor figures such as Blake and Sangiovanni, all embrace the restricted-scope view, whereas the (former?) analytical Marxists do not. The Republicans (who Heath assimilates to liberal egalitarianism) also tend to confine their egalitarianism to the bounds of, well, the republic. I believe that Joseph Heath also espouses a restricted-scope view but my basis for thinking that is an old article of his on immigration and justice, so I’m not sure. Those liberal egalitarians who take a more expansive view, e.g. Joshua Cohen, also seem to have flirted with the AM’s to some extent.
John McNeil 08.29.24 at 3:43 pm
Chris, would it be fair to say that the project of reconstructing Marx’s theories became a lot less interesting in the 90s than in the 80s simply because of the end of the Cold War? Rather than some Rawlsian victory on a purely intellectual plane? That the Soviet bloc was a giant tent pole keeping the Overton window (mixed metaphor, sorry) open for Marx reconstruction to seem relevant?
I ask that as a non-academic millenial who has learned a lot about the analytical Marxists from Crooked Timber over the years. Thanks for the book events on Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality and Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias. If anyone has ever titled a political philosophy book better than If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re so Rich, I’d like to know about that. Wright’s last book, which I read recently, is also impressive: How to be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century
Chris Bertram 08.29.24 at 4:10 pm
@John McNeil, I’m sure that is true, but there are also elements of a purely biographical nature. And while some people stay on the same topic their whole careers, other people just move on. Anyway, Cohen wrote this:
“When I had finished the book, an unexpected thing happened. I came to feel, what I had not consciously anticipated when planning or writing it, that I had written the book in repayment for what I had received. It reflected gratitude to my parents, to the school which had taught me, to the political community in which I was raised. It was my homage to the plain Marxism which the book defended. But, now that the book was written, the debt was paid, and I no longer felt obliged to adjust my thinking to that of Marx. I felt, for the first time, that I could think entirely for myself. I certainly did not forthwith stop believing what I had believed when I embarked upon the book, but I no longer experienced my commitment to those beliefs as an existential necessity.
In the aftermath of that loosening of the original attachment, I have thought more critically about historical materialism, but I have also shifted my attention to other topics ….” History, Labour and Freedom, pp. xi-xii.
David O'Brien 08.29.24 at 5:02 pm
I agree with Chris’s point #5 in the OP. I’d also have said Cohen’s shorter ‘Why Not Socialism?’ piece helps to make the same point, maybe even more straightforwardly. The view about justice or political morality that Cohen defends there–roughly, a pluralist one that gives importance to certain liberties, a luck-egalitarian equality principle, and a community principle–for sure doesn’t have the same content as Rawls’s theory of justice. And I don’t think the view is plausibly read as being justified because, e.g., it’s a better working out of the principles that reasonable people (in Rawls’s sense) would mutually accept. So I’d take it, too, to be good evidence for the Cohen-is-not-significantly-a-Rawlsian position.
Timothy Sommers 08.29.24 at 6:36 pm
(1) I would argue that the more relevant cut between analytic Marxism (AM) and egalitarian liberalism (EL) is that Rawls, et al, were developing theories of justice, normative theories; whereas AMs were interested in more empirical theorizing. Afterall of the original AMSers, Romer was an economist, Elster was famous for his work on collective action, and Cohen, arguably the bridge theorist between AM and EL, wrote his first official AM book was on Marx’s theory of history (materialist, not normative (as you know)).
What happened, it seems to be, is that Cohen shifted his emphasis to normative theorizing, full stop. I don’t think there was any tension between his AM views and his EL (or socialist, as he preferred) commitments and work. I would speculate, and it is just speculation, that the really significant influence that Rawls had (directly or indirectly) on Cohen is this. Rawls emphasized that the question of what the correct principles of justice are is entirely, and all to the good, separable from questions (largely empirical) about how to organize practices and social institutions to achieve justice. Marx would not be a fan of this view, obv. But I think there was nothing inconsistent in Cohen’s approach (if I am correctly characterizing it).
(2) I think the issue about “liberal nationalism” and the scope of Rawls’ (or other normative) principles, like the concentration on justice between generations that is starting to replace it, is logically parasitic on the central part of any such theory. It’s a lever that doesn’t move anything. But maybe it’s just me.
Harry 08.29.24 at 7:31 pm
I wonder how much of that quote Chris offered is partly because the AM group formed after Cohen had published the book (and substantially in response to the fact that he had published it). Most of the other NBSMGs, including Roemer (also a red diaper baby) and including EOW, who remained a Marxist, were less inclined ever to adjust their thinking to Marx’s.
On the scope of egalitarian liberalism — aren’t there two different things going on here? One is the substantive political principles, about which there is one kind of argument, and the other is constructivism, about which there is another kind of argument. AJ Julius shows that even a constructivist can go quite a long way in widening the scope of justice, but it is the constructivism, rather than the liberal egalitarianism, that motivates the limitation on scope.
Jerry Vinkurov at #4: “These two ideas seem much more complementary than oppositional to me.” That’s what Erik Olin Wright thought (you can think of his book Envisioning Real Utopias as an illustration of or even argument for it). Me too, with qualifications.
LFC 08.29.24 at 10:43 pm
I’ve split this comment into two parts.
Part 1
Some points about aspects of the history surrounding the “domestic v. global” application question (with the caveats that this is one person’s perspective and stems, of course, partly from having been alive in a certain time and place and having had certain interests). The following will likely not tell certain readers of this thread anything they did not already know, but so be it. (Re Harry B.’s citing A.J. Julius above: I don’t know his work so am not commenting on it.)
Some three years after the 1971 publication of A Theory of Justice, the UN General Assembly adopted, without a vote, the Declaration and Action Program on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (NIEO). (It was adopted without a vote because while a number of rich or “developed” countries didn’t like it, they decided at the time not to record their opposition formally. As a General Assembly resolution, it had no binding legal force.) The core claim of the NIEO (though not always phrased in these terms) was that the then-existing distribution of wealth, income, and resources between rich and poor countries (n.b.: countries, not individuals) was unjust. A political initiative with specific proposals, the NIEO also became a topic of academic debate and discussion in both the global North and South. And it was clear that Rawls’s theory had basically nothing to say about it, or the questions of global distributive justice that it raised, because in ToJ the application of Rawls’s principles was restricted to a “well-ordered” domestic society.
Some academic and other writers began to argue against that restriction, i.e. to argue that egalitarian principles of justice should have more than a “national” or domestic application. To take one example, Charles Beitz, in writings that included a 1975 PPA article and a 1979 book, contended that global economic “interdependence” (to use the then-fashionable word) created a scheme of social cooperation, in the Rawlsian phrase, such that the principles of justice should apply beyond the boundaries of nation-states. As one might expect, this sort of argument raised a number of thorny questions, both practical/empirical and theoretical, such as: (1) should the main subjects of the extended principles of justice be countries (i.e. governments) or individuals? (2) if the latter, how to ensure as a practical matter that redistributive transfers to governments would actually help poor individuals? (3) if one wanted to retain Rawls’s device of the original position, how should the global original position be structured, e.g. who were the parties to it? etc.
LFC 08.29.24 at 10:52 pm
Part 2
At the same time, in the “real world,” rich and poor countries engaged in a “dialogue” about the NIEO, and the U.S. with Kissinger as Sec. of State showed a willingness — for reasons probably having to do with blunting the power of OPEC more than anything else — to go part way in meeting certain Third World demands. But by the early 1980s, with Reagan and Thatcher in office and the Third World debt crisis, the NIEO as a political initiative was dead.
However, the academic mini-industry on global justice continued, and has resulted in a lot of interesting work (only a very small fraction of which I’ve read). Some of it is abstract but I think other parts of this literature integrate normative and empirical considerations.
In recent years there has also been renewed academic interest in the NIEO itself. Some of this work (to the extent I’m familiar with it) takes a rather uncritical approach to the NIEO, portraying it as an outgrowth of the anticolonial impulses/movements that drove decolonization and as an example of what one scholar calls postimperial “worldmaking.” One might have trouble gleaning or appreciating from such accounts that the NIEO program was severely criticized at the time by Marxists and others for (in their view) not doing much more than tinkering with the fundamental structures of the capitalist world market/economy. Probably the truth lies somewhere in between: the NIEO was reformist not revolutionary, but if implemented in the right way (a big “if”) it could have had beneficial effects for poor people in poor countries (even though its main thrust was state-level, not individual-level, redistribution). I think some of the recent work by historians and others tends to see the NIEO in a rosy retrospective light rather than fully grappling with the complexities that were fairly clear to many people who were alive and following the debates at the time. Needless to say, this comment has barely scratched the surface of those complexities, but that’s in the nature of most blog comments.
Chris Bertram 08.30.24 at 6:18 am
@LFC thanks for that. I don’t think it has much purchase on what I argue (or observe) in point 6 though, which is that AMs tended to take a different view on scope from LEs (at least the leading ones I mention in comment 7 above and most prominently Rawls himself in The Law of Peoples). That’s a generalisation, though not an exceptionless one, as you correctly observe re Beitz’s work in the 1970s (and we could say the same about the barely-mentionable Pogge I suppose). I also agree with Harry that constructivism doesn’t necessarily lead to narrow scope (Beitz and Julius both being counterexamples). Nevertheless, I’m sticking with the thought that the predominant concern among the deontological liberals has been on what citizens owe one another (occasionally they notice that not everyone on the territory is a citizen) whereas AM’s inherit their instinctive cosmopolitanism from the Marxist view that workers have no country.
John Q 08.30.24 at 10:22 am
I find myself increasingly unhappy with discussions centred on the term “liberal”. It seems to cover a range of views running roughly from Rawls to Nozick, and including Hayek and other unattractive figures.
By contrast the term typically excludes utilitarians, the main target (as I read it) of both Rawls and Nozick, who provide a much more robust case for egalitarianism, the welfare state and so on, as well as leading directly to a cosmopolitan view in which nationality doesn’t carry any weight
Matt 08.30.24 at 10:04 pm
I find myself increasingly unhappy with discussions centred on the term “liberal”. It seems to cover a range of views running roughly from Rawls to Nozick, and including Hayek and other unattractive figures.By contrast the term typically excludes utilitarians, the main target (as I read it) of both Rawls and Nozick, who provide a much more robust case for egalitarianism, the welfare state and so on, as well as leading directly to a cosmopolitan view in which nationality doesn’t carry any weight </i>
This strikes me as odd. I don’t think that Utilitarians are typically excluded from liberalism – The Mills, of course, are paradigmatic liberals, after all, and most well-known utilitarians are also liberals. Rather, the problem has been that it’s difficult for utilitarians to explain why they don’t, or won’t, depart from liberalism when they think that will maximize utility.
(On this, John, I think you might find something of interest in Heath’s discussion of cost/benefit analysis, mentioned but not [yet] discussed by Eric in his post on this general topic.)
As for Nozick and his ilk, I think there’s a strong case to be made for excluding libertarians of that sort from the family of “liberailsm”. The most well known version of the argument is Samuel Freeman’s paper, “Illiberal Libertarians: Why Libertarianism is not a Liberal View”. https://philpapers.org/rec/FREILW-2
John Kozak 08.31.24 at 4:44 pm
Is there much more to Heath’s argument than the observation that, over time, the part of a a particular cohort that enjoyed pelf and place became steadily less (politically) radical? Pass the sal ammoniac…
Adam Swift 09.01.24 at 3:01 pm
Chris, please will you write an intellectual biography of Cohen? I think there’s an important book to be written that traces, in careful detail, the development/evolution of his thinking, and locates it in its wider intellectual and cultural context. And I think you’re the person to do it.
Chris Bertram 09.01.24 at 7:16 pm
Thanks Adam. I’m not sure I agree, but it is very flattering of you to say so.
Adam Swift 09.01.24 at 8:27 pm
Which bit don’t you agree with Chris? Just the bit that you find flattering? Or am I wrong to think that the project is worthwhile? I’d been thinking for a while that somebody should do it and reading Heath’s piece, and some of the responses, makes it seem even more worth doing, and worth doing properly. If you don’t want to do it, who else? Mike Otsuka?
Matt 09.01.24 at 9:45 pm
For what it’s worth, I agree w/ Adam Swift above that this would be a very interesting project, and that you’d be well suited to do it, Chris.
John Q 09.01.24 at 10:04 pm
Matt @17 To give an example from the OP, Cohen’s egalitarian position is described as one which ” that most liberals would (and do) reject because of its implications for, for example, occupational choice.” I haven’t read exactly what Cohen advocates, but the implication that, for liberals. freedom of occupational choice trumps economic equality is the kind of thing that concerns me. Utilitarians would regard this as a trade-off, not a lexicographic order.
As it happens, I’ve just posted about occupational choice, concluding with “the children of high-status, high income parents are more likely to end up in high-status jobs and to have high incomes. That’s been known for a long time, as is the fact that the problem is particularly severe in the US.”
Measures to change this would quite likely impinge on occupational choice, at least for he children of high-status, high income parents,
Michael Kates 09.01.24 at 11:41 pm
I believe Christine Sypnowich has just came out with a book that seems to fill the gap outlined by Adam Swift above: https://www.wiley.com/en-au/G.+A.+Cohen%3A+Liberty%2C+Justice+and+Equality-p-9781509529964
Matt 09.02.24 at 12:25 am
Thanks for that link, Michael Kates – it does look very interesting. I do wonder if there would still be room for a more “intellectual biography” type book. (Those “Key thinkers in focus” books do tend to some some biography, but focus more on the arguments, at least among the ones I’ve read. They vary in quality, but some are really good. Jo Wolff’s on Nozick in this series, for example, is great, but very thin on “biography”, as have been most of the ones I’ve read. I suppose Wolff is also someone who could do a book on Cohen. But in any case, this is nice to know about.)
John Q – lots of thigs can “impinge” on occupational choice and still be fine with liberalisms, of course. For example, if a society decides not to provide funding for the opera, it’s going to “impinge” on the occupational choice of would-be opera singers, and high taxes on large incomes, taxes on various sorts of investment income or financial transactions or the like, and so on, will make certain jobs less attractive, and in that sense also “impinge” on occupational choice, but be fine from a liberal perspective. Lots of other options are okay, too. So, I’d need to know more about what you have in mind to have a clear opinion on it.
I haven’t read the Cohen stuff since grad school, but my memory was that it involved ideas like this: A is a skilled doctor, and can do lots of good as a doctor. But, he doesn’t really enjoy it, and is willing to do it only if he’s well compensated. If he’s not well compensated, he’d rather be a gardener. On Cohen’s account, it could be acceptable to require A to work as a doctor even though he wouldn’t agree to do this (and even though it’s not, say, emergency conditions.) I do tend to think that’s probably not acceptable, though of course details can matter. (We might also doubt that it would be efficient, or that you’d get very good doctoring this way, but the arguments never seemed to progress that far, and Cohen’s own meta-ethics tried to suggest that asking questions like that was not what political philosohers should do. That seemed obviously wrong to me.)
LFC 09.02.24 at 3:38 am
I’m not a scholar of this stuff (sorry for the informality) but I happen to know that Christine Sypnowich also edited the Cohen festschrift, which was published in 2006. (Maybe there was more than one, idk.)
Michael Kates 09.02.24 at 2:22 pm
You’re welcome, Matt.
Re: your point about Cohen and freedom of occupational choice, Cohen doesn’t think that it’s morally permissible for the state to coerce someone to become a doctor; rather, he thinks that individuals have a moral obligation (or, more accurately, a duty of justice) to become doctors if that’s necessary to improve the life prospects of the worst off. As he puts it in Rescuing Justice and Equality (p. 186): “Old-style Stalinistically inclined egalitarians might have . . . declared that, if people have to be coerced into equality, then so be it. But my own inclinations are more liberal, so that way out is not for me.”
Adam Swift 09.02.24 at 8:52 pm
I haven’t read either Sypnowich’s or Nicholas Vrousalis’ 2017 book but I suspect they’re both very good in their way. Sypnowich starts with a chapter called “The Political is Personal: G. A. Cohen’s Philosophical Journey” which presumably does some of what I had in mind but, like Matt, I guess that neither quite hits the spot we think worth hitting. Both look like survey introductions to, and critical engagements with, Cohen’s work as a whole rather than attempts to trace his intellectual path in detail, and to locate it in its wider intellectual context. Yes, Wolff could certainly do it but I’m still hoping to persuade Chris Bertram to take this on as his retirement project!
Matt 09.03.24 at 2:15 am
Michael Kates,
Thanks for the correction. I was thinking more from “If you’re an Egalitarian..” than “Rescuing Justice”, but had probably also just not remembered correctly. And, the position is made harder to understand because of the odd way Cohen came to think of the nature of political philosophy by “Rescuing”.
Chris Bertram 09.03.24 at 11:02 am
@Adam Swift, I’m not sure I agree that I’m the right person for the job. But it is an intruiging suggestion, so you’ve got me thinking about it.
Adam Swift 09.03.24 at 2:24 pm
Good to hear Chris. I’ll settle for that at this stage.
engels 09.07.24 at 4:43 am
Sadly can’t engage with this properly atm but iirc Cohen himself said he wouldn’t object to being called a “left-Rawlsian” and that the term “analytical semi-Marxist” might be apposite (in the prefaces of RJE and KMTH 2e respectively). Not that that settles anything.
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