Abstract
This essay is an attempt to piece together the elements of G. A. Cohen’s thought on the theory of socialism during his long intellectual voyage from Marxism to political philosophy. It begins from his theory of the maldistribution of freedom under capitalism, moves onto his critique of libertarian property rights, to his diagnosis of the “deep inegalitarian” structure of John Rawls’ theory and concludes with his rejection of the “cheap” fraternity promulgated by liberal egalitarianism. The paper’s exegetical contention is that Cohen’s work in political philosophy is best understood in the background of lifelong commitment to a form of democratic, non-market, socialism realizing the values of freedom, equality and community, as he conceived them. The first part of the essay is therefore an attempt to retrieve core socialism-related arguments by chronologically examining the development of Cohen’s views, using his books as thematic signposts. The second part brings these arguments together with an eye to reconstructing his vision of socialism. It turns out that Cohen’s political philosophy offers a rich conception of objective and subjective freedom, an original understanding of justice as satisfaction of genuine need, and a substantive ideal of fraternity as justificatory community with others. If properly united, these values can suggest a full-bloodied account of the just polity, and give us a glimpse into what it means, for Cohen, to treat people as equals.
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Notes
Cohen (1978).
Cohen (2009).
Cohen (1988).
Cohen (1995).
Cohen (2000b).
Cohen (2008).
See Cohen (2008, p. 4).
In the Introduction to the 2000 edition of Karl Marx’s Theory of History, Cohen seems to have endorsed the meta-sociological claims of methodological individualism, according to which large-scale social phenomena are to be explained by, and only by, appeal to the motivation sets of individual agents (Cohen 2000a, p. xxiii). It is not clear whether this endorsement sits comfortably with Cohen’s defence of functional explanation (for more on which see Sect. 2.1. below) and, if it does, whether consistency between the two renders methodological individualism vacuous. I shall try to address the latter question elsewhere.
Cohen (1978). All references hereafter are to the 1978 edition, unless otherwise indicated.
In order to exclude non-productive elements from this definition of the productive forces, Cohen defends a sharp distinction between the material and the social properties of society. See footnote 15, below.
In a later passage, Cohen commends planning for the (efficiency) reason that it prevents waste in resources. See Cohen (1978 , p. 337).
Charles Mills (1989) has taken up this question in recent work. I agree with Mills that Cohen’s distinction between the material and the social is exegetically unsustainable. But I also doubt it is conceptually sustainable. For Cohen distinguishes between “social relations” and “work relations.” The latter constitute “relations binding producers engaged in material production, conceived in abstraction from the rights and powers they enjoy vis-à-vis one another, and others.” (Cohen 1978, p. 111) But how can a set of material relations between people (which presumably includes the power each has to, say, abstain from joint production) be thus defined? Much hinges on the answer to this question. If it cannot be comprehensively answered, then the conceptual edifice of social form, said to “imprison” the material content of society, comes crushing down, taking with it the idea of socialism as the “conquest of form by matter” (Cohen 1978 , p. 129). Althusser takes issue with the sharp distinction between form and content -and the “guilty Hegelianism” he associates with it- in Althusser (2005, pp. 87–128). I am grateful to John Filling for impressing on me the significance of the material/social distinction for Cohen’s conceptual scheme, and for numerous discussions on this (social!) matter.
For Cohen classes become possible when, and only when, society becomes capable of reproducing a surplus over and above what is necessary for basic subsistence. And once class division, along these lines, becomes possible, it also becomes necessary, in the sense that it becomes nomicly indispensable to the achievement of growth in productive power, the means to en masse human self-emancipation (see Cohen 1978, pp. 207–215).
For the idea of “socially necessary” exploitation, which follows more or less readily from Cohen’s account of historical materialism, see Roemer (1995, chapter 1).
Cohen maintained that Marxists are committed to moral condemnation of capitalism as unjust because that is the only way (1) to make sense of central claims within Marxian and Marxist political economy (such as the “theft” of labour time under “fair” capitalist exchange), (2) to make sense of the conviction and passion Marxists invest in questions of equality, (2) to explain Marxist participation in political struggles when each can harmlessly stay at home (since the contribution of each makes little, if any, difference to the outcome of these struggles). See Cohen (1983, pp. 442–445) and Cohen (1995, pp. 139, 195).
If, as Cohen asserts elsewhere, being forced to X is a form of unfreedom, it follows that some forms of “unfreedom require freedom.” See Cohen (1998, p. 15).
Cohen here enlists his parable of the cave and key: there are ten people in the cave and only one key. Once someone exits the door is locked forever. The people in the room are individually free to exit, i.e., free in sensu diviso, but not collectively free, in sensu composito, to do so.
Cohen (1995).
It is here that libertarianism bifurcates into its left- and right- variants, the former embracing equality of (access to) external resources, and the latter placing little or no restrictions on the extent of permissible inequality. For recent discussion of left-libertarianism, see Otsuka (2005), chapter 1.
See Nozick (1974), pp. 174–182.
This is a précis of Cohen’s (1998) argument, which discusses the conceptual intricacies between money and freedom in much greater depth.
See Roemer (1995), pp. 65–96.
For Cohen exploitation is a subset of injustice, or more precisely, of unfairness. I shall briefly return to this in Sect. 3.2.
The term “market” is multiply ambiguous. Cohen manifestly means by it, not an innocuous forum for exchange of goods and services, but what Marxists call “generalised commodity production,” i.e., a system of production in which use values, including labour power, are bought and sold in the pursuit of profit. Carens’ egalitarian system (for more on which see Sect. 2.6, below) is market-based in the first sense alone.
See, apart from his “The Future of a Disillusion” essay, Cohen (1994).
In sapient commentary on Cohen, David Estlund links Cohen’s critique of Rawls with Marx’s early critique of Otto Bauer: “only when the actual, individual man… has recognized and organized his ‘own powers’ as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then is human emancipation complete.” (Marx 1994, p. 21) See Estlund (1998) for discussion.
Cohen (2000b, p. 167). As we shall see, Cohen means here “a society with roughly the same income” which also satisfies the ideals of freedom, community and democracy.
I agree with Cohen’s condemnation, but I also believe Dworkin’s inference to be flawed: even if justice tracks opportunity costs to others, it does not follow that markets can do this tracking better than other structures, or, indeed that they can do it in any satisfactory way. I criticise this inference in an essay entitled “Egalitarianism Against the Market,” which is available from me upon request.
This is part of the endorsement of the book by Joshua Cohen, which captures the general tenor of the authors commenting on Cohen’s substantive ethical argument in Feltham (2009).
See, for example, Cohen’s opening remarks in the essay on incentives, where he declares that his argument “applies not only to capitalist economies but also to economies without private ownership of capital, such as certain forms of market socialism.” (Cohen 2008, p. 34).
That chapter is a reproduction of Cohen’s 1991 Tanner Lectures, entitled “Incentives, Inequality and Community.” I shall refer to the Rescuing Justice and Equality, rather than the Tanner, version because the former includes some (minor) 2008 revisions.
The argument of Rescuing Justice and Equality asserts a form of the difference principle: it is intended as an ad hominem critique of Rawls. Cohen’s own account of justice is, as we have seen, inconsistent with the difference principle (even in its “strict” egalitarian interpretations). It therefore condemns rewards to the talented much more readily than does Rawls’. For discussion of the “lax” and “strict” interpretations of the difference principle, see the discussion that follows.
Of course, he grants that the behaviour of the kidnapper and the behaviour of the talented egoist are disanalogous in many respects (Cohen 2008, p. 41). But there is one respect in which they are analogous, namely in encroaching upon justice and community in an objectionable way.
It is sometimes unclear whether the ideal of community, which Cohen calls “justificatory community,” elicits a criterion of (the extent of) community, or whether it corresponds to a practical norm that ought to prevail in any desirable form of society. If, as he claims, “justificatory community is a set of people among whom there prevails a norm of comprehensive justification” (Cohen 2008, p. 43), the interpersonal test being a necessary condition for such justification, then arguably only full democratisation and accountability in economic life would fit the bill. I shall come back to this question in Sect. 3.4.
A distribution X is Pareto superior to Y if and only if X makes at least someone better off and no one worse off. The Pareto principle always mandates Pareto improvements, i.e., movements from X to Y when X is Pareto superior to Y (and vice-versa).
For an ever more forceful charge of inconsistency against Brian Barry’s deployment of the Pareto argument, see Cohen (2008, p. 112).
In terms of Fig. 1, Cohen probably believed democratic socialism to be presently feasible at D1, but not at D3, or close to D3. His view is, perhaps, too pessimistic. For it is economically very difficult to effect a transition from capitalism to socialism and in the process not render at least someone at the lower end of the distribution better off: any form of socialism implemented in the near future would, in all likelihood, not be Pareto inferior to D2. The Pareto principle is, in practice, much weaker than Cohen made it out to be in the context of anti-Rawlsian polemic.
Objective freedom is, roughly, concerned with the constraints imposed on peoples’ lives by the relations of production. See Sect. 2.2 for Cohen’s views of the relationship between individual and collective freedom.
See, for example, Cohen (1998, p. 7).
The distinction between objective and subjective freedom is obviously reminiscent of Hegel. But as I have drawn the distinction, it is inconsistent with the way Hegel draws (or seems to have drawn) it. For Hegel would not necessarily label A’s increased liability to interference as a reduction in A’s objective freedom, although he might grant that it reduces his subjective freedom. Cohen could, of course, also accede to the latter possibility, à la Hegel, but would by stipulation count increased liability to interference as a reduction in objective freedom. For recent defence of this distinction in Hegel, see Patten (2002), chapters 2 and 3.
For a similar definition see Julius (forthcoming). Julius is interested not in subjective unfreedom, but in a broader notion of wrongful coercion. I thank Faik Kurtulmus for the pointer.
“Typically” is in order here because A may be forced to do something he fully wants to do, as when he genuinely wants to please his sadistic girlfriend and does not mind the attendant violence.
For Cohen’s early endorsement of the unity between objective and subjective freedom (albeit not stated in these terms), see Cohen (2000a, pp. 130–133).
It bears noting that there is nothing perfectionist, or non-neutral with respect to conceptions of the good, about this conception of “advantage.” For “genuine” may be construed content-neutrally–it can include, for example, preference satisfaction, among other things.
See also his distinction between an “accidentally” and a “constitutively” just society, where Cohen insists that the predicate “just” be principally “applied to distribution,” in Cohen (2000b , p. 132).
Cohen actually thought that different forms (or “aspects” as he calls them in Cohen 2008, p. 323) of the same value, such as comparative and non-comparative forms of justice, are potentially at odds with one another. For this recurring pluralist motif, see Cohen (1989, p. 908), Cohen (1995, pp. 25, 257), and Cohen (2008, pp. 274–279, 315–320).
Steven Darwall has recently defended a second-personal standpoint as an irreducible claim-generating moral perspective in Darwall (2004), pp. 44–45. Darwall’s argument may not entail the substantive commitments Cohen puts forward, but it is methodologically congenial to Cohen. For certain moral demands are, for Darwall, “irreducibly second-personal,” i.e., they cannot, without loss, be presented in terms other than “I-thou.” This claim, if true, would reinforce the moral robustness of Cohen’s deployment of the interpersonal test.
It seems to follow from the “just because…” clause that Cohen believes community suffers only if justice suffers. This claim is at odds with his professed agnosticism about potential conflict between justice and community and flatly contradicts his discussion of the complaining car owner (see Cohen 2009, pp. 35–36). Cohen elsewhere explicitly interprets his own view as involving a “trade-off between fraternity and fairness” in Cohen (2006, p. 443). But whether he actually thought that justice is a presupposition of community, or not, does not impugn the point plainly entailed by this passage, that the making of the minor premise true and the voicing of that premise are distinct moral wrongs. The voicing elicits the further demand that the kidnapper be (more) ashamed for his behaviour. Unlike Cohen, Darwall asserts that guilt, and not shame, is the singular most (second-personally) apt emotion in kidnapper-like cases (see Darwall 2004, p. 48). But perhaps Cohen’s “you should be ashamed!” just means here: “feel guilty!”.
Compare (early) Marx’s “Comments on James Mill”: “I have produced for myself and not for you, just as you have produced for yourself and not for me. In itself, the result of my production has as little connection with you as the result of your production has directly with me. That is to say, our production is not man's production for man as a man, i.e., it is not social production… Each of us sees in his product only the objectification of his own selfish need, and therefore in the product of the other the objectification of a different selfish need, independent of him and alien to him.” (Marx 1986, pp. 31–32). See also Cohen’s interpretation of Marxian communism, as a “concert of mutually supporting self-fulfilments” in Cohen (1995, p. 123).
Darwall thinks the Kantian notion of treating people as ends in themselves can only be meaningfully fulfilled in second-personal terms. This thought is again congenial to Cohen, for whom the wrong of purely instrumental uses of others can only be fully understood once the dialogue pregnant in, or elicited by, social relationships comes adequately into view. Cohen’s interpersonal test is, in many ways, a screening device permitting him to track down and substantially distinguish between instrumental and non-instrumental uses of people. It is worth noting that these arguments have more than passing resemblance with Jürgen Habermas’ “discourse ethics,” although Cohen was –almost certainly- not acquainted with Habermasian moral philosophy.
“There’s actually much less inequality now than there was, say, 100 years ago. Then, only a few radicals proposed that everyone should have the vote. Others thought that was a dangerous idea, and most would have considered it to be an unrealistic one. Yet today we have the vote. We are a political democracy. But we’re not an economic democracy. We don’t share our material resources, and most people in this country would regard that as an unrealistic idea. Yet I think it’s an idea whose time will come. Society won’t always be divided into those who control its resources and those who have only their own labour to sell. But it’ll take a lot of thought to work out the design of a democratic economic order, and it’ll take a lot of struggle, against privilege and power, to bring it about. The obstacles to economic democracy are considerable. But just as no one, now, would defend slavery, I believe that a day will come when no one will be able to defend a form of society in which a minority profit from the possession of the majority.” (Cohen 1986).
This follows from the passage just cited and his discussion of joint ownership in Cohen (1995), pp. 83–84. His contradistinction between “the illusory democracy of class-based bourgeois politics” and “a real and complete democracy” are too vague for extraction of a positive thesis.
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Acknowledgments
I knew Jerry Cohen, first as his student and then as a friend, from 2003 to 2009. He possessed a razor-sharp mind, a deep human sensitivity, and a brilliant sense of humour. This essay is a grateful acknowledgement for his patience, generosity and friendship for the 6 years I knew him. I wish to thank Faik Kurtulmus and Maxime Lambrecht for helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft. During the writing of this essay, I have benefited from financial support by the ARC project on sustainability (French-speaking community of Belgium).
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Vrousalis, N. G. A. Cohen’s Vision of Socialism. J Ethics 14, 185–216 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-010-9084-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-010-9084-9