Date: Sun, 19 Oct 1997 21:05:33 -0400 (EDT)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: G.A. Cohen Interview in Philosophers' Web Magazine 



James F. recites against G.A. Cohen's recent turn to political philosophy
Marx's comment in Critique of the Gotha Program about paying too much
attention to issues of distribution rather than production. I think this is
a mistaken attack on lots of grounds:

1. Marx was attacking a specific document with particular flaws, viz., the
Gotha Program of the SDP, strongly influenced by Lasalle. It does not
follow without a lot of argument that anyone who pays attention to issues
of distributive justice is subject to whatever force Marx's attack on the
Goths Program may have.

2. In fact Cohen's trajectory makes a lot of sense. Formerly he thought
socialism was inevitable. This is a corollary of _Karl Marx's Theory of
History._ After a great deal of discussion of that thesis he came to think
(or realize) that it was untenable: historical materialism can only show
that socialism is possible, not inevitable. In that case, if one supports
it, it needs justification over the other possibilities. So what's
retrograde about justifying it?

3. James F. cites Cohen's engagement with Nozick, Dworkin, Rawls, etc. as
evidence of Cohen's turn from the left. This is rather odd. What are we
to make of, for example, Marx's sustained engagement with Smith, Ricardo,
Malthus, Nassau Senior, etc.? Is James F's idea that Marxist need pay no
attention to their ideological antagonists? 

4. James F. also seems to accept as unproblematic Marx's ridiculous claim
that getting the mode of production right will settle the distributive
questions, as if, for example, the issue of ownership of the means of
production were not a question of distribution. (Incidentally this has
been John Roemer's main distributive concern.) And as if once that were
settled there would be no further difficult distributive questions.

So I don't think these comments will do at all. There are legitimate
concerns to be raised about Cohen's recent work, as indeed about his older
work, but James has failed to raise them.


--Justin Schwartz

On Sat, 18 Oct 1997, James Farmelant wrote:
> 
> 
> Concerning G.A. Cohen's interview in the Philosophers'  Web
> Magazine I would say it clearly reflects the trajectory that has
> characterized
> the evolution other major Analytical Marxists in recent years--from

***

> most
> recent book  *Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality*  (Cambridge:
> Cambridge University Press, 1995).  In that latter book Cohen discusses
> the ethical justification of socialism over capitalism within the context
> of liberal analytical political philosophy as represented by the work of
> John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Robert Nozick.  In fact Cohen in that
> book goes to great pains to rebut the arguments that Nozick laid down
> on behalf of laissez-faire capitalism in his *Anarchy, State and Utopia*
> and to defend a concept of social justice as 'equality of opportunity
> of welfare' that is derived from an 'immanent critique' of Dworkin.
> 
> In the Philosophers' Web Magazine interview it is evident that Cohen's
> critique of capitalism focuses mainly on issues of income distribution.
> While this puts Cohen well within the mainstream of left-liberal
> political philosophy (ie. Rawls and Dworkin) it also places him far from
> Classical Marxism.  Marx in his *Critique of the Gotha Program* 
> criticized
> socialist critiques of capitalism that focused too much on distributional






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