Jerry Cohen
The unexpected passing of Gerald “Jerry” Cohen is a great loss to the philosophical community. A lion in the field over the past 30+ years, it is hard to think of a major contemporary political philosopher who has not been greatly influenced by his teaching or writing. Sam, Jake and I are lucky enough to count ourselves among this crowd (well, not the “major philosopher” part). Jerry was a professor of ours at Oxford and a teacher and role-model for much longer. The idea for this Public Philosophy project stemmed in no small part from the discussions had in and around the course we took with him.
Jerry’s own work led him to see the importance of public philosophy. His research in the ‘90s focused on the central role of individuals and their own life choices to the pursuit of justice. As such, he found particular importance in making political philosophy relevant and understandable to non-philosophers. As philosopher and former Cohen student Chris Beltram writes, “Faced with the opportunity to talk about social justice, equality, capitalism or socialism to an audience of ordinary people, Jerry would be absolutely meticulous about explaining himself clearly and engagingly to them…He was effective in such contexts because justice mattered to him, because it really does matter, and not just as as an exercise in the academy.”
It would be strange to write about Jerry and not mention his sense of humor and quick wit, for if there is one thing he was known for aside from his philosophy, it was this. Jerry titled his 2008 Valedictory Lecture: ‘My philosophical development and impressions of philosophers I met along the way’. Many turned up expecting his thoughts on the philosophical greats he had come across. But what the audience got were actual impressions—Jerry as his supervisor Gilbert Ryle, Jerry as Isaiah Berlin, and so on. In 2002, Jerry was delivering a talk at the University of Nottingham on his critique of Rawls. One student raised his hand and began to point out a commonality he thought he had spotted between Rawls and Cohen. He began: “far be it for me to make friends between the Great and the Good…” Then, quick as a flash, and before the student had a chance to get out the rest of his question, Jerry butted in: “Now hang on a minute. Which of us is which?”
No doubt, the world lost a great philosopher, a great professor and a great human being this week.
Cohen’s work can be split into three successive phases: his engagement with Marxism; his rebuttal of libertarianism; and his exploration of liberal theories of equality.
Cohen’s first published book, Karl Marx’s Theory of History—A Defence, took an entirely novel approach to the study of historical materialism, using the analytical methods of philosophy, neoclassical economics and rational choice theory. Like all of Cohen’s work, the book had a major impact on the field of philosophy, and came to form the basis of a new approach to the study of Marx, known as analytical Marxism.
Through most of his early work on Marxism, Cohen gave little effort to the defense of equality. Cohen thought socialism was so self-evidently superior to capitalism that there was no need to argue for it: any opposition was self-interested or class based. Cohen was woken from what he calls this ‘dogmatic slumber’ by Robert Nozick’s libertarian arguments in Anarchy, State and Utopia, which he found particularly powerful. Cohen detected similar themes between libertarianism’s emphasis on freedom and self-ownership and his own socialist thought. Historically there had never been much need to distinguish between “it’s mine because I made it” and “it’s mine because I need it,” because the poor were the workers. In Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality, Cohen shows that these principles are in conflict and ultimately chooses freedom and equality, arguing that self-ownership does not produce the freedom that libertarians assume it does.
His renewed emphasis on equality led him to address the fundamental question: equality of what? In “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice,” Cohen argues that egalitarians should be concerned not with equality of welfare or equality of resources, but with “equality of access to advantage.” For Cohen, “the grounding idea of egalitarianism” is that “it is bad if some people are worse off than others through no voluntary choice or fault of their own.” The implication, of course, is that it is not bad if people are worse off because of free choice. In other words, we only need equalize that which traceable to luck; where an inequality is due to choice, justice requires that inequality. Cohen’s arguments came to form the basis of a theory of distributive justice known as luck egalitarianism – the details of which still occupy many political philosophers today.
Once Cohen established what equality meant and that it was central to justice, he began to investigate what was necessary for the realization of justice. In If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? and in his latest book Rescuing Justice and Equality, Cohen takes on the Rawlsian notion that principles of justice applies only to the laws and institutions – the basic structure – of society. According to Cohen, justice requires not only just laws, but also just personal choice within society. As the title of the first book suggests, it is not consistent for one to be an egalitarian at the ballot box and economic self-maximizers in private life. For Cohen a change in the ethos of society, not just its laws, is necessary for the achievement of justice.
Agree or not with Cohen’s philosophy, his work is a model of rigorous analytical philosophy and the source of many influential ideas.
-Marc
(Note: parts of this post were excerpted from an introduction to Jerry Cohen delivered by Patrick Tomlin and me in May of 2008).
Related posts:
- In memoriam, G.A. Cohen
- Philosophy for second graders
- Can presidents have fun?
- Banning the burqa
- Not public philosophy, but fun anyway…
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Great quote by Jerry on his own philosophical career, as remembered by Oxford philosopher Chris Brooke (a former tutor of mine) – http://virtualstoa.net/2009/08/06/jerry-on-jerry/
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