Book in Review: Rescuing Justice and Equality,by G. A. Cohen. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press,2008. 448 pp. $45.00

By Chris Brooke, in an "imperfect paraphrase from memory," http://virtualstoa.net/2009/08/06/jerry-on-jerry/.

G.A. Cohen , Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Rescuing Justice and Equality (RJE) provides many along-the-way insights about the structure of Rawls’s theory; for example, it decisively clarifies and transforms the Rawls-Okin debate about the family and the basic structure, almost as an aside. I omit further mention of such asides, but they provide a great deal of RJE’s interest.

G.A. Cohen , Why Not Socialism? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

One exception is David Miller’s "Political Philosophy for Earthlings," in Political Theory: Methods and Approaches, ed. David Leopold and Marc Stears (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), which focuses on the arguments that concern me here, and offers persuasive Humean responses to them. As Miller emphasizes, the dispute is to some degree methodological, not normative or analytic: it is about the kind of enterprise political theory is, and what it is to examine concepts like justice.