Abstract
One day, perhaps, there will be a book on G.A. Cohen’s ideas that equals in mastery his analyses of Marx, Nozick and Rawls. In the meantime, relatively little has been written of his socialism in comparison to, say, his luck egalitarianism. That is, Cohen’s luck egalitarianism – the idea that, at the bar of egalitarian justice, differential disadvantage due to luck is unjust – has been subject to intense discussion while his socialism – where luck egalitarianism coexists with the value of community – still awaits proper scrutiny. This symposium’s aim is to advance that debate. It arises out of a workshop held at the Goethe University of Frankfurt in April 2011. David Miller and Hillel Steiner critique Cohen’s views, respectively, on market socialism and the character of market exchanges. Nicholas Vrousalis examines Cohen’s views on exploitation. Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen defends Cohen’s anti-statist understanding of justice and shows how it can be applied to liberal human rights debates.
As Cohen once pointed out, John Stuart Mill wrote On Liberty in 1859, and Roy Jenkins implemented his no-harm principle as [the British] Home Secretary in the Wilson government of the 1960s. You could have said to John Stuart Mill, ‘You’re off the wall. What are you talking about? Nobody is going to accept your proposal’. And you would have been right, for the next several decades or so. But so what? (Tormey, 2009: 360)
Socialism remains politically unpopular with voting publics as well as political and economic elites, but each of the contributors, whether this is their intention or not, advances G.A. Cohen’s project of keeping the idea alive.