I was contacted by several people about the death of G. A. Cohen, to whose ideas I devoted a chapter of my book Realizing Freedom. (The chapter, originally published in Critical Review, is also available in a PDF form here.)
I’ll just make two points about Cohen here, as I believe it generally best (there are exceptions) not to speak ill of the dead. In a meeting in his office when he reviewed an early draft of the essay above, he admitted that I had found a serious flaw, but demanded to know (and demanded is the right word) what my point was: “Are you attacking the argument, or the conclusion?!” I said I did not understand the question. He answered, “Well, the conclusion does not follow from the argument, so which are you attacking?” I was rather flabbergasted, and replied that the conclusion of an argument is a part of the argument, not some separate thing. But that was not how he saw things, and it showed in his entire career. There are arguments, and there are conclusions. You attach yourself to a conclusion, and then you look for arguments that lead to it. That’s why he was an “analytical Marxist,” i.e., someone who agreed with what he took to be Marx’s conclusions, but who thought that the arguments by which Marx reached them were erroneous or fallacious, so his job was to come up with new arguments. If those didn’t work, you kept the conclusion and looked for other arguments. (In this case, however, despite acknowledging to me that his argument failed to reach the conclusion, he never acknowledged it publicly, but took some pains to lobby journals not to publish my critique, as was confided to me by editors of those journals.)
To get a sense of what kind of man he was, think a bit on this defense of the Soviet Union:
The Soviet Union needed to be there as a defective model so that, with one eye on it, we could construct a better one. It created a non-capitalist mental space in which to think about socialism.
*
Millions had to die so that Cohen and his rich friends could enjoy “a non-capitalist mental space in which to think about socialism.” Words almost fail me. But not entirely. He should have spent his life begging forgiveness from all of the people who suffered from his pro-Soviet (he spent a good bit of his youth as a Soviet propagandist, which was essentially a family enterprise) and pro-Communist activities. He was no different than any old National Socialist who might have bemoaned the fact that National Socialism was nationally socialist enough, but who enjoyed the “mental space” it created to construct fantasies of an ideal life.
I will merely point out that his attacks on charity and assistance to others is consistent, not only with his political philosophy, but with his personality and life.
*From p. 250 of his 1995 book Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), in which he strings together the “argument” that does not lead to the “conclusion” that property rights are unjustified.
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Tom (if I may),
Economists and philosophers can all distinguish between the conclusion of an argument and the argument itself (i.e., the premises linked together). I suspect your encounter here was a misunderstanding.
Your comment about rich friends is snide and unwarranted. Cohen did have some rich egalitarian friends and was perplexed by their commitment to egalitarianism (and wrote about this). He also had some moderaretly wealthy non-egalitarian friends. Unlike many he had friends who were not fellow-travellers. His friendships could transcend politics.
But more seriously you seem to have missed part of the import of Cohen’s work to friends of capitalism. He was raised a Communist and took Marxism and communist very seriously. He sought to reconstruct Marx’s theory of history so that it looked plausible. In the process he and the other two well-known analytical Marxists undermined the theory so that few can find any plausibility in the story any more. All that is left of Marxism is a commitment to a vision of an egalitarian society. That is a remarkable accomplishment.
Further, Cohen was one of the few important analytical political philosophers — the only others were David Gauthier and Jan Narveson — who took Nozick’s book seriously. Cohen spent a couple of decade examining and attacking it. He even wrote an article explaining why Marxists should find it important.
I’ll look up the quotation you cite next month when I return to my office. But I don’t see how you can pin any of the standard accusations of Stalinism or complicity in homicide on him.
I think you miss his importance as a thinker. But were he not also an extraordinary and wonderful human being, I’d not both to pen this note.
Yrs,
Christopher Morris
Dear Christopher (if I may),
I have, of course, heard much about you and read, admired, and learned from your writings.
Please allow me to respond to some of the points you made. “Snide” may be in the eye of the beholder, but “unwarranted” is a different matter. He enjoyed a substantially higher income than the vast bulk of the human race — as do you and I — and made a point of not giving to charity, unlike those of us who don’t share his ideological fixations. The idea that he was somehow exempted from any moral pull of charity until the whole social system should change is a truly striking position. Regarding his statements on the USSR, you really must look them up. The statement is hardly what one would expect of a decent person. He wanted the USSR to be there — it “needed” to be there — so that he could think in his “non-capitalist mental space.” How special for him. No mention of what it meant for that regime to be “there.” You know, as every even minimally aware person knew, that it meant forced labor. It meant arrest for reading illegal poems in public, or even in private. It meant being spied on, beaten down, sent to labor camp, arrested for no cause other than one was at the wrong place at the wrong time, shot, disappeared. I know many people who suffered terribly from what Cohen considered a necessary condition for his parlor musings. Anyone who could write that, or regret the passing of the USSR in 1995, was not the decent person you represent, any more than a jovial and witty Nazi apologist or mocker of the holocaust could be a decent person.
Yes, Cohen took Nozick’s book seriously, at least, the one chapter with which he was acquainted. He didn’t bother to read much else. He didn’t bother to read Locke carefully (as he demonstrated to me during our conversations), or Pufendorf (to clarify the meaning of “community” of resources, a task he didn’t think worth his time, although he put a lot of weight on it in his own writings), or the critiques of socialism, or, frankly, anything on institutions. He read one very clever and important chapter in one book. Why should I be terribly impressed by that? I’m not.
I don’t accuse him of Stalinism. You have been led astray by a red herring. Stalin did not somehow pervert the USSR or lead it astray, as later Soviet apologists insisted. It was perverted from the start. Lenin and Trotsky, the leaders of the coup (against the authentically revolutionary Kerensky government) initiated the policies of oppression and murder, as a great deal of scholarship has proven. Cohen’s support of the USSR makes him complicit in its deeds, not at the level of liability to criminal punishment, but certainly at the level of meriting strong moral condemnation. Would you feel the same way about someone who wrote that the Third Reich “needed to be there,” for any reason whatsoever, even so he could think about its defects and how to do a better job?
Finally, my experience, as someone who actually read his work seriously (it seems that very few did; they did not bother to follow his logic, but simply assumed that it was clever and right), was certainly quite different from yours. He was extremely agitated and upset, as he had to admit that his “argument” did not lead to his “conclusion,” and later intervened to ensure that my article was not published in two journals. I’m rather confident that in that particular discussion, about “conclusions” and “arguments,” we did not misunderstand each other. He admitted that the conclusion did not follow, but wanted to know if I was criticizing the conclusion or the argument. What would it mean to criticize a conclusion? It highlights the extreme intuitionism and the religiosity at the base of his thinking. He was quite committed to those conclusions, and the commitment was not connected to the relationship to the premises.
Being witty is not the same as being a scholar, and it is no compensation for a lack of moral seriousness and responsibility. Many people supported Communist tyranny in the twentieth century, as many supported Fascist tyranny and National Socialist tyranny. Those who admitted their errors should be differentiated from those who did not, and even more so from those who openly and actively regretted the passing of those tyrannies.
Cordially,
Tom G. Palmer
Gentlemen:
It seems that both of you are discussing Cohen on the basis of your personal knowledge of him as well as his writings. So, it is hard to know who is right.
But it does seem that if a person regrets the passing of the Soviet Union, then this is not a very admirable thing to know about that person, to say the least. Finally, Tom is certainly correct to note that “being witty” is not enough.
Best to you both,
Doug