DOCSLIB.ORG

Introduction to the 2000 Edition: Reflections on Analytical Marxism

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Introduction to the 2000 Edition: Reflections on Analytical Marxism Introduction to the 2000 Edition: Reflections on Analytical Marxism THIS book received more attention than would otherwise have been bestowed upon it by virtue of the coincidence that it appeared just when a number of other Marxist scholars were also beginning to devote themselves to work of a kind that is now called 'analytical Marxist'. They, like me, had a 'Commitment without Reverence'1 to Marxism, and we formed a group that has now been meeting annu- ally for more than twenty years. In the present Introduction, I shall say (section i) what analytical Marxism is, and I shall describe (section 2) the formation of the Group that has promoted it. Section 3 is a personal interlude: it recounts how I, in particular, became an analytical Marxist. In section 4 the analyticality of analytical Marxism is delineated in greater detail, and section 5 discusses bullshit, the bete noire of ana- lytical Marxism. The final section addresses the irrepressible ques- tion: is analytical Marxism Marxist? (1) Analytical Marxism I shall not try to define 'Marxism'.2 As for 'analytical', it has two relevant, and relevantly different, senses in the present context, a broad sense and a narrow one. All analytical Marxism is analytical in the broad sense, and much is analytical in the narrow sense. In each sense of 'analytical', to be analytical is to be opposed to a form of thinking traditionally thought integral to Marxism: analytical thinking, in the broad sense of 'analytical', is opposed to so-called 'dialectical' think- ing, and analytical thinking, in the narrow sense of 'analytical', is opposed to what might be called 'holistic' thinking. The fateful opera- tion that created analytical Marxism was the rejection of the claim that Marxism possesses valuable intellectual methods of its own. Rejection of that claim enabled an appropriation of a rich mainstream methodology that Marxism, to its detriment, had shunned. ' That is the title of an article that bears the subtitle 'Reflections on Analytical Marxism', which appeared in Imprints for 1997, and from which the greater part of the present Introduction is taken. 2 But see section 6 for some effort in that direction. xviii INTRODUCTION TO THE 2000 EDITION The mainstream methodology that I have in mind deploys intellectual techniques that were shaped within several currents of non-Marxist Western (and mainly anglophone) social science and philosophy. The techniques in question are commonly styled 'analytical', in a broad sense, because their use requires and facilitates precision of statement on the one hand and rigour of argument on the other. We can distinguish three such sets of techniques. First, there are the techniques of logical and linguistic analy- sis that developed within twentieth-century positivist and post- positivist philosophy, initially in the German-speaking but dien (as a result of Nazism) dominantly in the English-speaking world. Next, there are the techniques of economic analysis which descend from Adam Smith and David Ricardo but which were given mathematical form within neo-classical economics, roughly from the time of Leon Walras and Alfred Marshall. And, finally, there are the techniques of the representation of choice, action, and strategy that developed out of and alongside that neo-classical economics: those techniques belong to what are now called 'decision theory', 'game theory', and, more generally, 'rational choice theory', and they are widely applied within contemporary political science. Now, scholars who write about analytical Marxism usually name three people as its founders: G. A. Cohen, Jon Elster, and John Roemer. That is a reasonable judgement, and I shall follow it here. Without too much distortion, one may say that Cohen is associated with the philosophical techniques identified above, Roemer with the economic, and Elster, who is a political scientist, with rational choice theory. There is some distortion there, because Elster, who is by far the most erudite and wide-ranging of the diree, employs in his work all three sets of techniques, because Roemer is a game theorist as well as an economist, and because Cohen's work is not wholly inno- cent of game-theoretical devices in their simple pre-mathematical form. But the suggested tripartite division does represent an approxi- mate truth. (2) The September Group Each of the aforementioned three scholars learned his Marxism independently of learning analytical methods, since there was, per- force, no analytical Marxism for them to learn before they had INTRODUCTION TO THE 2000 EDITION xix founded the school.1 Each put analysis and Marxism together before he had met the other two. The three came to know one another over the period 1979 to 1981, and one could say that analytical Marxism was truly in business by September 1981, when the trio met with some eight or nine others of similar mind, in London. Since then there has been an annual three-day meeting each September, usually in London,2 of about ten analytical Marxists, from four or five countries. The prehistory of (what is now called) 'the September Group' was as follows. With Cohen's assistance, Elster convened a weekend meeting in London in September 1979, of about a dozen scholars, of Marxist or quasi-Marxist stripe, from several European countries, all of whom were working on the concept of exploitation. We found our exchanges congenial and stimulating, so a similar meeting, again on exploitation, with roughly the same cast, occurred in London in September of 1980. At the close of that meeting it was decided to meet annually, but to remove the restriction of discussion to exploitation. The personnel, as of 1981, were the most dedicated who had attended in 1979 and/or 1980, together with one or two new invitees. Since 1981, membership in the Group has been remarkably stable. As I write, we consist of Pranab Bardhan (Berkeley), Samuel Bowles (Amherst), Robert Brenner (Los Angeles), G. A. Cohen (Oxford), Joshua Cohen (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Philippe van Parijs (Louvain-la Neuve), John Roemer (Yale), Hillel Steiner (Manchester), Robert Van der Veen (Amsterdam), and Erik Wright (Madison). Since 1982, when Bardhan joined, there have been two departures and two fresh adhesions. Jon Elster and Adam Przeworski left in 1993, in reaction, so they said, to what they considered to be unsatisfactory aspects of the intellectual character that the group had evolved: others of us thought that their farewells had more to do with the demise of European communism. Bowles joined in 1987, and Joshua Cohen in 1996. 1 Each of the three had a political commitment to Marxism, or to something close to Marxism, before his academic induction into the techniques that I have described. Cohen and Roemer were raised in North America, in pro-Soviet, pro-People's Republic homes, by politically active parents. Elster's background was not communist, but he participated in a once robust left socialist Norwegian movement which was friendly to Marxism. 2 We met in Paris in 1982, in Chicago in 1991, in New York in 1996, in Cambridge (Massachusetts) in 1998, and in Oxford in 1999. xx INTRODUCTION TO THE 2000 EDITION (3) My Path to Analytical Marxism It is extremely difficult to adopt and pursue an intellectual method simply as a result of coming across its use in a book or an article and finding it attractive. Practice of the methods that I have described requires a training in them, an apprenticeship. And I shall now explain why peculiarities of my own background made me receptive to the required training at a time when other Marxists in my cohort were not. (Similarly differentiating stories could no doubt be told about Elster and Roemer, but it is not for me to tell them.) My initial ingestion of Marxism took place in a peculiar milieu. My parents were Jewish communist factory workers in Montreal who met in the course of struggles to build unionism in the garment trade, in the face of brutal boss and police repression. When I was four years old, in 1945, my parents enrolled me in the Morris Winchewsky Yiddish School, which was run by a communist Jewish organization. It was the only school that I attended until I was eleven, when raids by the 'Red Squad' of the Province of Quebec Police on the premises of the organization, and on the school itself, made it impossible for the school to continue. (This was in 1952, and the raids were part of the local contribution to the McCarthyite persecution then still pro- ceeding in North America. The Quebecois version of McCarthyism was less insidious than the real article occurring south of the border, but it was also more brutal, and, especially for a child, more imme- diately frightening.) My upbringing induced in me a love of and belief in Marxist ideas, and, by the time I reached McGill University to study for my first degree, I had read, with imperfect understanding, a number of the classics of Marxism. I was certain, at seventeen, that Frederick Engels's Anti-Duhring contained all the important philosophical truth that there was. I came to see its limitations as an undergraduate, and I concluded that its philosophical sections, by contrast with those on society and history, were naive. But my commitment to historical materialism was more durable, and I long intended to expound and defend it as best I could, and eventually, in 1978, I published (the first edition of) the present book, in fulfilment of that long-standing intention. The book owes its methodological character to the circumstance that I moved in 1961 from McGill to Oxford, where, under the benign guidance of Gilbert Ryle, I learned British analytical philosophy. INTRODUCTION TO THE 2000 EDITION xxi Almost all politically committed students were, at that time, and throughout the 1960s, hostile to that philosophy.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Philosophy of Ecological Crisis and Two Forms of Modern Dialectics
    Utopía y Praxis Latinoamericana ISSN: 1315-5216 ISSN: 2477-9555 [email protected] Universidad del Zulia Venezuela Philosophy of Ecological Crisis and two Forms of Modern Dialectics VALIULLINA, Zaynab R.; LUKJANOV, Arkadiy V.; PUSKAREWA, Marina A. Philosophy of Ecological Crisis and two Forms of Modern Dialectics Utopía y Praxis Latinoamericana, vol. 23, no. 82, 2018 Universidad del Zulia, Venezuela Available in: https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=27957591037 DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1513030 This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International. PDF generated from XML JATS4R by Redalyc Project academic non-profit, developed under the open access initiative Utopía y Praxis Latinoamericana, 2018, vol. 23, no. 82, July-September, ISSN: 1315-5216 2477-9555 Notas y debates de actualidad Philosophy of Ecological Crisis and two Forms of Modern Dialectics La filosofía de la crisis ecológica y dos formas de la dialéctica moderna Zaynab R. VALIULLINA DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1513030 Bashkir State University, Rusia Redalyc: https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa? [email protected] id=27957591037 http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7120-4516 Arkadiy V. LUKJANOV Bashkir State University, Rusia Marina A. PUSKAREWA Bashkir State University, Rusia Received: 21 August 2018 Accepted: 16 September 2018 Abstract: e rapid development of science and technology results in a change of human lifestyle. e main purpose of the work is to study the philosophy of ecological crisis and the forms of modern dialectics. e idea of "intersubjectivity" will function as our methodological basis. Continuation of Hegel’s ideas and essays of existentialists are related to dialectical processing of thought and technology.
    [Show full text]
  • Some Worries About the Coherence of Left-Libertarianism Mathias Risse
    John F. Kennedy School of Government Harvard University Faculty Research Working Papers Series Can There be “Libertarianism without Inequality”? Some Worries About the Coherence of Left-Libertarianism Mathias Risse Nov 2003 RWP03-044 The views expressed in the KSG Faculty Research Working Paper Series are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the John F. Kennedy School of Government or Harvard University. All works posted here are owned and copyrighted by the author(s). Papers may be downloaded for personal use only. Can There be “Libertarianism without Inequality”? Some Worries About the Coherence of Left-Libertarianism1 Mathias Risse John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University October 25, 2003 1. Left-libertarianism is not a new star on the sky of political philosophy, but it was through the recent publication of Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner’s anthologies that it became clearly visible as a contemporary movement with distinct historical roots. “Left- libertarian theories of justice,” says Vallentyne, “hold that agents are full self-owners and that natural resources are owned in some egalitarian manner. Unlike most versions of egalitarianism, left-libertarianism endorses full self-ownership, and thus places specific limits on what others may do to one’s person without one’s permission. Unlike right- libertarianism, it holds that natural resources may be privately appropriated only with the permission of, or with a significant payment to, the members of society. Like right- libertarianism, left-libertarianism holds that the basic rights of individuals are ownership rights. Left-libertarianism is promising because it coherently underwrites both some demands of material equality and some limits on the permissible means of promoting this equality” (Vallentyne and Steiner (2000a), p 1; emphasis added).
    [Show full text]
  • Quong-Left-Libertarianism.Pdf
    The Journal of Political Philosophy: Volume 19, Number 1, 2011, pp. 64–89 Symposium: Ownership and Self-ownership Left-Libertarianism: Rawlsian Not Luck Egalitarian Jonathan Quong Politics, University of Manchester HAT should a theory of justice look like? Any successful answer to this Wquestion must find a way of incorporating and reconciling two moral ideas. The first is a particular conception of individual freedom: because we are agents with plans and projects, we should be accorded a sphere of liberty to protect us from being used as mere means for others’ ends. The second moral idea is that of equality: we are moral equals and as such justice requires either that we receive equal shares of something—of whatever it is that should be used as the metric of distributive justice—or else requires that unequal distributions can be justified in a manner that is consistent with the moral equality of persons. These twin ideas—liberty and equality—are things which no sound conception of justice can properly ignore. Thus, like most political philosophers, I take it as given that the correct conception of justice will be some form of liberal egalitarianism. A deep and difficult challenge for all liberal egalitarians is to determine how the twin values of freedom and equality can be reconciled within a single theory of distributive justice. Of the many attempts to achieve this reconciliation, left-libertarianism is one of the most attractive and compelling. By combining the libertarian commitment to full (or nearly full) self-ownership with an egalitarian principle for the ownership of natural resources, left- libertarians offer an account of justice that appears firmly committed both to individual liberty, and to an egalitarian view of how opportunities or advantages must be distributed.
    [Show full text]
  • Anarchy in the PA? Anti-Essentialism, Anti-Statism, and the Future of Public Administration
    CONFERENCE DRAFT This paper is not intended for general circulation and may not be cited without the permission of the author. Anarchy in the PA? Anti-Essentialism, Anti-Statism, and the Future of Public Administration Thomas J. Catlaw Assistant Professor School of Public Affairs Arizona State University 411 North Central Avenue Mail Code 3720, Suite 450 Phoenix, AZ 85004 Email: [email protected] Phone (602) 496-0459 Paper prepared for presentation at the “Public Administration and Anti-Essentialism” Conference, Florida Atlantic University, Fort Lauderdale, FL—March 2-3, 2007 Introduction Authority has been an ongoing focus of scholarly and intellectual investigation for nearly entirety of modern social science. In sociology, this concern can be tracked from Weber’s famous typologies and Durkheim’s exposition of anomie, a state induced by the decline of regulative authority relations, through the 1960’s “twilight of authority” (Nisbet, 1975) and the contemporary declaration of a “post-traditional” order (Giddens, 1994). Authority has also received enormous consideration in political science and political philosophy (Agamben, 2005; Arendt, 1958; Benne, 1943; DeGeorge, 1985; Engles, 1978; Flathman, 1980; Friedrich, 1972; Laski, 2000/1919; Lowi, 1970; McKercher, 1989), anthropology (W. B. Miller, 1955; Turner, 1969), organizational sociology (Blau, 1968; Dalton, Barnes, & Zaleznik, 1973/1968; Meyer, 1972), psychology (Kelman & Hamilton, 1989), and a wide range of provocative interdisciplinary legal, political, and psychological perspectives (Diggins & Kann, 1981; Friedrich, 1958; Horkheimer, 1972; Lincoln, 1994; Pennock & Chapman, 1987; Sennett, 1980). The literature on the topic is internally contradictory and voluminous—not withstanding the fact that consideration of authority readily expands into equally nebulous and complex concepts such as power, legitimacy, the state, and the nature of social order itself with no obvious analytic or historical limit.
    [Show full text]
  • An Introduction to Philosophy
    An Introduction to Philosophy W. Russ Payne Bellevue College Copyright (cc by nc 4.0) 2015 W. Russ Payne Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document with attribution under the terms of Creative Commons: Attribution Noncommercial 4.0 International or any later version of this license. A copy of the license is found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ 1 Contents Introduction ………………………………………………. 3 Chapter 1: What Philosophy Is ………………………….. 5 Chapter 2: How to do Philosophy ………………….……. 11 Chapter 3: Ancient Philosophy ………………….………. 23 Chapter 4: Rationalism ………….………………….……. 38 Chapter 5: Empiricism …………………………………… 50 Chapter 6: Philosophy of Science ………………….…..… 58 Chapter 7: Philosophy of Mind …………………….……. 72 Chapter 8: Love and Happiness …………………….……. 79 Chapter 9: Meta Ethics …………………………………… 94 Chapter 10: Right Action ……………………...…………. 108 Chapter 11: Social Justice …………………………...…… 120 2 Introduction The goal of this text is to present philosophy to newcomers as a living discipline with historical roots. While a few early chapters are historically organized, my goal in the historical chapters is to trace a developmental progression of thought that introduces basic philosophical methods and frames issues that remain relevant today. Later chapters are topically organized. These include philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, areas where philosophy has shown dramatic recent progress. This text concludes with four chapters on ethics, broadly construed. I cover traditional theories of right action in the third of these. Students are first invited first to think about what is good for themselves and their relationships in a chapter of love and happiness. Next a few meta-ethical issues are considered; namely, whether they are moral truths and if so what makes them so.
    [Show full text]
  • CHAPTER 2.1 Augustine: Commentary
    CHAPTER 2.1 Augustine: Commentary Augustine Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis (henceforth Augustine) was born in 354 A.D. in the municipium of Thagaste (modern day Souk Ahras, Algeria, close to the border with Tunisia). He died in 430, as the Arian1 Vandals besieged the city of Hippo where he was bishop, marking another stage in the demise of the Roman Empire. Rome had already been sacked in 410 by Alaric the Visigoth, but the slow decline of Roman grandeur took place over a period of about 320 years which culminated in 476 when Romulus Augustus, the last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, was deposed by Odoacer, a Germanic chieftain. Augustine thus lived at a time which heralded the death knell of the ancient world and the beginnings of mediaeval western European Christendom.2 Augustine‘s great legacy to western civilization is that intellectually he united both worlds in drawing from the ancient thought of Greece and Rome and providing a Christian understanding of the intellectual achievements of the ancients. His new synthesis is a remarkable achievement even today and for those of us, who remain Christians in the West, our debates, agreements and disagreements are still pursued in Augustine‘s shadow.3 1 Arianism was a schismatic sect of Christianity that held the view that the Second Person of the Trinity, Christ, is created and thus does not exist eternally with the Father. 2 See J. M. Rist‘s magnificent Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003. Rist notes that, ‗Despite his lack of resources he managed to sit in judgment on ancient philosophy and ancient culture.‘ p.
    [Show full text]
  • Sharing Mother Nature's Gifts: a Reply to Quong and Miller
    Sharing Mother Nature’s Gifts: A Reply to Quong and Miller Hillel Steiner University of Manchester Note to participants in the Territory and Justice conference, Dublin 2010: This paper is part of a symposium that will shortly be published in the Journal of Political Philosophy. It is Part II of this paper – my reply to David Miller – that is relevant to the concerns of our conference and that should be comprehensible even in the absence of David’s paper. Of course, I’d very much welcome any comments you might have on any part of the paper. Please send them to me at [email protected] . Thanks. Sharing Mother Nature’s Gifts: A Reply to Quong and Miller Hillel Steiner University of Manchester For nearly forty years now, philosophers working on conceptions of distributive justice have been arguing about whether – and if so, how – responsibility-sensitivity can be an integral feature of their accounts. Some, primarily right libertarians, have contended that it can be if, and only if, the sole foundational right ascribed to individuals is one of self-ownership.1 Others, primarily strict egalitarians, have tended to agree with them and have consequently rejected both responsibility-sensitivity and self-ownership on the grounds that the unequal distributions which those features underwrite are patently unjust. Luck egalitarian theories reject both of these positions, though their reasons for doing so vary somewhat from one such theory to another. Left libertarianism is a luck egalitarian theory or, more precisely, a family of luck egalitarian theories. Among their several reasons for rejecting right libertarianism is the fact that it fails the responsibility-sensitivity test.
    [Show full text]
  • Gerald A. Cohen (1941-2009) an Intellectual Journey Through Radical Thought
    Gerald A. Cohen (1941-2009) An intellectual journey through radical thought Fabien Tarrit Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne France Abstract: The philosopher Gerald A. Cohen, who once was a Chichele Professor at Oxford University, between 1984 and 2008, died on the 5th of August last year. His thought, known as a radical one and explicitly intended as serving the liberation of humanity, suddenly appeared on the intellectual theatre in 1978 with the publication of Karl Marx‟s Theory of History: A Defence. This book can be seen as doubly original. On the one hand it defends historical materialism on the basis of methodological foundations (analytical philosophy, logical positivism, functional explanation) that are usually known as contradictory with Marx‟s method. On the other hand, it initiated a school of thought, Analytical Marxism, which debate also took on economics, sociology, history… Later, after a long-lasting debate, still in search of intellectual radicalism, he gradually departed from Marx‟s theory, both for theoretical reasons in terms of logical consistency, and for empirical reasons in terms of correspondence between theory and empirical facts. He then gradually turned on theoretical discussions in political philosophy that flourished around John Rawls‟ Theory of Justice. This was not an immediate shift, since beforehand he appropriated the libertarian concept of self-ownership in order to associate it to a Marxist approach. In doing so, he intended, on the basis of John Locke‟s theory, to use a libertarian argument as a tool for critical theory. Cohen then gave up this concept before entering the normative debate around issues on social justice.
    [Show full text]
  • Critique of Pure Reason the Dialectic
    Critique of Pure Reason the Dialectic Immanuel Kant 1781 Copyright © Jonathan Bennett 2017. All rights reserved [Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations, are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Each four-point ellipsis . indicates the omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth. Longer omissions will be reported between square brackets in normal-sized type. This version follows (B) the second edition of the Critique, though it also includes the (A) first-edition version of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. Undecorated marginal numerals refer to page-numbers in B; ones with an ‘A’ in front refer to A, and are given only for passages that don’t also occur in B. The likes of ..356 in the margin mean that B356 (or whatever) started during the immediately preceding passage that has been omitted or only described between square brackets. These marginal numerals can help you to connect this version with other translations, with the original German, and with references in the secondary literature. Cross-references to other parts of this work include the word ‘page(s)’, and refer to numbers at the top-right corner of each page.—The Transcendental logic divides into the Transcendental analytic, which started on page 45, and the Transcendental dialectic, which starts here. First launched: January 2008 Critique. Dialectic Immanuel Kant Contents Introduction 155 1.
    [Show full text]
  • Kant's Account of the Rational Sources of Metaphysics in The
    CON-TEXTOS KANTIANOS. International Journal of Philosophy N.o 10, Diciembre 2019, pp. 235-239 ISSN: 2386-7655 Doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3583193 Kant’s Account of the Rational Sources of Metaphysics in the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason RUDOLF MEER• Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, Russia Review of: Willaschek, M., Kant on the Sources of Metaphysics. The Dialectic of Pure Reason. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 308. ISBN-13: 978- 1108472630. The Transcendental Dialectic is an insufficiently studied section of the Critique of Pure Reason. This is surprising given that Division Two of the Transcendental Logic forms the largest part of Kant’s first critique. If the doctrine is systematically considered, then Kant’s critique of the metaphysica specialis—that is, rational psychology, rational cosmology, and rational theology—is at the core of the investigations (Willaschek 2018, p. 11). And in fact, the emphasis seems to be on the destruction of the unconditioned objects, God, world, and soul. In this sense, the Transcendental Dialectic would be a long Appendix to the Transcendental Analytic and the Transcendental Aesthetic, in which Kant dissociates himself once again from the metaphysical tradition and his philosophical opponents, in order to legitimize indirectly the previous analysis. Kant gives unambiguous hints for understanding the architectonic of the Critique of Pure Reason in this sense, by classifying the Transcendental Analytic as Logic of Truth and the Transcendental Dialectic as Logic of Illusion. Hence, Kant’s early critics had determined that Kant neither has a positive dialectic theory nor a concept of system, and this is a point of view which is frequently repeated in subsequent writings.
    [Show full text]
  • Critical Notice of GA Cohen's Self-Ownership, Freedom
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Missouri: MOspace “Critical Notice of G.A. Cohen’s Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality ”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 28 (1998): 609-626. Peter Vallentyne SELF-OWNERSHIP FOR EGALITARIANS G.A. Cohen’s book brings together and elaborates on articles that he has written on self- ownership, on Marx’s theory of exploitation, and on the future of socialism. Although seven of the eleven chapters have been previously published (1977-1992), this is not merely a collection of articles. There is a superb introduction that gives an overview of how the chapters fit together and of their historical relation to each other. Most chapters have a new introduction and often a postscript or addendum that connect them with other chapters. And the four new chapters (on justice and market transactions, exploitation in Marx, the concept of self-ownership, and the plausibility of the thesis of self-ownership) are important contributions that round out and bring closure to many of the central issues. As always with Cohen, the writing is crystal clear, and full of compelling examples, deep insights, and powerful arguments. Cohen has long been recognized as one of the most important exponents of analytic Marxism. His innovative, rigorous, and exciting interpretations of Marx’s theories of history and of exploitation have had a major impact on Marxist scholarship. Starting in the mid-1970s he has increasingly turned his attention to normative political philosophy. As Cohen describes it, he was awakened from his “dogmatic socialist slumbers” by Nozick’s famous Wilt Chamberlain example in which people starting from a position of equality (or other favored patterned distribution) freely choose to pay to watch Wilt Chamberlain play, and the net result is inequality (or other unfavored pattern).
    [Show full text]
  • Exploitation, Unequal Exchange and Dependency: a Philosophical Analysis
    Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1987 Exploitation, Unequal Exchange and Dependency: A Philosophical Analysis Paul Olabisi Otubusin Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Otubusin, Paul Olabisi, "Exploitation, Unequal Exchange and Dependency: A Philosophical Analysis" (1987). Dissertations. 2486. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2486 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1987 Paul Olabisi Otubusin EXPLOITATION, UNEQUAL EXCHANGE AND DEPENDENCY: A PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS by Paul Olabisi Otubusin A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Loyola University of Chicago in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 1987 Copyright 1987 by Paul o. Otubusin ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work has finally taken shape and seen the light of the day through the efforts of various people, many of whom I cannot acknowledge here due to lack of space. The author owes a great gratitude to all those who have contributed directly or indirectly towards the realization of this work and his educational goal. I am specially grateful to my dissertation director, Dr. David Schweickart who nurtured the preliminary idea in my mind and like the Socratic midwife, through his direction, comments and helpful suggestions, saw to the delivery of the idea in its present final stage.
    [Show full text]