G. A. Cohen

Quick Facts

• Full name: Gerald Allan Cohen
• Lived: 1941-2009
• Born: Montreal, Canada
• Worked mainly in: London and Oxford
• Main fields: political philosophy, Marxism, equality, freedom, property
• Best known for: founding analytical Marxism and later arguing that justice requires more than fair institutions

The Big Question

Can socialism and equality be defended with clear arguments, not just political loyalty or faith in history? Cohen asked what capitalism does to freedom, whether private property can be justified, and whether a just society needs egalitarian habits in everyday life.

In One Minute

G. A. Cohen was a Canadian-British political philosopher who brought the tools of Analytic Philosophy to Karl Marx. His early work made Marx's theory of history sharper and more testable.

His later work moved from Marxist history to moral argument. Cohen thought capitalism was not just unequal. It also shaped what people could actually do. A person with no productive property may be legally free to refuse one job, but still have little real choice except wage labor. Cohen also pressed egalitarians, especially followers of John Rawls, to ask whether justice is only about public rules or also about everyday motives.

What They Taught

Cohen's first major teaching was that Marx's historical materialism can be reconstructed as a clear theory. Historical materialism means the view that the way people produce the necessities of life strongly shapes law, politics, class, and culture. Cohen did not mean that ideas never matter. He meant that tools, skills, technology, and ownership patterns set powerful limits on society.

In Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence, Cohen gives special weight to the "productive forces": tools, machines, knowledge, land, raw materials, and trained labor. He argues that these forces tend to develop, and that "relations of production" change when they help or block that development. Relations of production are rules about who owns, controls, and works with productive resources. Feudal lord and serf, capitalist and wage worker, owner and tenant are examples.

Cohen also used functional explanation: explaining a social arrangement by the job it performs in a larger system. A factory rule may survive because it helps owners organize production and protect profit, not because everyone likes it.

Later Cohen became less interested in proving that socialism would arrive and more interested in why socialism would be just. He thought older Marxism leaned too hard on the idea that history would solve the problem for us. If socialism is morally better, we should be able to say why.

Against Robert Nozick, Cohen argued that self-ownership does not automatically justify capitalist property. Self-ownership means that each person has moral authority over their own body and powers. Cohen asked: even if I own myself, why should a few people own the land, factories, and resources that everyone else needs?

Against Rawls, Cohen argued that justice cannot stop at the "basic structure" of society, meaning its main institutions such as law, markets, taxation, and education. Rawls allowed some inequalities if they improved the position of the worst off. Cohen replied that if talented people demand extra pay before using their talents, society may have fair-looking rules but an unfair ethos. An ethos is a shared pattern of motives and habits.

Key Ideas With Examples

• Analytical Marxism: a version of Marxism that uses clear definitions, logical argument, social science, and economics. Cohen wanted Marxist claims to be testable by friends and opponents.
• Historical materialism: the claim that economic life strongly shapes social life. A factory society needs different laws, cities, schools, and work discipline than a small-farm society.
• Productive forces and relations of production: productive forces are tools, skills, labor power, and materials. Relations of production are ownership and work relations. A steam engine is a productive force; a wage contract is a relation of production.
• Proletarian unfreedom: Cohen's claim that workers under capitalism can be formally free but collectively stuck. One worker may quit one job, but workers as a class cannot all escape wage labor unless the property system changes.
• Self-ownership and world-ownership: self-ownership says people own their bodies and talents; world-ownership concerns external resources such as land and factories. Cohen argued that the first does not settle the second.
• Difference principle: Rawls's rule that inequality is allowed only when it benefits the least advantaged. Cohen objected when this rule excused high incentives for talented people who could choose to work for less.
• Egalitarian ethos: a social spirit in which people care about equality in daily choices. A doctor who supports equality but demands a huge salary to serve poor patients lacks this ethos.
• Socialist community: a form of life where people cooperate because others' needs matter. Cohen's camping-trip example asks why sharing food and equipment seems natural on a trip but strange in the wider economy.

Major Works

• Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978): reconstructs Marx's historical materialism as a theory about productive forces, class relations, and social change.
• History, Labour, and Freedom (1988): essays on Marxist history, labor, and freedom, with Cohen moving toward moral questions about capitalism.
• Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (1995): challenges Nozick-style libertarianism by arguing that private property gives some people power over others' options.
• If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (2000): reflects on Cohen's communist upbringing, his break with historical inevitability, and the personal demands of equality.
• Rescuing Justice and Equality (2008): criticizes Rawls and argues that egalitarians must examine incentives, motives, and social ethos.
• Why Not Socialism? (2009): uses a camping trip to explain equality and community, then admits that large-scale socialist design is the hard problem.

Why It Matters

Cohen matters because he made socialist political philosophy harder to dismiss. He showed that Marxist claims about class, labor, and history could be put into careful arguments. He also showed that the moral case for equality cannot hide behind predictions about the future.

He also changed debates about freedom. Defenders of capitalism often say that markets protect liberty because people can choose jobs and contracts. Cohen replied that choice depends on background property rules. If every path to food, shelter, and respect passes through someone else's property, then "free choice" is not simple. He also asked comfortable egalitarians whether it is coherent to support equality in public while living by self-interested market norms in private.

Proponents, Critics, and Opponents

Cohen's closest intellectual setting was analytical Marxism, especially the "September Group" of Marxist philosophers and social scientists. Figures such as Jon Elster, John Roemer, and Erik Olin Wright also tried to rebuild Marxist theory with clearer arguments and stronger social science.

Marxist critics often said Cohen made Marx too tidy. They worried that his focus on technology, functional explanation, and logical reconstruction lost the conflict, politics, crisis, and dialectical movement in Marx's own writing. Some also thought his early historical materialism was too deterministic.

Rawlsian critics resisted Cohen's attack on incentives. They argued that Rawls was mainly asking how society's basic institutions should be arranged, not how morally admirable every person's choices must be. Cohen replied that institutions and personal choices are linked. A society cannot be deeply egalitarian if its members constantly exploit unequal bargaining power.

Libertarian critics rejected Cohen's challenge to self-ownership and property. They argued that strong property rights protect individual independence. Cohen answered that property rights always restrict someone: a fence protects the owner's freedom to exclude, but removes others' freedom to use that land.

Some egalitarian critics, including relational egalitarians such as Elizabeth Anderson, pushed against the luck-egalitarian side of Cohen's work. Luck egalitarianism says society should correct disadvantages people did not choose. The worry is that this can focus too much on sorting responsibility and too little on building relations among equals.

Related Pages

• Karl Marx
• John Rawls
• Robert Nozick
• Marxism
• Political Economy
• Analytic Philosophy
• Liberalism
• Capital