If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?

"If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? He had a complicated family history. In fact, in the first chapter of the book, Jerry talks about his upbringing. He was brought up in Montreal, from a Jewish-Communist background. Both his parents were workers in the rag trade, as he referred to it. His father was genuinely of working class descent. His mother, though, was from a wealthy eastern European family who, as he puts it, went to Canada and slipped down the class ladder a few rungs. She was a very confident, articulate, intelligent woman who became an activist in the Canadian Communist Party in the Montreal branch. Jerry grew up with Marx in the house in the way some people had Jesus. He went to a school where they were taught in Yiddish half the day, and I can’t remember whether it was French or English for the other half of the day, but he grew up bilingual in French and English with a good smattering of Yiddish that he used on every possible occasion. Eventually, the school was raided by the Canadian Red Squad and closed down. So he had this very unusual upbringing. He was clearly fiercely intelligent as a child, he ended up going to McGill University and then got a scholarship to come to England. He took the BPhil in philosophy at Oxford under the tutelage of Gilbert Ryle but Isaiah Berlin was also very influential for him. At the age of 23, he got a job lecturing here at UCL as a moral philosopher. Apparently, he wanted to take the first year off to go and teach in France but he wasn’t allowed to. I met him in 1980 when he’d recently been promoted to Reader in philosophy on the strength of his first book, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence . This was something he’d spent about ten years working on. Partly, he said, the motivation for that book was that he grew up believing that Marxism was, broadly speaking, true. He arrived at Oxford and found people were scoffing at it and thought they had refuted it. People like John Plamenatz and H.B Acton had written books that were disparaging of Marxism, to the point where Acton ends one of his books saying Marxism-Leninism was a philosophical farrago, in that by the standards of analytic philosophy, Marxism contradicts itself. That was Jerry’s challenge, and for most of the next ten years of his life he set out trying to explain Karl Marx’s theory of history to show that by even the very highest standards of analytic philosophy, Marxism could be reconstructed. It was a remarkable project, but I didn’t choose it as my book because it’s a slightly dated read now. It’s fighting battles that no longer seem so urgent. So although it has a very strong statement of historical materialism and the arguments for it, not everything in the book is still so fresh. Also, Jerry said a funny thing happened to him after he wrote the book. It was as if he had paid his debt to his childhood. Having written it, a whole range of critics — absolutely top-rate analytical philosophers — started pointing out weaknesses. He was a very honest philosopher, in the sense of taking criticism seriously. He would take every criticism on its merits. If he thought it was no good he would refute it, if he thought it was appropriate as strong criticism he might modify his view or come up with an answer. He wrote later on that it wasn’t that he came to reject the version of historical materialism that he’d defended, but came to the view that he no longer really knew how to tell whether it was true or false. So he moved on to other topics. But, while he was still writing Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence an American philosopher, Gerald Dworkin, brought his attention to a paper published in Philosophy and Public Affairs by Robert Nozick. This was to become the main chapter of Anarchy, State, and Utopia . Jerry Cohen read it and thought, “This is such a strong defence of capitalism, and such a strong criticism of Communism that I’ll have to put my other work aside and spend some years trying to refute Nozick.” So he paused his work on Marx and wrote a couple of very important papers, still used now, trying to defend a much more redistributive Marxist view, using the same premises that Nozick uses. This was Jerry’s tactic: don’t import any premises, use the other person’s premises, and show your view follows from the other person’s premises. This is really remarkable because it’s hard enough showing that your view follows from your own premises, never mind that your view follows from your opponent’s premises! But that’s what Jerry did in his work on Nozick. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Now the book I’ve chosen, If you’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? , was written when Jerry left UCL and went to work in Oxford as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory and a fellow of All Souls’ College. In one way, you might think this is the most bourgeois job a political philosopher could have but it had been held by a succession of radical and semi-Marxist figures. If you’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? is a diverse set of writings on a number of different topics even though there are some common themes. Only very late in his life did Jerry write a sustained book of political philosophy — Rescuing Justice and Equality — which is a work of very deep and detailed analytic political philosophy, and not really an appropriate starting point. You have to understand a lot of the background before you can really understand that book. But two of the chapters in the If You’re an Egalitarian book are earlier versions of what will later appear there and they’re more accessible. Also, you get this wonderful material about Jerry’s life and some fantastic accounts of Marx’s earlier writings. This ties in with the 1844 Manuscripts , for there’s some commentary on that and also some work relevant to Nozick as well. So, you get sections from Jerry’s entire career in there, set around this question which is — as he says — if you’re an egalitarian, how come you’re so rich? Being a professor at All Souls College, he was probably in the top one percent in the income bracket in the country, but he was a leftie so why didn’t he give all of his money away? That was something that would have been put to him. He did give a lot of his money away, but even so his disposable income remained high. Why didn’t he give away more of it? And for other people like him, how can they reconcile their political views with their personal behaviour? There’s a very interesting chapter on that topic. Whether he solves the problem is another matter, but at least he’s engaging with it very honestly. What you get in this book is, again, the writings of an incredibly intelligent person, and his reflections on his unique biography and trajectory. It’s very rare for philosophers to say very much about their history and what brought them to the views they have. We also get some writings on the history of philosophy in Marx and Hegel, and we get foreshadowings of his later work criticising Rawls that will really be the capstone of his career. And it’s a superbly readable book! Again, it’s a book you can sit down and start reading and then wonder where the day has gone. So it is the book of Jerry’s that I recommend to anyone who is interested in finding out what he and his work was like. Sadly, he died about five years ago, but his work is growing, if anything, in stature. I’ve recently read PhD theses where it is claimed that the three leading political philosophers of the contemporary era are Rawls, Nozick, and Cohen (all sadly dead now). It will be very interesting to see how long that lasts and whether scholars, with time, will regard him as one of the leading political philosophers of this century. Certainly while he was alive, there was no one more interesting or entertaining to listen to or talk with. This interview was published January 22nd, 2015"