Ga cohen why not socialism summary

Cover Download Save contents. Title Page, Copyright pp. Contents pp. I: The Camping Trip pp. IV: Is the Ideal Feasible?

V: Coda pp. Acknowledgment p. Project MUSE Mission Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide.

For instance, F. Cohen then articulates the principles of the socialist camping trip. He does not defend these principles at length or attempt to show they are preferable to other competing principles. The principle of socialist equality of opportunity eliminates all inequalities resulting from undeserved disadvantages or advantages. This principle allows significant inequalities if such inequalities arise the right way.

However, the campers also abide by a principle of community. The campers care about one another, and care that they care about one another. Cohen argues that as a result, the campers will not tolerate certain inequalities that socialist equality of opportunity would otherwise permit.

Cohen then argues that large-scale societies would be morally better if they were socialist. If we could figure out how to make societies run like the socialist camping trip, we would rejoice. He says,. I do not think that the cooperation and unselfishness that the trip displays are appropriate only among friends, or within a small community. In the mutual provisioning of a market society, I am essentially indifferent to the fate of the farmer whose food I eat: there is little or no community between us.

We tolerate capitalism only because we think we must. Perhaps, given our moral and cognitive failings, capitalism delivers the goods. But socialism would be the preferred system if only human beings were better. Cohen says there are two main questions about socialism. First, is it intrinsically desirable? He thinks it clearly is. Second, is it feasible? Here he is less certain. His book Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality , for example, is a challenging and searching Marxist criticism of Nozickean libertarianism.

Thus, if anyone can defend socialism successfully, perhaps Cohen can in this book. One presumes that it is intended for classroom use, and for that purpose I suppose it can be useful.

The book is puzzling as much for its omissions as for its commissions. It proceeds, for example, as if the political events of the twentieth century did not take place.

It does not mention Cuba. There is, moreover, no indication in the book that the discipline of economics has made any progress since Marx. Because he thinks any reasonable person would have endorsed his two socialist principles as exemplified in the conduct of the camping trip, he argues that we should therefore endorse these principles in society generally. Here is the opening description:. A few pages later, Cohen confesses that he does not enjoy camping trips p. The first elaborates the social-ethical principles realized on camping trips, the second asks whether the camping ideal provides a desirable guide for the organization of the economy of society at large, and the third explores whether achieving that ideal is feasible.

Briefly consider each of these in turn. What does justice demand of our economy? Instead, socialist equality of opportunity aims at reducing inequality to those generated by personal choices. For example, this principle would insist on equal hourly pay, but would allow people to work more or less. The resulting inequalities would consist only of regrettable choices and pure option luck.

But socialism, according to Cohen, should go further in advancing a sense of community and building its economic institutions on generosity and fellow-feeling rather than immediate self-interest. Community, like self-interest in a market context, is founded on reciprocity. But in the market case reciprocity is purely instrumental, motivated by greed and fear. In the community case reciprocity is achieved through mutual generosity and celebrates our virtues, not our vices.

Community is likely to reduce further the range of inequality outcomes that would be tolerated even by socialist equality of opportunity.

Cohen worries that the principle of community may on occasion go so far as to actually contradict the theory of justice lying behind socialist equal opportunity. But he points out that, even in market economies, choices are strongly conditioned on the wishes of others. The market provides a casino from which it is difficult to escape. For most of us there is no choice but to accept the options allowed by the market game. Constrained in this way we fall back on the basest motivations of greed and fear, and at best limit our better motives to immediate family and friends.

How much better to accept the constraints of community and in that context draw on our more generous impulses?