G. A. Cohen Quotes on Justice
G. A. Cohen’s If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? (2000) and the late Rescuing Justice and Equality (2008) gave late twentieth-century analytical Marxism its principal egalitarian critique of the dominant Rawlsian framework. The central polemic is directed at the difference principle’s accommodation of inequality-producing incentives for the talented: an authentically egalitarian society, Cohen argues, requires not merely just basic-structure institutions but a corresponding ethos of personal commitment to equality in the everyday choices of citizens, with the standard liberal sequestration of personal life from the demands of justice constituting an impermissible philosophical concession to the privileged. The framework, drawing on Cohen’s earlier work in the Marxist analytical tradition (Karl Marx’s Theory of History) and the broader Oxford analytical tradition, shaped the contemporary debate over the proper site and reach of distributive justice.
Quotes
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Attributed to G. A. Cohen:
“From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs is still the right ideal.”
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Attributed to G. A. Cohen:
“Equality requires the absence of unjust inequalities, not the absence of all difference.”
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Attributed to G. A. Cohen:
“Capitalism is incompatible with the community we owe one another.”
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Attributed to G. A. Cohen:
“The personal is political; the political is also personal.”
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“I believe that certain inequalities that cannot be forbidden in the name of socialist equality of opportunity should nevertheless be forbidden, in the name of community. But is it an injustice to forbid the transactions that generate those inequalities? Do the relevant prohibitions merely define the terms within which justice will operate, or do they sometimes (justifiably?) contradict justice? I do not know the answer to that question.”
II. The Trip's Principles -
“Market socialism does not fully satisfy socialist standards of distributive justice, but it scores far better by those standards than market capitalism does, and is therefore an eminently worthwhile project, from a socialist point of view.”
IV. Is the Ideal Feasible?