Gerald Allan Cohen was a Marxist political philosopher at All Souls College, Oxford. He was a curious combination of rigorous analytical thinker and yet supporter of virtually unsupportable Marxian doctrines, including an economically determinist version of historical materialism, and a view of human nature according to which Marx's 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program doctrine "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." I never met Jerry (as he was called), although he had close intellectual exchanges with several of my closest colleagues, including John Roemer, Jon Elster, and Samuel Bowles. At the cost of being uncharitable to a keen intellect, I suspect that his studied ignorance of standard social and psychological theory, common among philosophers of the mid-Twentieth century, who did not want their judgments to depend on empirical facts, accounts for his ability to spout socially bizarre theories in a perfectly logical and reasonable manner.
This little book---and I do mean little, being about 3% to 10% as long as your usual academic offering---is Cohen's last word on the subject of socialism published before his death. Cohen shows no trace of the historical materialism he formerly, and brilliantly, espoused, and he does not believe that the modern economy is conducive to a socialist alternative. Rather, Cohen argues that markets are morally offensive institutions that most people would be happy to get rid of if they could figure out some alternative compatible with the standard of living we are accustomed to in advanced market societies. "The market" says Cohen, "is intrinsically repugnant...Every market, even a socialist market, is a system of predation." (pp. 78,82)
In place of the market, Cohen celebrates the caring and voluntary mutual aid that occurs in small groups of friends (he never mentions family), and believes this can be extended to a community of strangers as well. He calls this "communal reciprocity." (p. 39)
Cohen's distaste for markets is that market competition destroys community and undermines egalitarian principles. In place of our natural feelings for helping one another to the best of our ability, market competition fosters selfish greed and quashes human compassion. Cohen recognizes two guiding principles for socialism: an egalitarian principle and a community principle. He distinguishes three levels of egalitarianism. Bourgeois egalitarianism eliminates arbitrary social restrictions on occupying social positions (e.g., class, caste, or race). Left-liberal egalitarianism eliminates accidents of birth to institute equality of opportunity independent of social class or quality of family life. Radical, or socialist egalitarianism, which Cohen prefers, eliminates differences in natural ability. Inequality can still exist because of poor judgment or just luck. Much of such inequality would be corrected according to his principle of community solidarity, which requires a high degree of equality of outcome.
Cohen is far from optimistic about the feasibility of the sort of socialism he espouses. "There are two contrasting reasons," he argues, "why society-wide socialism might be thought infeasible...the limits of human nature and the limits of social technology." (pp. 54-55) Cohen concludes that there is no problem with human nature, since people are sufficiently generous under the appropriate conditions. He observes that "doctors, nurses, teachers and others do not...gauge what they do in their jobs according to the amount of money they're likely to get as a result." (p. 59) He argues that this is not because of some special properties of those who work in these professions, but rather because the culture of medicine and teaching are humanist rather than capitalist. There is no reason, he believes, why such culture could become a general characteristic of work in a socialist community.
Rather than lamenting the incompatibility of socialist community and human nature, Cohen faults our meager social technology; there is simply no known machinery for harnessing natural human generosity. He calls this an "insoluble organizational design problem." "In my view," he remarks, "the principal problem that faces the socialist ideal is that we do not know how to design the machinery that would make it run." (p. 55)
I think there are two problems with Cohen's argument. First, there is a reason why we lack the organizational institutions that harness human generosity, and it has to do with a side of human nature that Cohen does not recognize. There is a great deal of heterogeneity among people in the degree to which they privilege the personal, including self and family, over the social. Everyday observation, reinforced by a huge body of empirical evidence---see my book, Bounds of Reason (Princeton, 2009) for details---that unless there are safeguards against the free-rider tendencies of the selfish, the natural tendency for the majority to cooperate will be undermined, and cooperation will unravel. Moreover, the larger the group, the harder it is to identify and punish the free-riders, even though most people are willing to incur personal costs to do so. Markets work because they discipline firms, who then discipline workers, thus solving the free-rider problem. Moreover, markets discipline firms by forcing them to compete and therefore reveal to the public exactly what are the limits of the possible in satisfying consumer needs and using technology efficiently. The knowledge of production possibilities unleashed through market competition cannot be revealed in any other way that we know of.
A second problem with Cohen's argument is that his personal social values are not likely to be shared by more than a small fraction of citizens of advanced capitalist economies, and this is not because of the hegemony of "capitalist ideology," but rather because humans have goals that conflict with, and often are more salient than, egalitarianism and community values. For instance, family is virtually universally, in every successful society, more salient than community. In every known society, people favor kin over non-kin, and their commitment to strangers is far weaker than their commitment to family members. In advanced liberal democratic societies, the ties of family by no means eclipse the feeling people have for their compatriots and the members of their residential and work communities. But no analysis of the good society can avoid dealing with the relationship between our public and parochial motivations.
A second arena of moral disagreement is the importance of social equality as a goal of the good society. There is a certain fraction of the population that takes social equality extremely seriously, but a far larger fraction, I believe, places concerns with procedural justice far above those of equal outcomes. The idea that one's family should not be able to affect the social success of one's children conflicts deeply with the natural family orientation exhibited by humans in almost every social setting. The notion that people should not be allowed to benefit from their natural capacities is equally repugnant to the individualist values upon which contemporary democratic ideals and support for human rights are based.
Cohen celebrates one side of human capacities, the side that cherishes affiliation and group solidarity, but seems completely unaware of the equally important side in which individuals strive for excellence, seek victory through competition, and spurn the mass psychology of the crowd in order to innovate and create. The idea that competition, even market competition, is just predation does not ring true at all, even when there are serious material and social consequences for both winners and losers.
