The Political Philosophy of G.A. Cohen by Vrousalis Nicholas

Author:Vrousalis, Nicholas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

5

Community

Marx’s philosophical trajectory began, as is well known, with a ‘humanist’ critique of Hegel and the Young Hegelians (with whom Marx was originally associated), culminating into a ‘materialist’ theory of society and history.1 Cohen’s philosophical trajectory was, in some ways, the reverse of Marx’s: from his early elaboration, and defence, of historical materialism in the 1970s and 1980s, Cohen gradually moved towards normative political philosophy, which figures prominently in all his writings from the 1990s until his death in 2009.

This chapter studies an important but neglected strand of Cohen’s humanist thought, his account of fraternity or community.2 Community is significant not only because it may have intrinsic value (see Wolff 1968) but also because it was, and remains, a significant point of difference between liberals and socialists or, to the extent that liberals can be socialists, between liberals and communists. What I will try to do is offer a more unified account of Cohen’s views on community than he himself provided, set against the background of his critique of (Rawlsian) liberalism.

I begin by sketching some parallels between Marx’s thought and Cohen’s normative political philosophy. I then outline Cohen’s community critique of Rawls and describe Cohen’s view of the connections between Rawlsian liberalism and community. This will give rise to a general tension immanent to Cohen’s normative political philosophy between the values of justice and community. I argue that it may well go deeper than he thought and conclude with a discussion of the textual avenues available for a reconciliation of these two values.

Marx and Cohen on community

Marx’s writings are replete with allusions to community, its forms in pre-capitalist society, its gradual dissolution under capitalism and its culmination under communism.3 Moreover, the dissolution ushered in by capitalism is posited as necessary for moving beyond feudal ‘idiocy’ and parochialism.4 As part of this process, large-scale enclosures, privatization of the means of production and the separation of men from their means of subsistence (their ‘radical chains’), all conspire towards the establishment of a class-divided society based on a capitalist division of social labour. In that society, the dominant form of relationship between human beings is one of ‘mutual indifference’. Marx does not deny that capitalism exhibits a certain form of reciprocity. Indeed, the market form of reciprocity is, he says, a ‘natural precondition of exchange’ (Marx 1973, p. 244). But that is not the rich form of reciprocity Marx envisages for communism:5

[Market] reciprocity interests [the subject to an exchange] only in so far as it satisfies his interest to the exclusion of, without reference to, that of the other. That is, the common interest which appears as the motive of the whole is recognised as a fact by both sides; but, as such, it is not the motive, but rather it proceeds, as it were, behind the back of these self-reflected particular interests, behind the back of one individual’s interest in opposition to that of the other. (Marx 1973, p. 244)

The reciprocity congealed in exchange relationships is said by Marx to have an ‘abstract universality’ (Marx and Engels 1975, vol.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.