If You’re So Egalitarian, How Come You’re a Philosopher?

If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?
by G. A. Cohen
Harvard University Press, 2000, 233 pp., $35

Philosophy and Social Hope
by Richard Rorty
Penguin Books, 2000, 288 pp., $13.95

W.H. Auden said that “poetry makes nothing happen,” and Karl Marx said the same thing (though not in so many words) about philosophy. The latter opinion would seem to place a Marxist philosopher in a curious position, especially one who is a leading exponent of historical materialism, which aims, with unrivaled ambitiousness and decisiveness, to explain what, if not philosophy, does make things happen. According to historical materialism, what makes things happen is the development of the productive forces. Hence, wrote the brash young Marx of The German Ideology, “the study of the real world is to the study of philosophy as romantic love is to self-abuse.”

Whether or not “Marxist philosopher” turns out, on investigation, to be an oxymoron, G. A. Cohen, successor to Isaiah Berlin and Charles Taylor as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University, is undoubtedly the most illustrious member of that species at present. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (1978) applied the methods of analytic and “ordinary language” philosophy to the interpretation of historical materialism. It has been widely praised and widely debated. History, Labour, and Freedom (1988) collects Cohen’s further reflections and responses to criticism. In Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (1995), Cohen engages with the leading liberal and libertarian political philosophers in the English-speaking world: Ronald Dworkin, Robert Nozick, and John Rawls. (His demolition of Nozick will be highly gratifying to anyone who, like this reviewer, has long found the prestige of Nozick’s arguments both inexplicable and exasperating.)

If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? is neither a treatise nor a collection of articles; it is the 1996 Gifford Lectures—the granddaddy of distinguished lecture series. Cohen ranges very widely. One lecture compares religious and political conviction. Another charmingly recounts his “Montreal Communist Jewish childhood.” Another contrasts “utopian” and “scientific” socialism, correcting the vulgar disparagement of the former and showing how the latter is compromised by the “obstetrical” motif of classical Marxism. (For example, “New higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.”) Still another lecture, “A Lighter Look at the Problem of Evil,” was a songfest. “The audience accepted my invitation to sing with me, to the accompaniment of tapes, a set of American popular songs that il...