Why Not Socialism?

• Author: Otteson, James R.
• Position: Book review

Why Not Socialism?

By G. A. Cohen

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Pp. 92, $14.95 cloth.

Defending socialism is a tall order these days, so it is a bit surprising to see an unabashed attempt. The late G. A. Cohen was a distinguished political philosopher at All Souls College, Oxford, and an important critic of libertarianism. His 1995 book Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality, for example, is a challenging and searching Marxist criticism of Nozickean libertarianism. Distinguished philosophers such as Hillel Steiner and Jonathan Wolff have offered high praise for Why Not Socialism? Thus, if anyone can defend socialism successfully, perhaps Cohen can in this book.

The book's brevity--only ninety-two very small pages--and its largely jargon-free writing suggest that it is meant for nonspecialist readers. One presumes that it is intended for classroom use, and for that purpose I suppose it can be useful. But Cohen's argument in this book is so weak that the book's main effect, I fear, would be to show that socialism has no plausible defense.

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 offers no assessment of--indeed, no mention of--the numerous attempts to establish socialist states or the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It presents no comparison of North Korea and South Korea or China and Taiwan. It does not mention Cuba. There is, moreover, no indication in the book that the discipline of economics has made any progress since Marx.

The book's positive argument fares no better. Cohen describes an imaginary camping trip made by several different families, and he argues that the trip proceeds according to two principles--"an egalitarian principle" and "a principle of community"--that together capture the socialist vision of a just society. 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. He briefly entertains two potential objections to this inference--namely, that the ideal he describes is not desirable and that it is not feasible. Claiming that these objections hold no water, he concludes that the camping trip's socialist principles are indeed what our governments should adopt for all of us.

A great...