If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?

• Author: Leiter, Brian

IF YOU'RE AN EGALITARIAN, HOW COME YOU'RE SO RICH? By G. A. Cohen. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. 237 pp. $18.00.

1. INTRODUCTION

   G. A. Cohen, the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford, first came to international prominence with his impressive 1978 book on Marx's historical materialism, (1) a volume which gave birth to "analytical Marxism." (2) Analytical Marxists reformulated, criticized, and tried to salvage central features of Marx's theories of history, ideology, politics, and economics. They did so not only by bringing a welcome argumentative rigor and clarity to the exposition of Marx's ideas, but also by purging Marxist thinking of what we may call its "Hegelian hangover," that is, its (sometimes tacit) commitment to Hegelian assumptions about matters of both philosophical substance and method. In particular, analytical Marxists "deny that there is anything of value which distinguishes [Marx's] method from that of mainstream social science." (3) Thus, analytical Marxists repudiate Marx's unfortunate attachment to the idea of a distinctively dialectical method of analysis and explanation, (4) according to which (as Cohen explains it) "every living thing ... develops by unfolding its inner nature in outward forms and, when it has fully elaborated that nature, it dies, disappears, is transformed into a successor form precisely because it has succeeded in elaborating itself fully." (5) Dialectics, so understood, entails teleology: A thing's "inner nature" determines its end, i.e., what it can and will become.

   Applied to the phenomenon of socioeconomic change, dialectics leads to what Cohen aptly calls Marx's "obstetric conception of political practice." (6) According to this view, "The prescribed way forward [i.e., to communism] is dictated by the process of pregnancy itself. The solution [communism] is the consummation of the full development of the problem [capitalism]." (7) Historical development is like a normal pregnancy: The outcome is foreordained--a baby will be born approximately nine months after conception--and all we, as historical actors, can do is facilitate, and perhaps ever-so-slightly accelerate, the predetermined conclusion. The "solution" (the baby) is the consummation of the full development of the "problem" (the pregnancy).

   As Cohen notes, this "dialectical idea ... of self-destruction through self-fulfillment" (8) and its cognate doctrine that "politics teases solutions out of developing problems" (9) are ideas that "few would now regard as consonant with the demands of rigorous science."(10) Of course, that understates the point: A commitment to dialectical methods of analysis and explanation looks like nothing more than a priori dogma, not the methodological linchpin of any successful empirical science. Hegel, who died in 1831, was himself a dead issue in German philosophy by the 1850s, having been skewered on the end of Schopenhauer's pen, turned on his head by Feuerbach, and dismissed or ignored by the new breed of German materialists and NeoKantians. (11) Yet, thanks to Marx, and especially Engels's infatuation with dialectics--and the intellectual subservience of so many of their followers--Hegel's idea of dialectic remained a vibrant one in European thought for the next century-and-a-half.

   What remains of Marx without the Hegelian hangover? The perhaps surprising answer is quite a lot, and certainly everything worthwhile! (12) Curiously, G. A. Cohen's important book, If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?, obscures this point. Cohen infers from the need for Marx to sober up from his Hegelian hangover that Marxists can no longer ignore the questions of normative moral and political philosophy, as Marx himself did: Once the "[s]uccess of the [revolutionary] cause is [no longer] guaranteed ... Marxists, or what were Marxists, are increasingly impelled into normative political philosophy." (13)

   Thus, Cohen's brand of Marxism returns the reader to the familiar academic terrain of armchair normative theory a la Rawls and Nozick. Whereas much of Cohen's 1995 collection of essays (14) took on the libertarian challenge to a Marxish (15) conception of equality and justice, the current volume attacks the liberal conception associated with Rawls, according to which "distributive justice and injustice are features of the rules of the public order alone." (16) This raises the question, as Cohen has dubbed it, of the "site" of distributive justice: Do principles of distributive justice govern only "the rules of the public order," as Rawls would have it, or must they also govern "personal choice," (17) "the attitudes people sustain toward each other in the thick of daily life"? (18) In Cohen's rather unMarxian view, "both just rules [for society] and just personal choice within the framework set by just rules are necessary for distributive justice." (19) Cohen's is an argument for a variation on the theme "the personal is political," or, more precisely, for the Christian version of that theme according to which genuine "equality requires ... a moral revolution, a revolution in the human soul." (20) Equality, in short, demands not just institutional arrangements favoring egalitarian norms, but also an egalitarian "social ethos," (21) which informs the actions of citizens in their daily lives, an ethos which takes root in the "soul." Hence, the title of his book: If you're really an egalitarian, then it's not enough to support the redistributive, liberal state--you really ought to be giving away your money too! (22)

   Roughly half of Cohen's book is devoted to a lucid and provocative exposition and critique of what he calls "Classical Marxism," its Hegelian hangover, and the obstetric metaphor; the second half is an exercise in normative theory, with Rawls as its target. The latter arguments have, so far, attracted the most attention, (23) but I will accord the first half of the book somewhat more space here. (24) The traditional Marxian attitude towards normative theory--namely, that it is pointless because ineffectual--is one that resonates with a more recent attack on normative theory familiar to legal scholars from the work of Richard Posner. (25) Attacking what he calls "academic moralism" (26)--"the kind of moral theorizing nowadays considered rigorous in university circles" (27)--Posner claims that such theorizing

   has no prospect of improving human behavior. Knowing the moral thing to do furnishes no motive, and creates no motivation, for doing it; motive and motivation have to come from outside morality. (28) Even if this is wrong, the analytical tools employed in academic moralism--whether moral casuistry, or reasoning from the canonical texts of moral philosophy, or careful analysis, or reflective equilibrium, or some combination of these tools--are too feeble to override either narrow self-interest or [pre-existing] moral intuitions. And academic moralists have neither the rhetorical skills nor the factual knowledge that might enable them to persuade without having good methods of inquiry and analysis. As a result of its analytical, rhetorical, and factual deficiencies, academic moralism is helpless when intuitions clash or self-interest opposes, and otiose when they line up. (29) With a slight change in the rhetoric, Marx could have been the author of this passage. Moreover, Marx and Posner may be more correct about the efficacy of moral theory than either Cohen or Posner's critics (30) allow. Or so I shall argue in what follows. Let us begin, however, by considering what remains of Marx's theory of history once we cure Marx of the Hegelian hangover.

2. MARX'S HEGELIAN HANGOVER: HISTORICAL EXPLANATION WITHOUT DIALECTICS

   I want to grant Cohen and other analytical Marxists that dialectics, understood as an a priori constraint on explanation, is unacceptable. I also do not want to dispute the interpretive point that Marx sometimes took dialectics quite seriously. The interpretive point is of interest to Marx scholars, to be sure, but not to philosophers, historians, or readers of this journal. The question that really matters is ought Marx--or a Marxian--be committed to dialectics? Does his theory of historical change require it? Does his opposition to normative theory demand it? In all these cases, the answer is "no."

   Why does Cohen not attend to these points? The source of the problem is suggested by his explanation of the sense in which Marx and Engels take "scientific socialism" to be "scientific": (31)

   The most obvious and least interesting sense, though not therefore the least important sense, in which it is, in their view, scientific, is that it possesses a scientifically defensible theory of history in general and of capitalism in particular. .... But the most interesting claim is about how the movement which possesses the science relates to the social reality which generates the movement and the science.... The movement understands ... how it itself arises.... It is the consciousness of social reality, in a political form. .... Scientific socialism is what it is because of a different self-perception.... It understands itself as utopian [i.e., non-scientific] socialism could not, as the reflex of the stage of development at which it arises, this now being the stage when capitalism's contradictions are acute and the proletarian movement is strong. It understands itself as the consciousness of the movement, rather than as inspired by universally valid ideals. It consequently looks for the solution to the evils of capitalism in the process in which capitalism is transforming itself. (32) Cohen thinks the "most interesting"--but not necessarily, he admits, the most "important"--reason that Marx takes his theory to be scientific (33) is that it displays a dialectical self-understanding. "Scientific socialism" understands both (a) that it itself is historically conditioned (such "understanding" is only possible at the point...