Cohen, G. A. Why Not Socialism?. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009.
Cohen’s path in that world saw him study philosophy at McGill University and, beginning in 1961, Oxford. The image of a staunch Marxist such as Cohen arriving at Oxford that year is incongruous. Oxford was then a bastion of so-called analytic philosophy, a tradition of thought that traced its roots to British philosophers such as G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. Insofar as analytic philosophy of the 1960s took up political questions at all, as it did in the work of Isaiah Berlin, it was explicitly anti-communist. Berlin’s interest in politics however was the exception. Oxford-style philosophy focused overwhelmingly on the philosophy of mind, logic and, above all, language. Political philosophy was so marginal that a year after Cohen arrived Berlin published an essay under the morose title “Does political theory still exist?”
It was a common occurrence during the 1960s for politically committed students to be hostile to analytic philosophy, on the grounds that it was quietist and trivial. “If you are young and left-wing,” Cohen has said, “and you come to university with a thirst for relevant ideas, and academic philosophy of the Oxford kind is the first system of thought you encounter, then it will be hard for you not to feel disappointed or even cheated by it.” But precisely because Cohen was already so politicized, he did not go to class looking for a political system. As a result Cohen was able to engage analytic philosophy on its own terms and excel at it—and, in time, be transformed by it.
The late 1960s saw Marxist ideas gain academic prominence. Works by French thinkers such as Louis Althusser were translated and widely discussed. Cohen’s analytic training made him critical of 1960s Marxism, which he came to term “bullshit Marxism.”
Its practitioners claimed to possess their own intellectual method, known as dialectics. Such claims struck Cohen as an excuse not to observe normal standards of evidence and rigour. When one read French Marxists closely, Cohen felt, their ideas were often expressed in such a gassy way it was impossible to determine if they were true or false. Cohen’s preferred approach was on display in the 1978 book that made his name, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. It saw Cohen give an intellectually respectable account of Marxism by jettisoning Marx’s least defensible ideas and setting out the remainder with ruthless clarity.
Cohen soon became a leader of a school of thought known as analytic Marxism. Analytic Marxism eventually rejected so much of Marx—the dialectics, the scientific pretensions, the claims of historical inevitability—that it has long been debated whether it really is a form of Marxism. Cohen thought the question was misguided. In his view, Marx began a tradition of political and economic equality, and everything else was negotiable. Cohen once noted that Galileo and Newton founded physics, but physicists are never asked whether they are a Galilean. “Physics must contradict (much of) what Galileo and Newton said: only so can it be loyal to the tradition which they founded.” Whatever the accuracy of the Marxist label in other ways, it is definitely misleading if it is taken to suggest that only a Marxist can agree with Cohen’s arguments. . . .
Read the rest here: http://reviewcanada.ca/reviews/2010/06/01/the-thinking-man-s-marxist/.
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