Gerald Cohen

Gerald Allan Cohen (also known as GA Cohen and Jerry Cohen, born April 14, 1941 in Montreal, Canada, † August 5, 2009 in Oxford, United Kingdom) was Professor of Social Theory and Political Theory at the University of Oxford.

Life

Cohen grew up in a communist- dominated, non-religious Jewish family in Montreal and began to engage already as a teenager in the Communist Party of Canada. He studied political science and philosophy at McGill University and the local at the University of Oxford, where he among other things, was influenced by Gilbert Ryle and Isaiah Berlin. His sympathies for the real socialism disappeared in the course of the 1960s, after he had traveled in the years 1962 and 1964, Hungary and Czechoslovakia as well as due to the Soviet intervention against the Prague Spring in 1968. Unaffected remained Cohen's socialist beliefs, which he held until his death represented.

He was from 1963 lecturer at University College London from 1985 until his retirement in 2008 Chichele Professor of Social Philosophy and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. In addition to teaching at Oxford Cohen taught regularly as a Visiting Professor at Columbia University in New York.

Cohen was married twice and had two children from his first marriage. He died at the age of 68 years after a stroke.

Work

Cohen was next to Jon Elster and John Roemer one of the leaders of Analytical Marxism, a flow which examines the theories of Karl Marx with the tools of analytic philosophy. His first book, published in 1978, Karl Marx 's Theory of History: A Defence, is still regarded as a founding document of this approach. Cohen reconstructed and defended in this work, the historical materialism of Marx by the means of the analytical philosophy of language and the theory of rational decision. So he turned vehemently against the prevailing until today dialectical interpretation of Marx's theory of society that it is not opposed to prove than scientific.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Cohen turned in his philosophical work from Marxism and focused on studies of the concept and justification of moral egalitarianism, which he understood as the proper normative core of socialist thought and defend investigated. In some furious running disputes with Robert Nozick and John Rawls Cohen represented a radical conception of moral equality as the epitome of social justice and called for an ethos of equality on a personal and social level. His last published during his lifetime book, Rescuing Justice and Equality, is a good balance of these two decades of debate. A pilot study for this project, If you're an egalitarian, how come you're so rich? , Located in German under the title equality without indifference before.

Works

• Karl Marx's theory of history. A defense Oxford University Press, 1978 ( ISBN 0-691-02008-6 ); expanded edition 2000 ( ISBN 0-19-924206-2 )
• History, Labour and Freedom. Themes from Marx, Oxford University Press, 1988 ( ISBN 978-0198247791 ).
• Self- ownership, freedom and equality, Cambridge University Press, 1995 ( ISBN 0-521-47174-5 )
• If you're an egalitarian, how come you're so rich, Harvard University Press, 2000 ( ISBN 0-674-00218-0 )? , German translation: Equality without indifference. Political philosophy and individual behavior, 2001 ( ISBN 3-434-53094-0 )
• Rescuing justice and equality, Harvard University Press, 2008 ( ISBN 978-0-674-03076-3 )
• Why Not Socialism? Princeton University Press, 2009 (ISBN 978-0-691-14361-3 ); German Translation: Socialism. Why not? , 2010 (ISBN 3-813-50381- X)