REVIEWS

G.A. COHEN, If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000
RONALD DWORKIN, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2000
JOHN ROEMER, Theories of Distributive Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1996
Reviewed by ALEX CALLINICOS

Having Your Cake and Eating it

An anecdote from the 1970s

Sometime early in 1973, I paid a visit to Jerry Cohen, who was then teaching philos-
ophy at University College London. I was in my third year at Oxford, and I wanted
to go on to write a doctorate on Marx’s Capital. Given the scarcity of Marxist philosophers
in British universities (not something that has changed much in the intervening thirty
years), Cohen was an obvious choice to supervise such a thesis. I remember little of
our conversation – though it was amicable enough, I ended up doing my doctorate
elsewhere.

One exchange did stick in my mind, however. As a native of what was then the rebel
colony of Southern Rhodesia, I would not be entitled to a British state grant. I told
Cohen that I intended to apply for a Commonwealth scholarship. He asked me whether
I would be comfortable taking such a scholarship. The implication was that there
might be something morally problematic about my taking it – whether because the
Commonwealth was a means of perpetuating British imperialism, or (more likely)
because, as a white Rhodesian, I might crowd out black candidates who needed the
money more. Whatever the precise nature of Cohen’s reservations, I had no such
qualms: I needed money to finance my doctorate, and I would cheerfully take it from
whatever source was available. I made it clear that I was puzzled that he should think
there was an issue there. We had stumbled into mutual incomprehension.

I tell this anecdote for two reasons. First, it fits in with the quasi-autobiographical
style of Cohen’s latest book. Secondly, it dramatises the tension that is one of that

Historical Materialism, volume 9 (169–195)

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2001
book’s main themes. Even though he was then still a pretty orthodox Marxist (the
publication of Karl Marx’s Theory of History was still more than five years in the future),
Cohen was already concerned about the role of moral judgements in guiding our
actions. I believed that they had no such role – or, rather, that, insofar as they did
provide us with reasons for acting, they served as one form of bourgeois ideology. In
taking this position I was the more orthodox Marxist (though it was spiced up with
a lavish portion of Althusserian anti-humanism and a sprinkling of Nietzsche).

Both of us have changed our views in the intervening thirty years. Cohen, as If You’re
an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? records, is now concerned intellectually less
with explanatory social theory than with normative political philosophy; politically,
he has travelled most (though not all) of the distance that separates Marxism from
the egalitarian liberalism of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. Yet he has retained one
of the most common Marxist assumptions, namely that we must choose between
explanatory social theory and normative political philosophy, or – more broadly –
between Marxism and morality. He has, in other words, rejected classical Marxism in
favour of an ethical theory of justice. By contrast, having now abandoned what I now
regard as the absurdly reductive view of moral discourse that I took from Marx and
Althusser, I see no reason why one can not be a fairly orthodox Marxist and a realist
about evaluative sentences, treating these as having, in their own way, truth-values
just like sentences making factual assertions about the state of the weather or the
stock market. Where once I dismissed morality in the name of Marxism, I now refuse
to choose between them: I don’t see why one can not have both. I think one can have
one’s cake and eat it – in this case at least.

An exemplary journey?

I contrast my evolution with Cohen’s not because mine is particularly interesting or

important, but in order to undermine the impression of inevitability that If You’re an
Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? implies about Cohen’s own trajectory from the
orthodox Marxism he unreflectingly acquired thanks to his upbringing in a working-
class Jewish Communist family in Quebec to the ethical socialism he now embraces.
The book – based on the 1996 Gifford Lectures – weaves together personal remini-
scence and philosophical argument in a manner that is initially attractive but leaves
the reader (or at any rate this one) increasingly frustrated.

In the opening chapter, Cohen worries rather ineffectually about the status of beliefs
acquired as a result of the particular upbringing one has had – Marxism in his case,
or the analytic-synthetic distinction among those who read philosophy at Oxford.1
But there is one way in which we may lack reflective distance from the beliefs we

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have acquired that he fails to consider – namely thinking that one’s own intellectual
evolution is somehow privileged, revelatory of deeper truths. Thus he writes:

And now Marxism has lost much or most of its carapace, its hard shell of
supposed fact. Scarcely anyone defends it in the academy, and there are no
more apparatchiki who believe that they are applying it in Communist Party
offices. To the extent that Marxism is still alive – and one may say that a
sort of Marxism is alive in, for example, the work of scholars like John
Roemer and Philippe Van Parijs in Belgium – it presents itself as a set of
values and a set of designs for realizing those values. It is therefore, now,
far less different than it could have once advertized itself to be from the
utopian socialism with which it so proudly contrasted itself. Its shell is crack-
ing and crumbling, its soft underbelly exposed.2

Now, Roemer and Van Parijs are, of course, members of the so-called September Group
of philosophers and social scientists whose annual meetings have been the driving
force of analytical Marxism. Cohen, who can claim with justice to have founded ana-
lytical Marxism, is also a member of the group. So, Cohen is saying that, insofar as
Marxism survives, it consists in what he and his friends are doing. Moreover, its con-
tent has been reduced to (or perhaps better, given the traditional Marxist hostility to
ethical discourse, has been transformed into) ‘a set of values and a set of designs for
realising those values’. There are two things to be said about these claims. First, they
are remarkably similar to Tony Blair’s oft-repeated assertion that he is pursuing tra-
ditional socialist values in a modern setting.3 Guilt by association is, of course, no
basis for condemning anyone: Cohen has indeed produced a fine critique of the Labour
modernisers’ failure to defend socialist values, let alone to seek to realise them in
practice.4 But it is, in any case, clear that the sense in which Marxism survives accord-
ing to Cohen would not be one easily recognisable by its founders. Secondly, his
claims are incredibly arrogant. In implying that the only worthwhile Marxist work
being currently done is what he and his fellow analytical Marxists are doing, he tacitly
dismisses virtually everything published in this journal, and in others like it, as a
waste of time. In particular, the critique of political economy to which Marx devoted
his economic writings is vieux jeu. ‘Scarcely anyone defends it in the academy now’ -
or rather, scarcely anyone who counts.5

Maybe we are wasting our time. But, for that conclusion to bite, powerful support-
ing argument is required. Yet this is precisely what is lacking in If You’re an Egalitarian,
How Come You’re So Rich?, at least when Cohen discusses the theoretical content of
Marxism. This is really surprising. Karl Marx’s Theory of History, whatever one thinks
of the interpretation of historical materialism offered there, is one of the classics of

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twentieth-century Marxist philosophy.6 Cohen’s other monograph, Self-Ownership,
Freedom, and Equality is an impressively sustained and subtle piece of argumentation,
even if one thinks it a misdirection of his intellectual energy (as I do).7

Relative to these two undeniably important books, If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come
You’re So Rich? is a disappointment. The four chapters that are concerned with Marxism
(three to six) contain much rather laboured exposition of fairly straightforward points.8
In the process, they offer three main criticisms of Marxism (the second and third are
developed at more length in the Self-Ownership book):

Criticism 1. Marx drew on Hegel for ‘an obstetric conception of political practice’
according to which ‘the full development of a problem always issues in its solution’.
But this is both ‘patently false’ and encourages ‘a cavalier attitude to politics’.9

Criticism 2. Marx was able to dispense with any moral critique of capitalism because
he believed that ‘material equality, equality of access to goods and services, was both
historically inevitable and morally right’. More specifically, ‘[i]t was partly because
they believed that equality was historically inevitable that classical Marxists did not
spend much time thinking about why equality was morally right’. This belief in the
inevitability of socialism was itself partly supported by Marx’s claim that the work-
ing class were simultaneously the majority of society, produced its wealth, and were
the exploited and the needy people in society, and therefore had ‘the will and capac-
ity for revolution’.10 But, since the working class has disintegrated, this basis for achiev-
ing socialism no longer exists (granting that it ever had the characteristics that Marx
ascribed to it).

Criticism 3. Marx relied, however, on two ‘inevitabilitarian claims’. The second guar-
anteed the absence of conflict after the revolution: the development of the productive
forces ‘would issue in a material abundance so great that anything anyone needed
for a richly fulfilling life could be taken from the common store at no cost to anyone’.
But ‘planet Earth rebels: its resources turn out not to be lavish enough for continu-
ous growth in technical knowledge to generate unceasing expansion of use-value’.
Indeed, it is the ‘[s]harply falling average living standards’ required to achieve sus-
tainable development that now increasingly motivate the demand for equality since
‘huge disparities of wealth’ would then become harder to bear than when growth is
hauling everyone’s incomes up, albeit unequally.11

The politics of inevitability

All three criticisms raise large questions. In the space available to me here, I shall
have to deal with them summarily, but I must say that I am not sure that they will

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thereby be done much injustice. All three have in common the idea that classical
Marxism treats socialism as inevitable. Criticism 1 offers a good opportunity to con-
sider this idea directly. Cohen is perfectly correct in finding what he calls ‘the obstet-
ric motif’ in Marxism.12 It is most explicitly stated in the famous passage in the 1859
Preface where Marx says: ‘Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is
able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises
only when the material conditions necessary for its solution are already present or at
least in the process of formation’.13

Cohen is also right to say that the view of history implied by such passages is false.
Two reasons for this falsehood stand out. The first is that problems are often formu-
lated before the conditions for solving them exist. An obvious example is provided
by the idea of equality itself. Marxist historians from Bernstein and Kautsky to
Christopher Hill and Brian Manning have documented how, from the very early
phases of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, movements have arisen that
propounded the ideal of a society without classes or exploitation while lacking the
means to realise this ideal. It is one thing to say that the creation of an egalitarian
society depends on certain material conditions, but quite another to claim that the
very idea of such a society can only be formulated when such conditions ‘are already
present or at least in the process of formation’. Secondly, social revolution is not
inevitable. The presence of certain material circumstances may be a necessary condi-
tion of a particular social transformation, but it is not a sufficient one.

It must be said, however, that neither of these reasons need present much embar-
rassment for Marxists. As I have already noted, Marxist historians have been espe-
cially assiduous in uncovering socialist and communist movements that were ‘premature’
from the standpoint of the level of development of the productive forces and the struc-
ture of class relations. Without the absence of ‘the material conditions necessary for
its solution’, Engels’s famous portrayal of the plight of the sixteenth-century German
communist leader Thomas Münzer would lack its tragic force:

The worst thing that can befall the leader of an extreme party is to be com-
pelled to assume power at a time when the movement [sic] is not yet ripe
for the domination of the class he represents and for the measures this dom-
ination implies. What he can do depends not on his will but on the degree
of antagonism between the several classes, and on the level of development
of the material means of existence of the conditions of production and
commerce upon which the degree of intensity of the class contradictions
always reposes. What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again
depends not on him, but also not on the degree of development of the class

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 struggle and its conditions. He is bound to the doctrines and demands hith-
erto propounded which, again, do not follow from the class relations of the
moment, or from the more or less accidental level of production and com-
merce, but from his more or less penetrating insight into the general result
of the social and political movement. Thus, he necessarily finds himself in
an unsolvable dilemma. What he can do contradicts all his previous actions
and principles and the immediate interests of his party, and what he ought
to do cannot be done.14

Engels’s diagnosis of Münzer’s ‘unsolvable dilemma’ contradicts the doctrine expounded

by Marx in the 1859 Preface that ‘mankind . . . sets itself only such tasks as it is able
to solve’. Apart from providing yet more evidence against the counterposition of a
mythically ‘determinist’ Engels and ‘humanist’ Marx, this passage highlights the
theoretical heterogeneity present even in the founding works of Marxism. Cohen
dilates on the evil consequences of the ‘obstetric conception’ and the inevitable tri-
umph that it promises the Left: ‘that is a reassurance which, after the sorry history
of the twentieth century, we can no longer enjoy and, which it is, moreover, danger-
ous to enjoy’.15 I can’t help detecting a certain amount of bad faith here. For, if there
is a canonical statement of the obstetric conception, it is Karl Marx’s Theory of History.
Not only does the Primacy Thesis (according to which the level of development of
the productive forces explain the nature of the relations of production) at the core of
Cohen’s account of historical materialism require that social revolution (given the
appropriate material conditions) is inevitable, but, elsewhere, he explicitly defends
the thesis that socialist revolution is inevitable.16

It was his commitment to historical inevitability that lay behind many other Marxists’
resistance to Cohen’s version of the Marxist theory of history, despite the brilliance
with which he articulated it.17 It, therefore, is a bit rich for him now solemnly to lec-
ture us on the evils that follow from believing that socialism is inevitable. We did not
need Cohen to tell us this: all we had to do (assuming we could not work it out for
ourselves) was read Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. Moreover,
it is easy to demonstrate exegetically that some of the key figures in twentieth-century
Marxism did not believe that socialism was inevitable: the most obvious cases in point
are Lenin, Trotsky, Lukács, and Gramsci.18 Even Rosa Luxemburg, who mistakenly
thought that the economic breakdown of capitalism was inevitable, did not conclude
that this collapse would necessarily lead to successful socialist revolution: hence her
slogan ‘socialism or barbarism’.19

Cohen elaborates on the bad consequences of ‘inevitabilitarianism ’: ‘If you think of

politics obstetrically, you risk supposing that what Lenin called “the concrete analy-

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sis of a concrete situation” will disclose, transparently, what your political interven-
tion must be, so that you do not face the uncertainties and hard choices with which
a responsible politics must contend’.20 This is fair enough, except that the placing of
a famous formulation of Lenin’s in this sentence implies that he made this supposi-
tion. Nothing could be further from the truth. The theory implicit in Lenin’s politics
is one according to which the uncertainties of history require interventions from rev-
olutionaries that often involve choosing between unpalatable alternatives (the Treaty
of Brest-Litovsk comes to mind) but which may help produce a better outcome.21

Memories of class

Cohen’s Criticism 2 involves that old chestnut the disappearing working class. This
is, of course, an enormously important issue. It has to be said that Cohen’s argument
here does not begin to rise to the level demanded by the subject matter. Theoretically,
probably the key claim that he makes is that, traditionally, Marxism equated the needy
with the exploited: hence, it would be their need that would fuse with workers’ eco-
nomic power (a consequence of their exploitation) to bring about an overthrow of
capitalism. Not only is this equation empirically false, Cohen contends, but it is nor-
matively problematic since it implies a distributive principle that rewards people in
proportion to their labour contribution (the so-called contribution principle), and that
therefore denies those who cannot work because of youth, infirmity, or old age a share
of society’s resources. 22

Now this is all very odd. For one thing, confused though Marx may be about nor-
mative questions, he is perfectly clear in the Critique of the Gotha Programme that the
contribution principle’s insensitivity to differences in need is a defect. It is because of
this defect that he argues that the higher stage of communism would allocate resources
to individuals on the basis of their needs, not their productive contribution.23 For
another, Cohen’s account of Marx’s conception of the working class is based on two
rather exiguous sources, the Communist Manifesto and the second verse of the fine
American socialist song ‘Solidarity Forever’. Sometimes, when publicly presenting
his critique of Marx Cohen will sing ‘Solidarity Forever’. These performances are the
best thing about this argument. He refers to ‘[t]he communist impression of the work-
ing class’.24 And, indeed, what Cohen offers us is an impression, not a theory of the
working class.

It is tedious to have to repeat what someone as familiar with Marx’s writings as Cohen
should know, namely that the Manifesto, magnificent though it is, is not a reliable
guide to Marx’s mature economic theory. The latter’s development depended on
Marx’s detailed engagement in the 1850s with classical political economy in general

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and Ricardo in particular, a process that culminated in the Grundrisse, and the later
manuscripts of what became Capital. Among the revisions in his earlier thinking was
his rejection of the so-called ‘iron law of wages’, according to which wages cannot
rise above the minimum of physical subsistence. This theory, which Marx does endorse
in the Manifesto, would support the equation of the working class with the needy that
Cohen ascribes to him.25

And Marx does indeed express such a view, for example, in the 1843 Introduction to
his Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. But the development of his
mature conception of the working class involves precisely the rejection of the idea
that the proletariat were necessarily the neediest section of society. Other groups –
for example, the peasantry – may be worse off, but it is their strategic placement
within the capitalist process of exploitation that makes the working class the privi-
leged agent of socialist transformation.26 The great political problem of the relation-
ship between the proletariat and the peasantry – one of the dominant debates about
socialist strategy from the German Social Democratic Party in the 1890s through the
Russian Revolutions to the disputes over Maoism and Guevarism in the 1960s and
1970s – would not arise were it not the case that wage-labourers exploited by capi-
talism do not exhaust, or even dominate the category of the needy.

Cohen might respond by saying that these exegetic points do not address the empir-
ical reality of the disintegration of the working class. But nowhere does he offer any-
thing resembling an analysis of the class structure of contemporary capitalism. His
remarks on the subject do not rise above the level of an op-ed Guardian column. This
does not mean that Cohen is wrong, only that he fails to offer any persuasive reasons
for believing that he is right. The closest he comes to an argument is in the follow-
ing response to the objection that, despite deindustrialisation in the advanced economies,
the world working class is growing:

But that is instructively false. It is no doubt true that, across the countries
which form the bulk of the world’s population, there are producers, previ-
ously cut off from capitalism, who amply realize the exploitation and need
characteristics – in Indian steel mills, in Korean electronic assembly facto-
ries, and so on. But they do not form a majority across the societies in ques-
tion, which remain largely agrarian, and they do not represent producers
on whose labor capitalism is dependent, in the traditional projected sense.
For the engine of production in today’s world is the transnational corpo-
ration, which absorbs and expels workers at will. No group of its workers
has substantial clout, because so many other groups form an industrial
reserve army vis-à-vis any one of those groups. The actual and potential

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 proletariats of India and China are ready to displace the workers of
Birmingham, Detroit, and Lille, and of Manila and São Paulo and Capetown
[sic].27

The quaint idea that South Korea is a ‘largely agrarian’ society implies much ignor-
ance of the Third World, as does this passage as a whole. Cohen apparently subscribes
to an extreme version of the globalisation thesis, according to which footloose multi-
national corporations (MNCs) float over the world, investing and divesting as they
choose. He seems unacquainted with the actual evidence on the nature and distrib-
ution of foreign direct investment (FDI). As numerous studies have shown, MNCs
largely invest in the advanced capitalist economies themselves, and in a small num-
ber of relatively developed Third World states (including coastal, but not inland China).
FDI is attracted to these countries by the size and sophistication of their domestic
markets, by the quality of their infrastructure and communications, and by the pres-
ence of relatively educated and skilled workforces. The importance of this last con-
dition means that it is not the case that the MNC ‘absorbs and expels workers at will’.
Labour has not become a homogeneous factor of production any unit of which may
be substituted for by any other. Even where MNCs have been able to take advantage
of well-educated and computer-literate Southern workforces available at much lower
wages than their Northern counterparts, they cannot hire or fire them ‘at will’: in
what sense are the English-speaking call-centre workers used by British Airways in
Bombay in competition with illiterate manual labourers in the same city?28

Abundance , justice, and communism

Cohen’s casual critique of Marx’s theory of the working class suggests his argument
is driven by philosophical concerns rather than by any attempt to engage empirically
with the realities of contemporary capitalism. This impression is strengthened by
Criticism 3. This states that Marx was able to rule out the kind of conflicts that are
normally held to require some principle of distributive justice to regulate them in a
communist society by ‘a technological fix’: ‘a plenary abundance ensures extensive
compatibility among the material interests of differently endowed people’.29 But this
thought is no longer tenable in the era of global warming: ‘It is beyond dispute that
Western consumption . . . must, on average, fall drastically, and that non-Western con-
sumption, considered in the aggregate, will never reach current levels’.30 So, we need
principles of justice to manage the conflicts that will be unavoidable even in an egal-
itarian society, since humanity’s future, like its past, will be one of scarcity.

This argument signals an important shift in Cohen’s overall theoretical orientation.

In Karl Marx’s Theory of History it is rational actors’ response to scarcity that drives

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the development of the productive forces that in turn explains the rise and fall of
social systems: scarcity, in other words, underpins historical materialism .31 Now, how-
ever, it is the prospect of enduring scarcity that helps to motivate the demand for an
egalitarian society. As Cohen himself puts it, ‘[a] (supposedly) inevitable future plenty
was [in Marx] a reason for predicting equality. Persisting scarcity is now a reason for
demanding it’.32 This contrast implies the autonomy of moral discourse from material
constraints, a thesis that Cohen makes more explicit in Chapters 8 and 9 of If You’re
an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?

Here, he argues, this time against Rawls, that a just society requires not merely an
institutional structure that respects Rawls’s two principles of justice, but also the
prevalence of an egalitarian social ethos. Hence, he now finds himself sympathising
with the traditional Christian view that ‘equality requires . . . a moral revolution, a
revolution in the human soul’. Cohen is careful not to reduce the attainment of equal-
ity to such a revolution: ‘both just rules and just personal choice within the framework
set by just rules are necessary for distributive justice’. Nevertheless, as he puts it, he
has ‘moved from an economic point of view to a moral one’.33 This shift helps to
explain his preoccupation, made explicit in the final chapter of this book, with what
rich egalitarians should do now: if a just society depends on both just structures and
just behaviour, how should egalitarians behave in an unjust society?

Once again, the least interesting aspect of Cohen’s argument is the empirical claims
he makes. The ecologically mandated necessity of reductions in Western living stan-
dards and so on, which he asserts to be ‘beyond dispute’, seem to me highly dis-
putable. More to the point, however, he does not seem to me to have got the connections
between ecology, communism, and conflict quite right. To begin with, the myth that
Marx was insensitive to the environmental impact of modern technologies cannot sur-
vive a reading of John Bellamy Foster’s important new book Marx’s Ecology. Here
Foster documents not merely Marx’s continuous preoccupation with the relationship
between humankind and the rest of the natural world but also his increasing con-
cern, expressed especially in Capital, Volume III, about the destructive environmen-
tal consequences of modern agricultural techniques revealed by Liebig’s researches.
The idea that Marx was after ‘a technological fix’ does not seem consistent with the
aspects of his thought highlighted by Foster.

The need for such a fix derives, according to Cohen, from Marx’s belief that the higher
stage of communist society would be one without conflict. He offers a nice image of
how Marx envisaged such a society:

One way of picturing life under communism, as Marx conceived it, is to

imagine a jazz band each player in which seeks his own fulfillment as a

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 musician. Though basically interested in his own fulfillment, and not in that
of the band as a whole, or of his fellow musicians taken severally, he never-
theless fulfils himself only to the extent that each of the others also does so,
and the same holds for each of them. There are, additionally, some less tal-
ented people around who obtain high satisfaction from not playing but from
listening, and their presence further enhances the fulfillment of the band’s
members. Against a backdrop of abundance, players and audience alike
pursue their own several bents: no one cleans the streets (unless he gets a
kick out of that) or spends his life as an appendage to a machine. Everyone
is guided by his self-regarding goal, yet there is no inequality in the pic-
ture to exercise an egalitarian .34

The good thing about this image is that it brings out that, for Marx, communism is
the liberation of individuality. Cohen rightly rejects the attribution to Marx of what
he calls an ‘over-socialised’ view of human nature according to which there will be
no conflict in communism because, thanks to the forms of socialisation characteristic
of that mode of production, individuals will no longer think of themselves as having
different interests. Communism is, rather, what he calls ‘a concert of mutually sup-
porting self-fulfillments, in which no one takes promoting the fulfillment of others as
any kind of obligation’.35 It is precisely because of the absence of obligation, or indeed
of constraint more generally, that abundance is required to ensure that everyone doing
their own thing does not lead to conflict.

But it is also in this asserted absence of constraint – present in the passage cited above
in the claim that ‘no one cleans the streets (unless he gets a kick out of that)’ – that
Cohen’s metaphor of the jazz band goes off the rails. Commenting on the needs prin-
ciple that Marx claims will govern distribution in full communism – ‘From each accord-
ing to his ability, to each according to his needs!’ – Cohen asks: ‘Does it not imply
that the individual must lend his ability to the community, for the sake of equality
of condition, and therefore exercise it differently from how he might otherwise have
chosen to do? But in a communist society everyone develops freely, and, so I infer,
without any such constraint’.36 But it is precisely this inference that Marx denies in a
famous passage in Capital:

the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined
by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of
things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the
savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and repro-
duce his life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social forma-
tions and under all possible modes of production . . . Freedom in this field

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 can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally reg-
ulating their intercourse with Nature, bringing it under their common con-
trol, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and
achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions
most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless
still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of
human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which
can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The short-
ening of the working day is its basic prerequisite.37

This does not much sound like a jazz band. At the very least, everyone will have to
clean the streets, or in some other way do their share of the indispensable but unpleas-
ant activities that make up the ‘realm of necessity’. Marx plainly hopes that techno-
logical change will reduce the demands of this realm, but he does not predict that
they will disappear. Once this element of compulsion is acknowledged, then it is hard
to envisage a communist society from which conflict has been banished. Given the
differences among individuals which, as Cohen rightly argues, Marx does not believe
can be socialised out of existence, people will have different views about the relative
unpleasantness of various socially necessary activities and about how to allocate them.
Decision-making mechanisms will be required in order to resolve these differences
and arrive at some broadly acceptable conclusions about, among other things, how
these tasks are performed. Even if (as Marx presumably expects) direct coercion can
usually be avoided, these arrangements will involve people having sometimes to do
things they would have preferred not to do.38

How far do these inferences from Marx’s remarks on the realm of necessity take us
from his explicit views? Not very far. He does not, in fact, claim that there will be no
conflict under communism. In the 1859 Preface, he writes: ‘The bourgeois mode of
production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production – antago-
nistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates
from the individuals’ social conditions of existence’.39 So, the irreducible differences
among individuals will still generate conflict under communism. What will change,
however, are the character and the causes of such conflict. Cohen cites passages
from The German Ideology where Marx relates the disappearance of conflict to the
development of the productive forces. Most famously, he warns that, without a
world revolution, ‘which presupposes the universal development of the productive
forces’, ‘privation, want is merely made general and with want the struggle for
necessities would begin again, and the whole filthy business would necessarily be
restored’.40

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By ‘the whole filthy business’ Marx means, of course, exploitation and class
struggle – large-scale conflict among collective actors rooted in their unequal access
to material resources, which, in turn, depend upon the relatively limited development
of the productive forces.41 The abundance required for communism is whatever is the
material prerequisite for eliminating that, not whatever is required to avoid any clashes
whatsoever among the members of the same society. All that Marx is committed to,
as Will Kymlicka puts it, is ‘the absence of structurally generated conflicts of interest
prior to and independent of individuals’ choices’.42 Cohen talks about Marx positing
‘absolute abundance’ or ‘limitless abundance’ as the presupposition of communism
without any serious attempt to explain why he must do this.43 Norman Geras has
argued persuasively that what the needs principle requires is ‘abundance relative to
some standard of “reasonable” needs which, large and generous as it may be possi-
ble for it to be, still falls short of any fantasy of abundance without limits’, and that
this implies that, ‘though there can be no primitively-given co-ordination or harmony
of individual needs and though these might well sometimes potentially conflict, there
will be authoritative social norms, including distributive ones, which people more or
less voluntarily accept’.44 Cohen praises the article where Geras makes this argument,
but does not consider its damaging implications for his own interpretation of Marx’s
conception of communism.45

The collapse of this interpretation also undermines Cohen’s explanation of Marx’s

indifference to normative issues:

Under conditions of scarcity, so traditional Marxism maintains, class soci-

ety is inescapable, its property structures settle questions of distribution,
and discussion of the nature of justice, in general terms, is therefore futile . . .
Nor is it necessary to inquire into what precisely will be demanded by jus-
tice in the future condition of abundance. For communism, in which every-
one has what she wants, will then supervene effortlessly . . . and justice will
thereby be achieved, on any conception of it, from utilitarian through to lib-
ertarian. Devoting energy to the question ‘What is the right way to dis-
tribute?’ is futile with respect to the present and unnecessary with respect
to the future.46

I think I have said enough to indicate the respects in which this picture of commu-
nism caricatures Marx’s views: even on a deterministic reading of historical material-
ism, it is nonsense to suggest that he thinks communism would ‘supervene effortlessly’,
and he does not claim that, once it is attained, ‘everyone has what they want’. It is
true that he mistakenly believes that communism will not require normative princi-
ples of justice to regulate the conflicts that will inevitably follow from the fact that

Reviews • 181
everyone cannot have what they want. But the sources of this error are more com-
plex than the desire to rule out any possibility of conflict in an egalitarian society that
Cohen mis-attributes to him.

Let me briefly mention three important factors. First, we cannot discount the influence
of Hegel, who provides the pervasive philosophical background to all Marx’s thought
(even when the latter goes beyond or even breaks with him). Hegel’s critique of Kant
involves an assault on the autonomy of moral discourse and an insistence that evaluative
and factual considerations cannot be disentangled. It is Marx’s Hegelian anti-Kantianis m
that, I think, lies behind his attack (most notably in the Critique of the Gotha Programme)
on the abstractness of ‘right’, his false claim that any normative principle of equality
is inherently unable to attend to the differences between human beings.47 Second, in
The German Ideology Marx develops a critique of moral discourse as a form of ideol-
ogy that disjoins the resolution of social conflict from the material conditions on which
it depends.48 He also offers accounts of both Kantianism and utilitarianism – still today
the most influential forms of ethical theory – as bourgeois ideologies. Thirdly, Marx
distinguishes his political strategy from that of various left-wing currents (the utopian
socialists, ‘True Socialism’, Proudhon, etc.), which, because of their lack of a mate-
rialist conception of history, treat moral criticism and advocacy as substitutes for the
development of an independent working-class movement fighting for political power.

These considerations help to motivate Marx’s adoption of a relativist conception of

ethics according to which moral judgements reflect the needs of the prevailing mode
of production. This conception informs his remarks in Capital and elsewhere about
the justice of capitalist exploitation that have generated so much debate.49 As Geras’s
scrupulous analysis has definitively shown, Marx was wrong: even though he denies
it, his critique of capitalist exploitation involves a tacit appeal to principles of jus-
tice.50 But – to return to the point I made at the beginning of this article – recognition
of this error does not require us to abandon historical materialism for ethical social-
ism. The very fact that Marx’s critique of exploitation is implicitly evaluative sug-
gests prima facie that his explanatory social theory can peacefully co-exist with normative
claims. Cohen seeks to overturn this presumption, but since he has to caricature both
historical materialism and Marx’s view of communism to make his arguments stand
up, there is no reason for us to make the choice he demands of us, between Marxism
and morality. We can have our cake and eat it.

Engaging with egalitarian liberalism

This conclusion is not intended to encourage Marxists complacently to retreat into an

unexamined orthodoxy. The influence of Marx’s erroneous meta-ethical theory has

182 • Reviews
meant that Marxist thinking on normative issues is seriously underdeveloped. This
is a particular weakness when it comes to the philosophical area to which Cohen has
devoted much of his attention since the early 1980s, the development of egalitarian
principles of justice. Thanks to the influence of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, this has
been a boom-zone in Anglophone political philosophy over the past generation. As
Cohen’s fellow Analytical Marxist John Roemer rightly says, ‘these philosophical ideas
have led to immense progress in our understanding of what justice is’.51 Part of my
purpose in refusing Cohen’s dilemma is to open up a space in which Marxists can,
in a relaxed and open-minded (though not uncritical) way, respond to the arguments
and findings of egalitarian liberalism.52

The other two books under review are useful resources for this dialogue. Sovereign
Virtue brings together Ronald Dworkin’s major writings on equality. These have had
a key role in setting the terms of the debate as it has developed since A Theory of
Justice. One of Rawls’s most radical claims was that persons are not entitled to ben-
efit from any special talents they may have. Since they are not in any sense respon-
sible for the existence of these talents, they do not deserve them or any benefits that
derive from their exercise. Special rewards for the talented are only justified when
they provide them with incentives to produce more and thereby benefit the least
advantaged (Rawls’s Difference Principle sanctions inequalities only when they are
to the advantage of the worst off).53

This argument conjures up a distinction between those aspects of a person’s life for
which she may be held responsible and those for which she may not. Rawls himself
in his official doctrine refuses to draw this distinction (although he sometimes nev-
ertheless relies on it),54 but Dworkin makes it central to his account of what he calls
equality of resources. Thus he writes:

Equality of resources assumes a fundamental distinction between a person,

understood to include features of personality like convictions, ambitions,
tastes, and preferences, and that person’s circumstances, which include the
resources, talents, and capacities he commands. ‘Dworkin 2000; p. 140.’

This distinction in turn maps onto one between choice and chance:

We distinguish, for a thousand reasons, between what part of our fate is

open to assignments of responsibility because it is the upshot of someone’s
choice, and what part is ineligible for any such assignment because it is the
work not of people but of nature or brute luck.55

Dworkin’s thought is that egalitarianism requires that persons should be compensated

for disadvantages that stem from bad brute luck, from circumstances outside their

Reviews • 183
control, such as the natural talents and class position that they inherit.56 In a pair of
seminal articles that first appeared in 1981 and are here republished as Chapters 1
and 2, ‘Equality of Welfare’ and ‘Equality of Resources’, he argues for an egalitarian
distribution of resources based on a hypothetical auction in which individuals with
equal shares bid against each other for bundles of resources and also insure them-
selves against the possibility of their suffering from handicaps such as disability and
lack of talent. In the second half of Sovereign Virtue, entitled ‘Practice’, Dworkin pro-
poses extensions of the hypothetical insurance market to provide the basis for the
provision of health care and protection against unemployment and low pay.57

Dworkin’s version of liberal equality depends on a series of complex, and subtly

deployed arguments. It is impossible properly to assess these here. I shall therefore
merely touch on two aspects of this theory. First of all, there is the relationship that
Dworkin posits between equality and the market. If it is generally the case that egal-
itarian liberals believe that the principles of justice they endorse can be realised in
some version of a market economy, Dworkin develops a much tighter relationship,
embedding the idea of a market in his very formulation of what equality is. He says
that ‘the idea of an economic market, as a device for setting prices for a vast variety
of goods and services, must be at the centre of any attractive theoretical development
of equality of resources’.58 It is important to see that this does not mean that Dworkin
is a neoliberal advocate of a minimal state or anything like that. On the contrary, he
is a liberal Democrat – in European terms, a right-wing social democrat – who sup-
ports the mixed economy and the welfare state.

The function of the market in Dworkin’s thought is less as an actual institution than
an ideal state by reference to which one is able to determine whether or not a par-
ticular distribution is just. Thus: ‘The device of the auction might provide . . . a stan-
dard for judging how far an actual distribution, however it has been achieved,
approaches equality of resources at any particular time’. A few pages later he calls
‘the idea of a market in insurance . . . a counterfactual guide’. But, even if this use of
the market as a kind of ideal type (relative to which one is able to measure the jus-
tice of actual distributions) does not commit Dworkin always to opt for market solu-
tions in practice, he is on the individualist end of the egalitarian liberal spectrum.
Thus he says that ‘a just distribution is one that well-informed people create for them-
selves by individual choices, provided that the economic system and the distribution
of wealth in the community in which these choices are made are themselves just’. The
proviso is an important one, but Dworkin tends, when considering specific policy
issues, to privilege individual responsibility:

A community that is committed to equality of resources, so that people

make their own decisions about what lives are best for them, enforces rather

184 • Reviews
 than subverts proper principles of individual responsibility. It does accept
that the intervention of government is sometimes necessary to provide the
circumstances in which it is fair to ask all citizens to take responsibility for
their own lives. But it respects the personal judgements of need and value
that citizens have actually, or would be likely to make under appropriate
conditions, in the exercise of this responsibility.59

Cohen famously praises Dworkin for having ‘performed for egalitarianis m the
considerable service of incorporating within it the most powerful idea of the anti-
egalitarian right: the idea of choice and responsibility’.60 This stress on individual
responsibility has provoked an attack on ‘luck egalitarianism ’ for reinstating the idea
of the undeserving poor by condemning to their fate those whose disadvantaged sit-
uation flows from their own bad choices (for example, someone who is disabled
because she drove without fastening her seat-belt).61 This criticism involves a distor-
tion of Dworkin’s position, which seeks to base social provision, not on what choices
people actually make, but on those they would make under the conditions – involv-
ing crucially an equal distribution of claims on resources – of the hypothetical insur-
ance market. It is true that Dworkin does describe equality of resources as a ‘third
way’ between ‘old egalitarians’ and conservatives who focus exclusively on, respec-
tively, collective and personal responsibility, but he should not be punished too severely
for this misjudgement: his criticisms of the 1996 Welfare Reform Bill signed into law
by Bill Clinton indicate that he is neither theoretically nor practically committed to
the actually existing Third Way with its reinstatement of laissez faire and attacks on
the poor.62

The real difficulty lies in the idealised conception of the market on which Dworkin
relies, drawing on Walrasian general equilibrium theory.63 This conception is not simply
unrealistic (any neoclassical economist would cheerfully concede this) but systemat-
ically misleading from the point of view of justice. For the fluctuations of the market
are constantly generating new cases of brute luck. Individuals are rewarded or (more
frequently) have their livelihoods destroyed because of shifts in the market that have
little or nothing to do with their talents or their choices about how to use them. To
put it in Dworkin’s terms, the market belongs to circumstances rather than choice.

Dworkin is ambivalent on this point. He says that ‘the distribution of tastes’ – on the
kind of neoclassical model he is using, one of the main determinants of the relative
prices of resources – are among the ‘background facts that determine what equality
of resources in these circumstances is’. Equality of resources involves individuals
developing their life-plans on the basis of an understanding of how important dif-
ferent resources are to others; this understanding is provided by the relative prices
of these resources, which, in turn, reflect the preferences of all the participants in the

Reviews • 185
auction. But individuals must take responsibility for these preferences: Dworkin’s
conception of the person ‘assigns his tastes and ambitions to his person and his phys-
ical and mental powers to his circumstances’.64 Thus, equality of resources will gen-
erate a just distribution because, here, individuals choose constrained only by nature
and by the choices of others subject to the same constraints. But this picture relies on
too individualistic a conception of social structure in general and of the market in
particular. The market is what Hegel called ‘second nature’: it governs people’s choices
and shapes their life-chances according to an imperative logic that cannot be captured
– indeed that it is apologetic to seek to represent – as the mere resultant of individ-
ual choices. At issue here is the central theme of Marx’s critique of Proudhon, and
one of the persistent points of disagreement between revolutionary socialism and
social democracy: exploitation and crises are liabilities inherent in the very structure
of the market (once it has been disentangled from other social relationships), not his-
torically contingent distortions.65

This point brings us to the second issue I wish to consider – the contrast central to
Dworkin’s whole theory of equality between circumstances and choice. As he con-
cedes in one of the later essays reprinted here, ‘[t]he distinction between choice and
circumstances . . . is problematic in many ways’. 66 This has indeed emerged from the
debate about what Cohen calls ‘the currency of egalitarian justice’ to which he has
made a distinguished contribution. In the second half of his Theories of Distributive
Justice, John Roemer provides a lucid and judicious survey of this and related debates
that can be strongly recommended for all those trying to make sense of the impor-
tant issues they raise (though the innumerate will have to skip the formal axioma-
tising that gives the book such an intimidating aspect: Roemer says that his ‘central
purpose is to increase the philosophical tool kit available to economists’, while, at the
same time, interesting political philosophers, but he runs the risk of falling between
two stools, the ideas scaring off economists and the maths philosophers).67

The starting point of this debate is provided by Dworkin’s critique of a rival egali-
tarian ideal, equality of welfare. Welfare (a utilitarian concept) is usually understood
in the modern literature as preference-satisfaction. Dworkin objects that equalising
welfare would involve compensating individuals with expensive tastes, which is unfair
to those who have more modest tastes. According to Dworkin, individuals must in
general take responsibility for their tastes: the price of not doing so is to become alien-
ated from aspects of one’s self. We should therefore allocate people equal resources
(in the form prescribed by the hypothetical auction): if some individuals’ tastes and
ambitions lead them to work harder and save more than others and so end up bet-
ter off, then there is nothing unjust about this outcome, which simply reflects differ-
ent exercises of personal responsibility.

186 • Reviews
This argument has provoked the objection that there are cases where preferences
plainly are not chosen and where the individuals concerned regret having them. Cohen
gives the example of someone who, though able to move his arms perfectly well, suf-
fers an acute pain after doing so. Such a person does not suffer any deficiency of
resources, but is at a welfare disadvantage for which he deserves to be compensated.
Examples of this kind do not lead Cohen to reject Dworkin’s distinction between
choice and circumstances, but rather, as he puts it, to ‘relocate the cut’: ‘The right cut
is between responsibility and back luck, not between preferences and resources’.68 To
signal that people can be unjustly disadvantaged with respect to welfare as well as
resources, he proposes, as the correct metric of egalitarian justice, equality of access
to advantage.69

Dworkin responds in Sovereign Virtue to Cohen’s criticisms and to parallel ones made
by Amartya Sen (who offers yet another egalitarian currency, equality of capabili-
ties).70 He makes a powerful attack on the utilitarian conception of desires and pref-
erences as somehow given independently of reasoning and judgement:

Philosophers who are drawn to the language of eighteenth-century psy-

chology and twentieth-century economics refer to the great variety of human
motives, simple and complex, crude and sophisticated, as ‘desires’ or ‘pref-
erences’. These terms suggest a sharp split between these motives, on the
one hand, and reasoned judgement and conviction on the other. In fact,
most of the motives that people cite, in explanation of behavior, are not the
raw emotions that judgement confronts, but the consequences of that con-
frontation. People’s large-scale hopes for their lives – their ambitions – are
plainly suffused with judgement . . . Even most of what we might more nat-
urally call ‘tastes’ are soaked in judgement. Some are not; some really are.
The unfortunate man whose tap water tastes sour would prefer not to have
that disability: his condition is a handicap, and equality of resources would
regard it as such. But more complex tastes are interwoven with judgements
of endorsement.71

Dworkin attributes to Cohen what he calls the ‘addict-like assumption that people’s
preference are matters of good or bad luck’. But Cohen does not make this assump-
tion. Thus, he says that ‘people can be unlucky not only in their unchosen resource
endowments but in their unchosen liabilities to pain and suffering and in their uncho-
sen expensive preferences’. The implication is surely that some preferences are cho-
sen: indeed, the key opposition on which Cohen relies is that between choice and
brute luck, as when he argues that ‘egalitarian redress is indicated to the extent that
a disadvantage does not reflect genuine choice’.72 Dworkin seems, in fact, to agree

Reviews • 187
that ‘the right cut is between responsibility and bad luck’. His own formulations in
papers subsequent to the two original ‘Equality’ articles employs similarly abstract
oppositions such as that between choice and chance. Moreover, he accepts that ‘hav-
ing a physical or mental infirmity or condition that makes pain or depression or dis-
comfort inescapable without expensive medicine or clothing is . . . an evident and
straightforward handicap’ for which equality of resources would compensate.73 This
seems to provide further support for the seemingly inescapable conclusion that the
various refinements to the rival currencies of egalitarian justice (welfare, resources,
opportunity, or capabilities) made in the course of the debates of the past two decades
leave us in much the same practical position whatever metric one prefers on philo-
sophical grounds.74

There is, it seems to me, a much deeper difficulty with the distinction Dworkin draws
between choice and circumstances, namely that choice often depends on circumstances.
Even if we ignore the very hard philosophical problems connected with determin-
ism, there is the case of what Jon Elster has called adaptive preferences: disadvan-
taged individuals may cut their preferences according to their circumstances.75 As
Roemer puts it:

the conceptions of success [or preference-satisfaction] that individuals adopt

are influenced (if not determined) by the resources and circumstances they
have. If one is not responsible for one’s circumstances, should one be respon-
sible for the preferences that have been adopted because of them? Consider
the tamed housewife who is glad that she has overly modest ambitions.
Dworkin would hold her responsible for the consequences of those prefer-
ences. Is this sensible?76

Dworkin’s defence against Cohen that ambitions and tastes are ‘soaked in judgement’
will not answer this objection. For, the tamed housewife’s decision to cut her prefer-
ences according to her circumstances is far more likely to reflect her judgement about
what is feasible rather than some brute feeling. Questioning whether this judgement
is correct or even reasonable pushes us towards giving priority to objective consid-
erations over subjective choices in two directions. First, as Roemer observes, ‘[s]ome
objective measure of a person’s condition should, it seems, surely count in the mea-
sure of advantage salient for distributive justice’: in other words, principles of egali-
tarian justice must be embedded in some larger account of human flourishing in which
the good is irreducible to what we happen to deem good.77 Secondly, as we have seen,
Dworkin conceives social structure, at least in the ideal case where equality of resources
prevails, as the resultant of individual choices. But a stronger conception of social
structure is required in order to arrive at a deeper understanding, not simply of how

188 • Reviews
circumstances constrain choices, but also of what is really socially possible as op-
posed to merely apparently feasible.78 These criticisms do not invalidate the distinc-
tion Dworkin seeks to draw between choice and circumstances: the intuition that
egalitarianism seeks to remedy the disadvantages that individuals suffer as a result
of contingencies they have played no part in creating is a powerful one. But this dis-
tinction needs to be articulated onto broader theories of human nature and of social
formations.

Another way of putting this is to say that, for all its subtlety and richness, Dworkin’s
version of egalitarianism is excessively individualistic. Marx’s relationship to indi-
vidualism is complex: though he criticises possessive individualism, his own con-
ception of communism appeals to the ideal of individual self-realisation. Analytical
Marxism, as practised by Elster and Roemer in particular, sought to replace the dis-
tinctive explanatory structures of historical materialism with the methodological indi-
vidualism of rational-choice theory. But even when we confront egalitarian liberalism
where it is strongest, as normative political philosophy, we encounter the limits of a
purely individualist conception of society.

Notes
1
I do not find the latter example especially persuasive. I can think of quite a few
people who studied philosophy at Oxford – myself included – who reject the ana-
lytic-synthetic distinction.
2
Cohen 2000, p. 103.
3
For a critique of this claim, see Callinicos 2001, Chapter 2.
4
Cohen 1994.
5
Though one major contemporary contributor to Marxist political economy famil-
iar to readers of Historical Materialism – Robert Brenner – is also a member of the
September Group.
6
Perhaps this would be a good occasion to recant my youthful dismissal of this
book as ‘a notable vulgarisation of historical materialism’, Callinicos 1983, p. 113.
I allowed my objections to Cohen’s interpretation to obscure the power and orig-
inality of the arguments he used to develop it.
7
For a splendid diagnosis of this misdirection, see Barry 1996.
8
What, for example, is the point of all that stuff on Hegel’s critique of mathemati-
cal proof in chapter four?
9
Cohen 2000, pp. 43, 63, 75, 77.
10
Cohen 2000, pp. 103, 109.
11
Cohen 2000, pp. 105, 104–5, 114.

Reviews • 189
12
Cohen 2000, p. 43.
13
Marx 1971a, p. 21.
14
Engels 1978, pp. 469–70.
15
Cohen 2000, p. 76.
16
Cohen 1988, Chapter 4.
17
See, for example, Callinicos 1987, pp. 52–64.
18
For argument and supporting quotations in favour of this claim, see Callinicos
1983, pp. 67–80.
19
See Geras 1976, Chapter 1.
20
Cohen 2000, p. 76.
21
Further analysis of the theory of Lenin’s political interventions will be found in
Daniel Bensaïd’s and my contributions to the Lenin conference held in Essen in
February 2001, both of which are to be published in a collection of conference
papers by Verso in Autumn 2002.
22
See especially Cohen 1995, Chapter 6.
23
For much more discussion of these matters, see Callinicos 2000, Chapter 3.
24
Cohen 2000, p. 106.
25
See Rosdolsky’s fundamental discussion of Marx’s theory of wages: 1977, pp.
282–313.
26
See especially Löwy 1970 and Draper 1978.
27
Cohen 2000, p. 111.
28
I offered this example before I had read a fascinating piece on Indian call-centres
that stressed their employees’ relatively privileged position in the Indian labour
market: see Curtis 2001. For analyses of FDI that, despite their other differences,
support the case made in the text, see Hirst and Thompson 1996, Harman 1996,
and Held et al. 1999. The poverty of Cohen’s arguments does not mean that more
orthodox Marxists have no case to answer. For a challenging analysis of contemporary
class structure written from an analytical Marxist perspective, see Wright 1997.
29
Cohen 1995, pp. 125, 127. Chapter 5, from which these citations are taken, is Cohen’s
most complex and interesting discussion of these issues, and I accordingly draw
on it in my discussion of the more compressed version of Criticism 2 offered in
the book under review.
30
Cohen 2000, p. 113. The ellipses omit qualifications that Cohen immediately drops.
31
Cohen 1978, pp. 152–3.
32
Cohen 2000, p. 114.
33
Cohen 2000 pp. 2–3. Cohen’s argument, especially in Chapter 8, draws on an ear-
lier, more internal critique of Rawls’s interpretation of the Difference Principle: see
Cohen 1992.
34
Cohen 1995, p. 122.

190 • Reviews
35
Cohen 1995, p. 123; see also Cohen 1995, pp. 133–8, and Kymlicka 1989, Chapter
6 (one of the best discussions of Marx’s critique of justice, originating in a doctoral
thesis supervised by Cohen).
36
Cohen 1995, p. 126 (italics added).
37
Marx 1971b, p. 820. Cohen is, of course, familiar with this passage. In Cohen 1978,
pp. 323–5, he criticised it for what he regarded as Marx’s unwarranted pessimism
about the possibilities of making work fulfilling under communism.
38
It should be clear that the occasional resort to coercion does not imply that com-
munism as Marx envisages it is not a case of what Cohen calls ‘voluntary equal-
ity’, where ‘an egalitarian distribution . . . is not achieved by (the threat of) force’
(Cohen 1995, p. 127). To say that co-ordination in such a society may sometimes
require coercion is not the same as saying that it always does. For further discus-
sion of conflict in a communist society, see Callinicos 1991, pp. 127–32.
39
Marx 1971a, p. 21.
40
Marx and Engels 1976, p. 49.
41
See, for example, Cohen 1978, pp. 197–215. Even though Cohen now denies this
(see 1988, Chapter 8), I assume, for the purposes of argument, that Marx is right
to believe that the disappearance of class would also mean that of other major
forms of large-scale conflict, for example, those based on different racial, religious,
or ethnic identities.
42
Kymlicka 1989, p. 118.
43
Cohen 1995, p. 133.
44
Geras 1989, pp. 263–264.
45
Cohen 1995, p. 139. A few pages earlier, Cohen says that an egalitarian society
requires ‘material circumstances which are clement, yet not Elysian’ (p. 135), a posi-
tion that seems little different from that which, according to Geras, is implied by
Marx’s conception of communism. Given the criticisms set out above, the opposi-
tion that Cohen postulates between Marx’s ‘pessimism about social possibility’ and
‘optimism about material possibility’ (Cohen 2000, p. 114) collapses. Marx was at
once more pessimistic (about our chances of escaping ‘the realm of necessity’) and
more optimistic (about our capacity to handle conflicts not deriving from exploita-
tive relations of production) than Cohen claims.
46
Cohen 2000, pp. 114–15.
47
See, for criticism of this claim, Callinicos 2000, pp. 81–2.
48
See Lukes 1985, Chapter 3.
49
These remarks have also the polemical aim of demonstrating, contra Marx’s major
political rival Proudhon, that even if the norms implicit in market exchange are
respected, exploitation nevertheless takes place.
50
Geras 1989.

Reviews • 191
51
Roemer 1996, p. 3.
52
For my own response, see Callinicos 2000.
53
Rawls 1999, pp. 87–9. See Cohen 1992 for a powerful critique of Rawls’s claim that
the Difference Principle authorises special rewards for the talented.
54
See, for example, Rawls 1996, pp. 183–6. My understanding of the relationship
between equality and responsibility is largely derived from conversations with
Matt Matravers.
55
Dworkin 2000, pp. 140, 287. See also pp. 322–3. ‘Brute luck is a matter of how risks
fall out that are not . . . deliberate gambles’ (p. 73).
56
It has, however, to be said that Dworkin’s view of how class fits in is unclear. Thus
he writes that ‘class and prejudice are matters of injustice not luck’, but then two
pages later declares: ‘It is bad luck to be born into a relatively poor family or a
family that is selfish or spendthrift’ (Dworkin 2000, pp. 345, 347). This ambiguity
(is the first kind of bad luck not a case of the class position one inherits?) prob-
ably reflects Dworkin’s uncertainty (discussed in the text below) about how to han-
dle social structure.
57
Dworkin 2000, Chapters 8, 9, 13.
58
Dworkin 2000, p. 66.
59
Dworkin 2000, pp. 72, 77, 313, 319.
60
Cohen 1989, p. 933.
61
Anderson 1999.
62
Dworkin 2000, p. 7, and see p. 320 on the Welfare Reform Bill. Note that he rejects
the Nozickean ‘starting-gate theory of fairness’ according to which ‘justice requires
equal initial resources’ and ‘laissez faire thereafter ’ (p. 87).
63
Dworkin 2000, p. 478, footnote 2.
64
Dworkin 2000, pp. 69, 81. It is thus, as already stated, the price-setting role of mar-
kets that is crucial to Dworkin. It is thanks to this that equality of resources passes
what he calls ‘the envy test’, according to which no individual prefers someone
else’s bundle of resources to her own since the hypothetical auction allows her to
make her own choices in the light of the relative importance of resources to the
other bidders: see pp. 67–70, and, on the relationship between liberty and equal-
ity, Chapter 3. Matthew Clayton offers a defence of equality of resources against
Cohen’s criticisms that makes meeting the envy test the rationale of Dworkin’s
conception of equality rather than a constraint that any such account might be
required to meet: see Clayton 2000. This interpretation, as Clayton makes clear,
involves playing down the distinction between brute luck and choice (which he
seems to regard as an unfortunate distraction), and thereby moves us in a differ-
ent direction from that taken by Dworkin’s recent writings.
65
See Callinicos 1994.

192 • Reviews
66
Dworkin 2000, p. 324.
68
Roemer 1996, p. 1.
68
Cohen 1989, p. 922.
69
See Arneson 1989 for a somewhat similar conception of equality.
70
See, for example, Sen 1992.
71
Dworkin 2000, pp. 290–1. This argument parallels the brilliant account of practi-
cal reasoning in Scanlon 1998, Chapter 1.
72
Cohen 1989, pp. 932, 934. See also p. 931. It is worth noting that Cohen’s views on
expensive tastes have evolved since ‘On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice’ appeared,
though not in a way that diminishes his differences with Dworkin.
73
Dworkin 2000, p. 296.
74
See Callinicos 2000, pp. 52–64, for a survey of the debate that reaches this conclusion.
75
Elster 1983.
76
Roemer 1996, p. 249.
77
Roemer 1996, p. 309.
78
See Callinicos 1987.

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