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If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?
This book presents G. A. Cohen's Gifford Lectures, delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1996. Focusing on Marxism and Rawlsian liberalism, Cohen draws a connection between these thought systems and the choices that shape a person's life. In the case of Marxism, the relevant life is his own: a communist upbringing in the 1940s in Montreal, which induced a belief in a
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Paperback, 256 pages
Published
September 30th 2001
by Harvard University Press
(first published June 3rd 2000)
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There are few philosophy books these days that give you a full sense of the person writing them, what the author is like as a person and where he is coming from, this is one of those books. And, amazingly enough, its humanity does not detract from its philosophical value. Inspiring.
This is one of the most enjoyable philosophy books I've read recently (and in general). The published form of a set of lectures Cohen delivered in Scotland, the chapters walk through a series of loosely connected topics, with the overarching theme being a sort of intellectual biography of Cohen's life and work. But the book is engaging even if you didn't know or care about Cohen before jumping in because of the path his work has taken: from his upbringing as a Communist in Montreal, to his early
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Brilliant and funny. It's a shame that Cohen didn't find a way to incorporate the part of the lecture where he sang songs from musicals to illustrate various ways in which bad things can be good.
One of the best collection of essays I've ever read.
One of the least impressive works I've read by this otherwise extremely impressive individual. It's title is a tad misleading, because only the final chapter (out of approximately ten) deals with that question. Cohen is a really bizarre but interesting philosopher. It's clear that he's brilliant. I mean really brilliant. And it's clear he has a cunning analytical mind that works like a devastating demolitionist. He can locate the precise premise that an entire argument is based upon, unravel it,
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part philosophy, part autobiography. focused on cohen's relationship with his non-religious, egalitarian upbringing and his academic attempts to justify these views.
Genial
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“Edinburgh is glorious, partly because of its grand buildings and its monuments, its parks and hills, but also – and, for me, more so – because of the brilliantly conceived and faithfully maintained straight and curved terraces of the eighteenth-century New Town that lies to the north of Prince’s Street. On the second evening of my lecturing engagement, full of good red wine from the cellar of the Roxburgh Hotel in Charlotte Square, where I was fortunate enough to be lodged, I treated myself to an after-dinner walk through the New Town’s stately terraces, and at no other time in my life – not even in Oxford or Cambridge – have I been so enthralled by the eloquence of stone.”
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