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Gerald Allan Cohen was Chichele Professor of Social and Political
Theory at All Souls College, Oxford for 23 years and is considered
one of the most influential political philosophers of the past
quarter-century. He died in 2009. The Political Philosophy of G. A.
Cohen is the first full-length study on the unity of Cohen's
political thought. It proceeds thematically, studying a range of
fundamental concepts such as materialism, freedom, equality,
fraternity and the market, all the while revisiting Cohen's seminal
treatment of Marx, Nozick, Dworkin, Rawls and Sen. Nicholas
Vrousalis brings together the diverse strands of argument in
Cohen's thought and critically reconstructs them in the context of
contemporary debates in social and political theory. This
reconstruction highlights common threads running through Cohen's
numerous contributions to contemporary philosophy, without
underrating the inevitable tensions between them.
Markets are thought of by some as liberating the individual. Rather
than a feudal system in which each is assigned a role or tasks by
an authority, each is free to make decisions concerning how to use
their resources and direct their productive activities in light of
market prices for goods and services. These prices are not dictated
but reflect the preferences of individuals, aggregated by an
invisible hand. In this posthumous work, political philosopher
Waheed Hussain argues that this way of thinking about markets
obscures their systemic nature. He shows that a better way to think
about the invisible hand is as a mechanism that drops each of us
into a maze whose design is opaque to us. It liberates us from the
direct bondage of a feudal system; but leaves us subordinate to an
arbitrary authority, one whose character is harder to discern.
Hussain locates this authority in the way the market shapes the
options available to us, exercising what he calls an impersonal
authority over each of us. According to Hussain, the market system
is objectionable when and because it is arbitrary, governing us
without giving anyone a voice concerning how the authority is
exercised. This is incompatible with what Hussain takes to be
fundamental to human freedom, the freedom to make choices in the
face of an option set that one can make sense of as being available
for good reasons, to which one can assent as a free person.
Exploitation is a globally pervasive phenomenon. Slavery, serfdom,
and the patriarchy are part of its lineage. Temporary and sex
workers, commercial surrogacy, precarious labour contracts,
sweatshops, and markets in blood, vaccines or human organs, are
some contemporary manifestations of exploitation. What makes these
exploitative transactions unjust? And is capitalism inherently
exploitative? This book offers answers to these two questions.
Nicholas Vrousalis argues that exploitation is a form of
domination, self-enrichment through the domination of others. On
the domination view, exploitation complaints are not,
fundamentally, about harm, coercion or unfairness. Rather, they are
about who serves whom and why. Exploitation, in a word, is a
dividend of servitude: the dividend the powerful extract from the
servitude of the vulnerable. Vrousalis claims that this servitude
is inherent to capitalist relations between consenting adults
whereby capital is monetary control over the labour capacity of
others. It follows that capitalism, the mode of production where
capital predominates, is an inherently unjust social structure.
Gerald Allan Cohen was Chichele Professor of Social and Political
Theory at All Souls College, Oxford for 23 years and is considered
one of the most influential political philosophers of the past
quarter-century. He died in 2009. The Political Philosophy of G. A.
Cohen is the first full-length study on the unity of Cohen's
political thought. It proceeds thematically, studying a range of
fundamental concepts such as materialism, freedom, equality,
fraternity and the market, all the while revisiting Cohen's seminal
treatment of Marx, Nozick, Dworkin, Rawls and Sen. Nicholas
Vrousalis brings together the diverse strands of argument in
Cohen's thought and critically reconstructs them in the context of
contemporary debates in social and political theory. This
reconstruction highlights common threads running through Cohen's
numerous contributions to contemporary philosophy, without
underrating the inevitable tensions between them.
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