Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality

by G. A. Cohen

• ISBN13: 9780521477512
• ISBN10: 0521477514
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-11-24
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In this book G. A. Cohen examines the libertarian principle of self-ownership, which says that each person belongs to himself and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else. This principle is used to defend capitalist inequality, which is said to reflect each person's freedom to do as as he wishes with himself. The author argues that self-ownership cannot deliver the freedom it promises to secure, thereby undermining the idea that lovers of freedom should embrace capitalism and the inequality that comes with it. He goes on to show that the standard Marxist condemnation of exploitation implies an endorsement of self-ownership, since, in the Marxist conception, the employer steals from the worker what should belong to her, because she produced it. Thereby a deeply inegalitarian notion has penetrated what is in aspiration an egalitarian theory. Purging that notion from socialist thought, he argues, enables construction of a more consistent egalitarianism.

Author Biography

G. A. Cohen is Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory and a Fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford. He was previously Reader in Philosophy at University College London. He was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1985

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
Acknowledgements	xii
Introduction: history, ethics and Marxism	1	(18)
Robert Nozick and Wilt Chamberlain: how patterns preserve liberty	19	(19)
Justice, freedom, and market transactions	38	(29)
Self-ownership, world-ownership, and equality	67	(25)
Are freedom and equality compatible?	92	(24)
Self-ownership, communism, and equality: against the Marxist technological fix	116	(28)
Marxism and contemporary political philosophy, or: why Nozick exercises some Marxists more than he does any egalitarian liberals	144	(21)
Marx and Locke on land and labour	165	(30)
Exploitation in Marx: what makes it unjust?	195	(14)
Self-ownership: delineating the concept	209	(20)
Self-ownership: assessing the thesis	229	(16)
The future of a disillusion	245	(21)
Bibliography	266	(6)
Index of names	272	(2)
Subject index	274