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Having at Equality Again: A Reply to Boulad-Ayoub and Cooper
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
Extract
I am grateful to Josiane Boulad-Ayoub and Wesley Cooper for their generous treatment of my Equality and Liberty and for their probing criticisms. They make me keenly aware that I have often not expressed myself clearly enough and they have set in motion a process of self-questioning that will extend well beyond this discussion. They drive home to me, once again, the realization of how difficult it is to get anything right in philosophy.
Since they, for the most part, raise different sorts of issues, I shall discuss their criticisms separately starting with Cooper's account.
- Type
- Critical Notices/Etudes critiques
- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , Summer 1986 , pp. 311 - 326
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1986
References
1 I See Boulad-Ayoub, Josiane, “Un égalitarisme radical ad usum delphini”, Dialogue 24/3 (Autumn 1985), 523–534, andCrossRefGoogle ScholarCooper, W. E., “‘I Don't Get No Respect’ ”, in this issue, 303–310Google Scholar.
2 Daniels, Norman, “Equal Liberty and Unequal Worth of Liberty”, in Reading Rawls (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1974), 253–281Google Scholar.
3 Nielsen, Kai, Equality and Liberty: A Defense of Radical Egalitarianism (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allenheld, 1985), 48 and 289Google Scholar.
4 Richard Rorty, as Jüirgen Habermas well argues, overdoes his bit about getting along without theory. But in the context mentioned above in the text, and there are many like it, Rorty's attitude is sound and it need not play into the hands of conservativism. Rorty, Richard, “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity”, 161–176, andGoogle ScholarHabermas, Jüirgen, “Questions and Counterquestions”, 192–198Google Scholar, both in Bernstein, Richard J., ed., Habermas and Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985)Google Scholar.
5 Some fifteen years ago I tried to show something about the grounds for my ambivalence in my Reason and Practice (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1971), 17–91. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then, much of which I have paid scant attention to, so I am unclear how much of this ambivalence, if any, I should still continue to feelGoogle Scholar.
6 Cohen, G. A., “Robert Nozick and Wilt Chamberlain: How Patterns Preserve Liberty”, in Arthur, John and Shaw, William, eds., Justice and Economic Distribution (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 246–262Google Scholar.
7 Levine, Andrew, Arguing for Socialism (London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), andGoogle ScholarCohen, G. A., “Capitalism, Freedom and the Proletariat”, New Left Review, no. 126 (03/04 1981)Google Scholar; Cohen, G. A., “Capitalism, Freedom and the Proletariat”, in Ryan, Alan, ed., The Idea of Freedom (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1979); andGoogle ScholarCohen, G. A., “The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 12/1 (Winter 1983)Google Scholar.
8 See the above references to Cohen plus his “Are Workers Forced to Sell their Labor Power?”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 14/1 (Winter 1985), 99–105;Google ScholarExdell, John, “Liberty, Equality and Capitalism”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 11/3 (12 1981), 457–472; and my “On Proletarian Unfreedom”, forthcomingCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 There is in thinking about such matters a kind of, by now, standard cultural relativism that is in social science circles often rather uncritically assumed. Against older racist views in anthropology and against absolutisms, it is an effective response. The standard accounts here occur in the writings of Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Melville Herskovits. For a self-conscious defense of such standard views from standard criticisms and for a few amusing potshots at what he regards as the nervousness of philosophers about relativism, see Geretz, Clifford, “Anti Anti-Relativism”, The American Anthropologist 86/2 (1984), 263–276. For, and in contrast, a powerful making-plain that conceptions of social evolution need not be either, on the one hand, unscientific or, on the other, racist or ethnocentric, seeCrossRefGoogle ScholarHallpike's, C. R. striking and carefully argued The Foundations of Primitive Thought (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1979). Many anthropologists' reactions to him have been as knee jerk as many philosophers' reactions to Richard RortyGoogle Scholar.
10 See the following articles by me: “True Needs, Rationality and Emancipation”, in Fitzgerald, R., ed., Human Needs and Politics (Sydney, Australia: Pergamon's Publishers, 1977)Google Scholar; “Rationality as Emancipation and Enlightenment”, International Studies in Philosophy (1978)Google Scholar; “Reason and Sentiment”, in Geraets, T., ed., Rationality-today (Ottawa, ON: University of Ottawa Press, 1976); andGoogle Scholar“On Rationality and Essentially Contested Concepts”, Communication and Cognition 16/3 (1983)Google Scholar.
11 I would now stress, in a way which is compatible with Equality and Liberty, but was not stressed there, that liberty and autonomy, though related, are distinct notions. See my “On Liberty and Equality: A Case for Radical Egalitarianism”, The Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice 4 (1984), 138–142.Google ScholarSee also Arneson, Richard, “Mill Versus Paternalism”, Ethics 90/4 (07 1980), 470–475; andCrossRefGoogle ScholarSchwartz, Adina, “Meaningful Work”, Ethics 92/4 (07 1982), 634CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Nielsen, Equality and Liberty, 267.
13 It may be, at least in North American societies, that doctors and hospital management so act as to in effect work against that in nursing. But that, if it actually obtains, is an externality poisoning the practice of nursing. It does not mean that the practice does not have the potential to which I referred.
14 Cohen, “The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom”, 2–23.
15 I am not suggesting that in the extant state socialist societies the bureaucratic elites do not have considerable political power, a power not enjoyed by the average citizen. I am only saying that if (perhaps counterfactually) a state socialism came to exist in which this was not so, that still, with bureaucratic elites, there would be status inequalities and that this would give them in various ways power over others (now not political power) in that society.
16 Nielsen, Kai, “Capitalism, Socialism and Justice”, in Regan, Tom and Veer, Donald Van De, eds., And Justice For All (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982), 264–286; and Nielsen, Equality and Liberty, 57–60Google Scholar.
17 Cohen, G. A., “Illusions about Private Property and Freedom”, in Mepham, John and Rubin, David Hillel, eds., Issues in Marxist Philosophy, vol. 4 (Sussex, England: Harvester Press, 1981), 23–239; andGoogle ScholarDahrendorf, Rolf, Essays in the Theory of Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968), 151–178Google Scholar.
18 Nielsen, Kai, “Taking Historical Materialism Seriously”, Dialogue 23/2 (1983), 319–338; and myCrossRefGoogle Scholar“Historical Materialism, Ideology and Ethics”, Studies in Soviet Thought 29 (1985), 47–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 I have tried to argue for that directly in my “On the Choice Between Reform and Revolution”,in Held, Virginia, Nielsen, Kai, and Parsons, Charles, eds., Philosophy and Political Action (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1972), 15–51; and myGoogle Scholar“On Justifying Revolution”, in Struhl, P. and Struhl, K., eds., Philosophy Now (New York, NY: Random House, 1980), 531–540Google Scholar.
20 For some powerful arguments that Marx did not view man as just the ensemble of his social relations,see McMurtry, John, The Structure of Marx's World-View (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 19–53; andGoogle ScholarGeras, Norman, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (London, England: New Left Books, 1983)Google Scholar.
21 Wood, Allen, Karl Marx (London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 12–15, 108–109, 117–122, 143–149Google Scholar.
22 Wood, Allen, “Marx and Equality”, in Mepham, John and Ruben, David Hillel, eds., Issues in Marxist Philosophy, vol. 4 (Sussex, England: Harvester Press, 1981), 206–207Google Scholar.
23 See references in footnote 17.