Background
COHEN, Gerald was born on April 14, 1941 in Montreal. Son of Bella Lipkin and Morrie Cohen.
COHEN, Gerald was born on April 14, 1941 in Montreal. Son of Bella Lipkin and Morrie Cohen.
Morris Winchewsky Jewish School, Strathcona Academy, and McGill University, Montreal and New College Oxford, England.
Lecturer in Philosophy, University College London 1963-1978, Reader 1978-1984. Chichele Professor, of Social and Political Theory and Fellow of All Souls, Oxford January since 1985. Isaac Deutscher Memorial.
Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence 1978, History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes from Marx 1988.
Cohen is a co-founder and leading member of a style of Marxist theorizing which has come to be known as analytical Marxism. One of its characteristics is that it carries the concerns of traditional analytic philosophy into the domain °f Marxist theory. This combination of traditions •s well illustrated in Cohen’s first book, Karl Marx's Theory of History (1978), which won Cohen the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize, and was described by John Roemer as ‘arguably the most rigorous work of Marxist scholarship this century’.
Taking as his guiding thread a page-long extract from Marx’s 1859 Preface, Cohen subjects it to a line-by-line analysis to show how Marx’s own words contradict some of the views attributed to him, and how he is really expounding a technological version of historical materialism. Cohen then takes a number of Marxist theses and shows how in those cases in which they are not already precise in themselves, they can be rendered precise by plausible additions of detail to Marx’s own words. Most famously in this connection, he takes the vague claim that the productive forces determine the productive relations, and gives it a functional interpretation that is both sophisticated and able to meet standard objections.
The thought is that the explanation for the Prevalence of a set of productive relations lies in the capacity of that set of relations to produce the optimum utilization of prevailing productive forces.
This ‘analytical’ approach to Marxism runs through Cohen’s second book (1988), a collection of essays partly refining the claims of Karl Marx’s Theory of History, and partly carrying the approach into new areas. The later essays are also •nteresting in that they display a less rigid adherence to the details of Marx's own position than does his earlier work. Cohen's interpretation °f Marxism has aroused much interest.
Some critics, such as Elster, have insisted that Cohen’s functional explanations are necessarily incomplete. and must be supplemented by microstructural explanations specifying the goals of individual rational agents. Others, such as Miller, have argued that Cohen’s conception of a productive force is too narrow, that he thereby misconstrues what historical materialism is, and hence gives a misleading view of Marx’s practice as a scientific historian.
Guardian crossword puzzles, Broadway and Hollywood musicals, painting and architecture.
Married Margaret Florence Pearce in 1965.