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GA Cohen, rigorously Marxist philosopher On torture

Finally El Pais published an article on the death of the political philosopher Jerry Cohen (Oxford). By now we thought we would let go the news happily as did other newspapers (except World ) We are especially pleased to be Jahel Queralt responsible for writing the obituary, she knew Cohen well as intellectually and personally.

Jahel Queralt by Lange

philosopher GA (Jerry) Cohen died Aug. 5 in Oxford (UK), at age 68. He liked to say that although having been brought up to believe something is no reason to believe, we can not ignore that the accident of birth explains, in large part, what one professes.

How lucky was that Marxism Gerald Allan (GA) was born on April 14, 1941, in Montreal, a Jewish militant in the Communist Party of Canada. During his youth, while studying philosophy at McGill University, he joined various communist organizations, but the infighting, the Soviet invasion of Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), and personal trips to Eastern Europe in the sixties ended his pro-Soviet.

However, it was a disappointment to Glucksman, but continued to believe that socialist values, equality and community, deserved loyalty. A better think those ideals devoted his entire life. In 1961 he went to Oxford to study with Isaiah Berlin and, after a period of 20 years as professor of philosophy at University College London, he returned in 1985 to fill the position of Chichele Professor at All Souls College, Oxford, until retired in the spring of 2008.

Two phases in his career

His career is clearly divided into two phases. The first was dominated by his interest in the philosophy of history of Marx and culminated with the publication of history theory of Karl Marx: a defense in 1978. The defense in question was to prove that Marxist materialism is true, but it can be reconstructed regardless of methodological holism and the dialectic that the more attached to the Communist Manifesto had been enthroned as essential elements of Marxism. Cohen came to Marx through the sieve of the philosophy of science and social theory, and the result was that the class struggle was not the driving force of history but, if anything, they were the productive forces.

In a context dominated by Althusser's interpretation of Marxist ideas, reading Cohen was almost considered a positivist heresy had not been for the support they had their ideas in an Anglo community little given to obscurantism. Along with other scholars such as John Elster, Adam Przewosrki and Philippe van Parijs, formed the "analytical Marxism" and, in the eighties, were devoted to distilling the ideas of Marx's ideology. They called themselves Group in September.

Since the nineties, he abandoned the Marxian exegesis. The revolution that was to lead to an egalitarian society did not come. He realized that equality and community do not define a state of things inevitable, but are values \u200b\u200bthat must be supported with good reasons and articulate principles. While Margaret Thatcher did her best to bury socialism, he defended him from his chair without falling into a social democracy decaffeinated.

Some will say that the place to change things is not the pulpit, but the street. But Cohen thought that the best we can do an intellectual is to think about the rest. There is lack of commitment, but modesty. The second stage works have contributed greatly to the debate on justice with different arguments, designed to show that we live in a more egalitarian society, because, as he said, it does not take the capitalist to go against socialism, enough think that socialism is not possible.