If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?
At the suggestion of Matthew Boudway, I recently picked up G. A. Cohen’s If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? I’m glad that I did. Besides having a superb title, Cohen’s book is perhaps the most philosophically sophisticated, morally persuasive analysis of inequality that I’ve ever read.
If You’re an Egalitarian… is a compilation of the Gifford Lectures that Cohen delivered in 1996. The book—part memoir, part intellectual history, part political and economic treatise—is difficult to describe. After a brief examination of the problems raised by the “formation of conviction”—how we come to believe the things that we believe, even when we realize that they lack a rational basis—Cohen moves on to a description of his own upbringing. In the second chapter, Cohen, who died in 2009, remembers a childhood spent “in a working-class communist family in a communist community in the 1940s in Montreal.” He muses on the paradoxes of growing up “both Jewish and antireligious,” speculating on how his own adult commitments were formed by the place, time, and family into which he was born. (Politically, Cohen is a socialist; religiously, he is an agnostic who respects the moral contributions of the Judeo-Christian tradition.)
The autobiographical bits of If You’re an Egalitarian… are beautifully, often humorously done. There are passages, as when Cohen describes lying to his fellow Jewish classmates about having had a bar-mitzvah, that could have come out of a Woody Allen movie. But the real strength of Cohen’s book lies in its more philosophical parts. Or, maybe more accurately, one of the joys of the autobiographical bits is to see just how much philosophical and political ideas can mean in a life.
The majority of If You’re an Egalitarian… considers how three competing traditions treat the problem of inequality. First, Cohen examines Marxism, which sees inequality disappearing as an inevitable result of the historical dialectic: once capitalism has provided such material abundance that competition is unnecessary, the capitalist society will sublate into the communist society. Next, he looks at political liberalism, specifically the strand of contemporary liberalism associated with the late political theorist John Rawls. According to this political philosophy, Cohen writes, “delivering equality is a task not of class struggle (crowned by a future abundance) but of constitution-making”; inequality goes away not because history says that it will, but because political deliberation and the institutions that it builds say that it should. Finally, Cohen trains his eye on Christianity, which argues that “equality requires not mere history and the abundance to which it leads, or mere politics, but a moral revolution, a revolution in the soul.”
Cohen isn’t shy about criticizing each of these systems. Because of its faith in the arc of history, Cohen writes, Marxism displays little interest in moral arguments in favor of equality: equality will arrive anyway, so we don’t really need to think too hard about what it means or why we might want it to arrive in the first place. (Cohen calls this the “obstetric motif” in Marxism—we don’t have to create the good society, just help in its delivery once its arrival is imminent.) Because of its focus on justice as largely a matter of institutions, Rawlsian liberalism tends to elide personal action. As Cohen writes, “personal choices to which the writ of the law is indifferent are fateful for social justice,” and Rawlsian liberalism just isn’t equipped to give an adequate account of these types of personal, non-institutional choices. As for Christianity, Cohen argues that at least a certain strand believes “that all justice is a matter of morally informed personal decision; on this particular Christian view, the rules set by Caesar can achieve little or nothing in the direction of establishing a just society.” The result is, at best, political quietism; at worst, a rejection of all structural attempts to achieve social justice.
Cohen’s main questions—what is equality and how do we achieve it—are of particular relevance right now. Think of the debates that have arisen over the publication of Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Murray charts many disturbing trends that (he claims) indicate the social and moral decline of the white lower class, such as increasing rates of crime and divorce. He then argues that it is this problem of ethos that is exacerbating inequality. As Nicholas Lehman writes, “What the non-élite need isn’t money, Murray thinks; it’s better values.” Unsurprisingly, this has prompted a backlash from those on the left, who argue that there are structural problems that account for the growing gap between the 1% and the rest of us, and that we must look to structural solutions, like a more progressive tax rate, in order to create a more just and equal society.
So, the question becomes, do we address the problem of inequality at the level of institutions (more just laws, more robust regulation of the market) or do we address it at the level of the individual (more just individual actions)? Is inequality primarily a legal problem, or is it a moral problem? Should we try to reform social structures or individual souls? The answer that Cohen gives in If You’re an Egalitarian…—and it’s one that I agree with—is that we need to change both. Both institutional and individual reforms are necessary, but neither on their own is sufficient. We need moral suasion and institutional reform, more egalitarian people and a more egalitarian economic framework.
There’s a lot more to If You’re an Egalitarian… than what I’ve sketched here. Cohen offers brilliant close readings of Marx and Feuerbach, Engels and Rosa Luxemburg. The pages in which Cohen explicates the Hegelian dialectic are particularly lucid. (Those familiar with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit will know that this is no small feat.) But what remains most important about Cohen’s book is its passionate interest in equality, both as a philosophical concept and as a political project. If You’re an Egalitarian… challenges us to think more critically about equality, and that’s a challenge that those on both the right and the left would do well to take up.
I see why Commonweal people would like this. It pleases both your moral (Catholic) and ideological (academic) sides. A problem I see with it is that the academic solution nullifies the moral one. Either you force people to do what they’re disinclined to do (the academic/ideological solution) or you let them choose their own path (the Catholic solution). You can’t both leave them ideologically unmolested and force them to live according to the dictates of your system. Once you start compelling them, they’re no longer free.
Catholicism tries to convince people of the rightness of its values but it doesn’t compel compliance. I understand there was a time when it did, but I thought we’d left that behind. Sounds as though Cohen thought compulsion was necessary. You, too?
David,
So by your reading, all legislative means aimed at creating a more equal society–the minimum wage, work safety regulations, prohibitions against slave labor–would be academic/ideological (whatever that means) and therefore un-Catholic? And, since all laws are coercive–that’s what makes them laws, after all, the fact that people have to comply with them or suffer consequences–does that mean that Catholics are required to be anarchists? By your argument, shouldn’t there be no laws whatsoever, since they necessarily involve compelling people to do one thing (not commit murder, for instance) rather than another thing?
This seems symptomatic of a real problem in contemporary political discourse: you mention the word “reform,” and that immediately means you’re an ideologue. (Again, whatever that means–is embracing the unfettered free market somehow the only pure position available?) You don’t even need to say what reforms you’re in favor of; the mere fact that you’re in favor of reform means, unequivocally, that you’re a leftist and can be dismissed out of hand. And it goes the other way, too (and that’s one thing I was trying to get at in this post). If you mention the need for moral persuasion, what Cohen calls “reforming souls,” then many on the left accuse you of minimizing structural injustice and blaming its victims.
“Catholicism tries to convince people of the rightness of its values but it doesn’t compel compliance. I understand there was a time when it did, but I thought we’d left that behind. Sounds as though Cohen thought compulsion was necessary.”
Comparing the element of compulsion in a representative democracy and in a theocracy strikes me as inapt.
People in a representative democracy can argue that people ought to be compelled to do or not do all sorts of things–curb their dogs, drive with licenses, not shoot their neighbors, say the Lord’s Prayer in school, have an ultrasound before an abortion, funnel more taxes into public schools, reduce farm subsidies, etc. etc.
But they can’t compel anyone without a majority agreeing–and with vigorous public debate from opposing viewpoints. No, it doesn’t work perfectly, but people have a right to argue what they want, even in an incendiary manner. Lookit Ted Nugent’s recent rants, which were rightly dismissed as ugly but harmless.
In a theocracy, religious leaders hand down laws that everyone must comply with without argument because the Holy Book as interpreted by an elite group of theologians say so.
In a political climate filled with left-vs.-right warring, I find the libertarian voice a refreshing one. Whereas both left and right are seemingly content with the idea of compelling behavior in a never-ending number of new ways in the service of ever-evolving truths, the libertarian – or some libertarians, at least – prefer to let rational humans be rational, to assume the best of humanity, instead of the worst. Laws are necessary in any society, but the more of them you make, the more strait-jacketed individuals become, until even in supposed democracies, an individual can hardly go through a day without breaking a dozen laws, the enforcement of any one of which could easily end up depriving her of a significant amount of freedom.
The less free individuals in a democracy are made by laws, the less their society can properly be called a democracy. You don’t need a king or a dictator to enslave a people. The machinery of government can do that if it is allowed to grow, weed like, to a point at which individuals come to think of their government as a strict parent.
Two things. First, I don’t have any desire to form and obey an ideology. Ideas, it seems to me, should be free to go where they will, regardless of perceived inconsistencies. Second, no society of any complexity can survive without rules. But wise leaders never lose sight of the danger that as societies grow older, they tend to accumulate an increasing legal burden. Political power does not restrain itself – if it is to be kept under control, prevented from enslaving the people it was intended to aid, wise leaders need to work to keep it from overgrowing.
Why doesn’t Commonweal just change the name of this blog to “David Smith’s Verdicts on Books He Has Not Read”?
David,
Let’s put aside your continued use of the word ideology (you aren’t convincing me that I or “Commonweal people” are ideological simply by saying that 1.) ideology is bad, and 2.) you’re not ideological).
Of course no society can survive without rules, and of course certain laws impose an undue legal burden, even if their purpose is noble. That’s why you need to make a reasoned argument on behalf of or against specific measures. You can’t just say, “Compulsion is bad” and think you’ve won the argument, because first of all, sometimes legal compulsion is necessary, as you would agree, and second, that’s not addressing what specific kinds of compulsion are being suggested and why these particular kinds are or are not warranted.
And, by the way, you’ll notice that I never suggested any specific legal or regulatory measures to address structural inequality. That wasn’t my interest here; I was merely interested in saying that we need to get beyond the bind that says “We need structural change and only structural change” or “We need to convince individuals to change their lives and only convince individuals to change their lives.” Yet you immediately labeled any such measures ideological attempts to “force them to live according to the dictates of your system.” Rejecting someone’s position before you’ve even heard it, just because you think it will only confirm “the dictates of [their] system”? That sounds like a pretty good definition of ideology to me.