Why Not Socialism? Review of G. A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism? E. P. BRANDON Posted on the (now defunct) Plurilogue: Politics and Philosophy Reviews (website) from November 2011 The late and much lamented Jerry Cohen has here offered the world a somewhat curious volume, the sort of thing one might expect the Society for the Propagation of the Socialist Gospel to put in every hotel room in the world. In a small, short format, it offers an argument in favour of an affirmative answer to its title question. Although it began life as a contribution to a comparatively obscure collection of essays, in this format it can be easily carried in one’s pocket or hand-bag in case inspiration for the socialist cause flags. Cohen begins by telling a story of a camping expedition and inviting us to respond to the thought that members of such a group should begin to demand special payments for their particular expertise. Like Cohen, I must admit to preferring easy access to a decent cellar to confrontations with Alpine streams, but to put his argument within my own experience, let me advert to a trip to China, ‘in the footsteps of the Chinese philosophers,’ where the only person who was fluent in Mandarin did not seek to charge the rest of us for the use of his ability to bargain for art-works or settle on an evening meal. Although we were mostly strangers at the beginning of the trip, we would surely have agreed with Cohen that such behaviours would have been seriously deviant. If we had had any other useful knowledge (but then we were mostly philosophers, so this is a counterfactual consideration) we would also have willingly shared it with the group. So Cohen establishes, it would seem, that there are contexts in which a socialist doctrine – “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”, perhaps – seems to almost everyone appropriate. How else would Bill Gates, or Warren Buffet, or George Bush, Senior or Junior, or whoever is your epitome of capitalism, behave, and expect others to behave, on a camping trip? But for most of us, life is not a series of camping trips. How to get from what is appropriate in some circumstances to how we ought to organise our social life? Cohen does not appeal here to the ineluctable forces of history – his argument is purely moral. He argues that it is not a matter of an ineradicable selfishness: ‘selfish and generous propensities reside, after all, in (almost?) everyone’ (p. 58) and many people expend effort to achieve what is needed rather than working to rule and being responsive only to the amount of reward. Cohen briefly reviews two proposals that preserve the market’s ability to manage information while eliminating or reducing its proclivity to yield unequal rewards to participants: Carens’ proposal for massive redistribution of wealth via the tax system, and Roemer’s scheme for ‘market socialism’. But he has to admit that none of these has been implemented, while the centrally planned economy preferred by many earlier socialists has been tried and found wanting. The problem is that we have not hit upon a social structuring that allows the camping trip mentality to flourish more generally. The Gospel is not that we can do it, but only that we don’t know that we can’t. I am afraid that doesn’t sound like a message that will convert the masses. Nor, I think, should it. If