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  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality
  • Cited by 454
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
August 2009
Print publication year:
1995
Online ISBN:
9780511521270
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511521270
Subjects:
Political Theory, Politics and International Relations, Philosophy, Political Philosophy
Series:
Studies in Marxism and Social Theory
Information

Book description

In this book G. A. Cohen examines the libertarian principle of self-ownership, which says that each person belongs to himself and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else. This principle is used to defend capitalist inequality, which is said to reflect each person's freedom to do as he wishes with himself. The author argues that self-ownership cannot deliver the freedom it promises to secure, thereby undermining the idea that lovers of freedom should embrace capitalism and the inequality that comes with it. He goes on to show that the standard Marxist condemnation of exploitation implies an endorsement of self-ownership, since, in the Marxist conception, the employer steals from the worker what should belong to her, because she produced it. Thereby a deeply inegalitarian notion has penetrated what is in aspiration an egalitarian theory. Purging that notion from socialist thought, he argues, enables construction of a more consistent egalitarianism.

Reviews

‘ … Cohen brings formidable analytical and forensic skills, and the book is an outstanding example of the intellectual gains to be won by clear and rigorous thinking about questions that are usually blanketed by idealogical fog.’

David Miller Source: London Review of Books

‘ … his book stands out among the many studies of electorial history …’.

Source: Anarchist Studies

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