Is the Personal Political?

This is a slightly revised version of remarks I presented in April at a Political
Studies Association Roundtable in Manchester, England, on G. A. Cohen’s book If
You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 2000). The roundtable discussants focussed exclusively
on the last three chapters of the book. The general theme of the book is the relation
between political ideologies and the choices that shape a person’s life. The earlier
chapters contain Cohen’s personal and philosophical reflections on the influence of
his Communist upbringing and essays on Hegel and Marx. The first two of the last
three chapters offer a critique from the left of John Rawls’s justification of incomemaximizing
behaviour on the part of the talented that gives rise to inequalities that
are to the benefit of the least well off. There Cohen argues that ‘egalitarian justice is
not only, as Rawlsian liberalism teaches, a matter of rules that define the structure
of society, but also a matter of personal attitude and choice’. The last chapter
contains a response to the arguments of philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and
Ronald Dworkin that wealthy egalitarians do not have extensive obligations to bring
about a more egalitarian society through acts of private charity.Article (English translation of an Italian publication)