I suspect that Jerry Cohen would not have minded if people took note of his passing by debating the merits of his works.
Actually, I find his reading of Marx to have been closer to the readings that were provided by such Second International Marxists like Kautsky and Plekhanov. I believe that somewhere in KMTH he makes such an acknowledgement. But yet he did seem to have to come to such a reading by way of Althusser, even though he rejected Althusserianism. G.A. Cohen discussed Althusser in his foreword to KMTH. There, after detailing some of the positive contributions of the Althusserians to Marxism (which for Cohen included the re-emphasis on Marx's more mature writings like *Capital* rather than the earlier writings like the 1844 Manuscripts and the attention that Althusser and his followers paid to historical materialism) then proceeded to note what he regarded as some of their more negative attributes. Writing thus: "Above all, I found much of *Lire Capital* critically vague. It is perhaps a matter for regret that logical positivism, with its insistence on precision of intellectual commitment, never caught on in Paris. Anglophone philosophy left logical positivism behind long ago, but it is lastingly the better for having engaged with it. The Althusserian vogue could have unfortunate consequences for Marxism in Britain, where lucidity is a precious heritage, and where it is not generally supposed that a theoretical statement, to be one, must be hard to comprehend." Alas, one consequence of Cohen's work was to revive the very sort of mechanical materialism that Althusser had rejected along with humanist Marxism, but which the young Jerry Cohen seems to have imbibed along with his mother's milk, having been born and raised within the milieu of the Canadian CP. Cohen, himself, years later, came to see the inadequacy of this type of historical materialism but seemed to draw the conclusion that the problem laid with historical materialism in general rather than with the specific variety of historical materialism that he had embraced. Jim Farmelant ---------- Original Message ---------- From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Marxism] G.A. Cohen died this morning Date: Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:29:07 -0400 Perhaps this is not the most tasteful time to debate the merit of his works, but, since its up there, I think we ought to reconsider the life and work of GA Cohen. ____________________________________________________________ Cheap Airfare from $49 Airfare Rates Just Dropped! Book Now to Lock In the Best Deals. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/c?cp=e-NnxyQ2nbKj1NNHIraWTgAAJ1BRugI4sJACAWmXIev8NAFPAAUAAAAAAAAAALUJCT6nwpnKG3LiNI2I7H3GfCHQAAAAAA== ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
