G.A. Cohen > Quotes

“Of course, not everybody likes camping trips. I do not myself enjoy them much, because I'm not outdoorsy, or at any rate, I'm not outdoorsy overnight-without-a-matress-wise. There's a limit to the outdoorsiness to which some academics can be expected to submit.”
― G.A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism?

“[T]he history of the twentieth century encourages the thought that the easiest way to generate productivity in a modern society is by nourishing the motives of which I spoke earlier, namely, those of greed and fear. But we should never forget that greed and fear are repugnant motives.”
― G.A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism?

“The promise of abundance is not an endless flow of goods but a sufficiency produced with a minimum of unpleasant exertion.”
― G.A. Cohen

“I do not know whether the needed refinements are possible, nor do I know, speaking more generally, whether the full socialist ideal is feasible, in the Carensian, or in some other form. We socialists don’t now know how to replicate camping trip procedures on a nationwide scale, amid the complexity and variety that comes with nationwide size. We don’t now know how to give collective ownership and equality the real meaning that it has in the camping trip story but which it didn’t have in the Soviet Union and in similarly ordered states. The camping trip’s confined temporal, spatial, and population scale mean that, within its confines, the right to personal choice can be exercised, without strain, consistently with equality and community. But while that can happen in the small, we do not know how to honor personal choice, consistently with equality and community, on a large social scale. But I do not think that we now know that we will never know how to do these things: I am agnostic on that score. The”
― Gerald A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism?

“Even when one’s concerns are thus wider than those of one’s mere self, the market posture is greedy and fearful in that one’s opposite-number marketeers are predominantly seen as possible sources of enrichment, and as threats to one’s success. These are horrible ways of seeing other people, however much we have become habituated and inured to them, as a result of centuries of capitalist civilization.”
― G.A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism?

“En mi opinión, el principal problema con el que se enfrenta el ideal socialista es que no sabemos cómo diseñar la maquinaria que lo haría funcionar. Nuestro problema no es primordialmente el egoísmo humano, sino la falta de una tecnología organizacional adecuada: nuestro problema es un problema de diseño. Es posible que sea un problema de diseño imposible de resolver, y es un problema de diseño que se encuentra sin duda exacerbado por nuestras propensiones al egoísmo, pero lo que tenemos, eso creo, es un problema de diseño.”
― G.A. Cohen, ¿Por qué no el socialismo? (Discusiones nº 2035)

“The market, one might say, is a casino from which it is difficult to escape, and the inequalities that it produces are tainted with injustice for that reason.”
― G.A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism?

“In every type of society people perforce provision one another: a society is a network of mutual provision. But, in market society, that mutuality is only a by-product of an unmutual and fundamentally nonreciprocating attitude.”
― G.A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism?

“Indeed, the history of the twentieth century encourages the thought that the easiest way to generate productivity in a modern society is by nourishing the motives of which I spoke earlier, namely, those of greed and fear. But we should never forget that greed and fear are repugnant motives.”
― G.A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism?

“In my view, the principal problem that faces the socialist ideal is that we do not know how to design the machinery that would make it run. Our problem is not, primarily, human selfishness, but our lack of a suitable organizational technology: our problem is a problem of design.”
― G.A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism?

“Edinburgh is glorious, partly because of its grand buildings and its monuments, its parks and hills, but also – and, for me, more so – because of the brilliantly conceived and faithfully maintained straight and curved terraces of the eighteenth-century New Town that lies to the north of Prince’s Street. On the second evening of my lecturing engagement, full of good red wine from the cellar of the Roxburgh Hotel in Charlotte Square, where I was fortunate enough to be lodged, I treated myself to an after-dinner walk through the New Town’s stately terraces, and at no other time in my life – not even in Oxford or Cambridge – have I been so enthralled by the eloquence of stone.”
― G.A. Cohen, If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?