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劳埃德:牛津象牙塔尖中梦想的更好世界

在以赛亚·柏林后接任牛津大学经济学系主任G.A.Cohen生前最后一本著作《何不实行社会主义?》的书评。该书认为弱肉强食是目前社会的特征,希望用一个更理想的社会形式取而代之。书评作者劳埃德悲观地认为柯亨的想法超乎现实,他为了实现平等而要求人们拥有的道德,自治和品行是不可能实现的。
G.A.Cohen 柯亨

A better world dreamt amid the spires

Review by John Lloyd


Published: September 15 2009 00:16 | Last updated: September 15 2009 00:16

 


Why not Socialism?

By G.A. Cohen

Princeton £10.95, $14.95




Jerry Cohen, who died last month at the age of 68, believed we live in a system of predation. Day after day – as recorded in these pages – Mr A gets ahead of Ms X; company Y swallows firm B; politician C denounces politician Z. Poverty, unemployment and protests against the established order, political and financial, are the common currency of news about market societies.

Cohen – a man of cheerful and cheering disposition, much lamented by his students and colleagues – was a respected scholar, Marxist inheritor of the Oxford chair once filled by the ur-liberal Isaiah Berlin. Yet if optimistic in will, he was intellectually a pessimist. As he writes in this, his last book: “Our attempt to go beyond predation has so far failed ... we do not know how to honour personal choice, consistently with equality and community, on a large social scale.” But – and here the optimism kicks in: “I do not think that we know now that we will never know how to do these things.” A predatory society, he thinks, is so unpleasant, so necessarily founded on greed and fear, that humans must ultimately find a way of transcending its limits.

Thus he proposes a better society – based on the example of a camping trip. When friends go camping, they divide tasks; share possessions and food; seek communal solutions. They do not – if they wish the expedition to end without rancour – insist on charging for their labour; or demanding sole use of the tent; or finding a market price for the chocolates they may have brought along.

Cohen knows that a camping trip is time out from real life but believes this ethos need not be confined to such settings. The key is to found social life on an intolerance of all inequalities not freely chosen. Thus all men and women should be paid the same for the work they do; but if they choose to take more time in leisure, they will receive proportionately less. That is fine, thinks Cohen: “there can be no objection to differences in people’s benefits and burdens that reflect nothing but different preferences, when (which is not always) their satisfaction leads to a comparable aggregate enjoyment of life” (his italic).

Equality, of outcome rather than opportunity, is always the goal. Everyone must have the same unless they freely choose not to. Those who wish to do more – work 16 hours a day, invest time in entrepreneurial activity – do so to benefit others, not themselves. No matter if this system is less efficient than capitalism: the achievement of a society not based on fear and greed is worth it.

I think Cohen was writing about heaven. He lived the last two decades of his life in an earthly simulacrum (for an intellectual), All Souls College in Oxford, one of the chosen ones free to pursue whatever recondite path they choose as their own. He acknowledges his luck in this book, admitting in his discussion of camping: “I’d rather have my socialism in the warmth of All Souls College than in the wet of the Catskills”. His journey from activism on the streets to the confines of the lecture hall and the seminar room, from slogans to abstraction, has been a common one. Save for a few small groups, Marxism has become a largely intellectual resource, invoked in the academy more for the study of culture, language and media than of economics. Some of Marx’s insights – as into the prime importance of the economic base of societies – remain, regarded now as common sense. But his own call to arms, as in the Communist Manifesto, is largely ignored.

Cohen was writing about heaven because the earthly efforts have so comprehensively failed. The Soviet Union broke down, and the Chinese Communist party abandoned Marxist economics (if not power), because their enforced equality – and in both this was substantial – reduced their populations to apathy, raised them to protest or kept them mired in poverty, at least relative to capitalist societies. Cohen’s route to equality – through moral suasion, self-government and universal decency – is not, this side of the heavenly curtain, available to us.

That is not, I think, simply the disillusion of one who once believed in a strong version of socialism, or even the recoil of one who saw the end of the Soviet experiment and the ruins it left close up. Most of us, it seems, are fated by our fallen natures to reside between an ideal of community and the realisation that life’s chances and rewards must be seized, if ambition and desire for comfort and security are to be served. More cheerily, we may come to recognise that these engines, as Adam Smith observed, can serve a good enough society. A liberal democracy with a strong social base is the best we can do and, at least for now, our governments’ central duty is to try to keep it that way. For this may be as good as it gets.

John Lloyd is an FT columnist

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