Cover: If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?, from Harvard University PressCover: If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? in PAPERBACK

If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?

Product Details

PAPERBACK

Print on Demand

$37.00 • £32.95 • €33.95

ISBN 9780674006935

Publication Date: 09/30/2001

Short

256 pages

6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches

3 line illustrations

World

Add to Cart

Media Requests:

Related Subjects

This is an unusual book, a remarkably successful blend of autobiography, intellectual history and moral philosophy that reflects the author’s distinctive outlook and background… [It] presents, I believe, the most important contemporary challenge to the egalitarian form of liberalism… The questions he asks are the ones we should all be worrying about.—Thomas Nagel, The Times Literary Supplement

These nine engaging and searching lectures, an unorthodox mixture of intellectual autobiography and philosophical argument, fall into two parts. In the first, [Cohen] describes the leading features of the Marxism in which he once believed. In the second, he explains why he remains critical of the sort of left-wing liberalism that would seem to be Marxism’s natural alternative.—Ben Rogers, The Observer

Some titles carry the author’s voice… Surely If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? does. Cohen is much the funniest living Anglophone political philosopher of any note, as well as perhaps the cleverest. Many of his best comic effects depend on the tone of voice, and some are clearly intended simply for fun. But it is always dangerous to assume that the jokes do not carry a point… [Cohen’s book is] a strikingly personal address, fusing autobiography and the history of ideas with political philosophy, and ending not only with the weighty issue of how far personal attitudes must feature within the subject matter of justice itself, but with the more disconcerting question of how far the disciplines of living effectively under capitalism are bound to prove lethal for the soul… At one level, Cohen’s book is largely an ingenious and agreeably frank casuistry of the ethics of professorial income management, but at another and more consequential level, it is a most imaginative deployment of personal ethical discomfort to pin down, and press home, a deep evasion at the center of this majority vision of social justice under capitalism. Its source may be merely the externalization of a private disquiet; but its force at the point of impact is as public as any philosopher could wish.—John Dunn, The Times Higher Education Supplement

It would be difficult to over-praise this wonderful book. It is profound, humane, witty, erudite, and often deeply personal. Though presented as something of an intellectual memoir, Cohen provides us with more food for thought than has been available in any book on egalitarian political philosophy in recent memory.—Daniel Weinstock, Philosophy in Review

Awards & Accolades

  • 2001 ForeWord Book of the Year Award, Philosophy Category

Share This

Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis, by Sara Marcus, from Harvard University Press

From Our Blog

The Burnout Challenge

On Burnout Today with Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter

In The Burnout Challenge, leading researchers of burnout Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter focus on what occurs when the conditions and requirements set by a workplace are out of sync with the needs of people who work there. These “mismatches,” ranging from work overload to value conflicts, cause both workers and workplaces to suffer