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In Memoriam: G.A. Cohen (1941-2009)

Brian Leiter

I am very sorry to report that the distinguished political philosopher and Marx scholar G.A. Cohen died this morning, after suffering what appears to have been a massive stroke some time yesterday afternoon.  Cohen was, at the time of his death, the Emeritus Chichele Professor of Social & Political Theory at Oxford University.  His former Oxford colleague Michael Rosen, now at Harvard, no doubt gives apt expression to what those who knew Jerry Cohen are feeling at this point; he wrote:  "I am, of course, as you will be, utterly shocked that someone so brilliant, kind, funny, loyal, sensitive, passionate, principled and altogether extraordinary has been taken from us so suddenly and unexpectedly."

I will post links to memorial notices as they appear, and may add a few recollections of my own over the next day or two.
 
UPDATE:  Here's a Philosophy Bites interview with Cohen.   (Thanks to Rob Sica for the pointer.)  And a nice remembrance from political theorist Colin Farrelly at Queen's U (Canada).
 
ANOTHER:  Michael Rosen suggested, and I agree, that it might be nice to open comments on this thread for people to share their recollections of Jerry or to comment on the importance and significance of his work and ideas.  As Michael wrote to me:  "A lot of good philosophers have, unfortunately, died recently, but I doubt that there are many who have made such an impact on people with their personality."  Please submit comments only once; they may take awhile to appear.

ONE MORE evocative remembrance from Christopher Bertram (Bristol).

VIA CHRIS BROOKE Cohen on his intellectual career.

AUGUST 7 UPDATE:  There will be a service for Professor Cohen at the chapel of All Souls College, Oxford, at 4pm on Tuesday 11th August. 

ANOTHER:  A memorial from Jo Wolff (UCL) here.

AND PREDICTABLY, THE CRAZIES get in on the act.   This one has open comments, for those who care to 'reason' with the monomaniacs.  (ADDENDUM 8/13:  The first crazy posted the same smears on his own blog, with comments open.  One commentator calls him out, rather politely under the circumstances.)

AN OBITUARY from The Guardian.  (Thanks to Matt Kramer for the pointer.)

ANOTHER OBITUARY from Times of London.  (Thanks to Matt Kramer and Michael Rosen for this link.)

A CHARMING REMEMBRANCE from a childhood friend.  (Thanks to Chris Morris for the pointer.)

AND ONE MORE:  Alex Callinicos (KCL) in The Socialist Worker.  (Via Michael Rosen.)

A MEMORIAL from Philosophie Magazine (in French).

A LENGTHY REMEMBRANCE with many wonderful anecdotes from a longtime friend, Jerry Dworkin.

ONE MORE (AUGUST 16):  Jonathan Wolff (UCL) talks about Jerry on BBC radio (about eight minutes in).

ANOTHER OBITUARY from The Independent.

AUGUST 22:  The ruling class weighs in with its own memorial!

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39 responses to “In Memoriam: G.A. Cohen (1941-2009)”

  1. Michael Rosen

    I have so many memories of Jerry and his ideas have played such a big role in my life (mostly, I should say, in provoking me to react against them) that I hardly know where to start. Perhaps it would be best to start with the most recent.

    I had lunch with Jerry yesterday – it already seems an age ago – and, among the things we talked about (if you’ve ever had a conversation with Jerry, you’ll know that it rarely stuck to a single or even one or two topics) were some lectures that I am due to give in Oxford in the spring of next year (how sad I am that he will now never hear them!) The theme is “History and Freedom in German Idealism”. What I intend to argue is that Kant should be read as taking up the ancient project of theodicy in a new way. Instead of justifying God by showing him as promoting human happiness (or justifying the lack of human happiness as an appropriate punishment for human transgression) Kant sets out to show that the world is, potentially at least, a world of justice – where happiness may be proportional to desert. What is more, the realization of such a world is a human possibility. We don’t have to wait for the lion to lie down with the lamb. But this leads implicitly to a secularization of the idea of divine justice – in Hegel’s (Schiller’s) famous phrase: “World history is the last judgement” (die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht). The achievement of justice becomes a historical project, not just a matter of religious faith.

    All of this is, as yet, pretty speculative stuff (for instance, part of the transformation is that the later German Idealists substitute an ideal of “reconciliation” for the Kantian idea of justice – Sittlichkeit in place of Moralität – but I don’t yet have a good account of how that fits in).

    But what I wanted to say is that, as I fumbled my way in explaining what I have in mind to Jerry, I was struck by how immediately it resonated with him. For an apparently very secular and analytic thinker, he “got it” despite my not expressing myself very fluently or clearly. I think that this bears thinking about. He is happy to say in Rescuing Justice and Equality that his perspective on justice is Platonic (justice just is, timelessly, justice, whether it is realizable as a matter of fact or not) but I think that there is a sense in which it can also be said to be Kantian – justice is about the elimination of the arbitrariness of fortune. If Marx is the inheritor of the secularization of the Kantian justice project, perhaps Jerry is (I can’t bring myself to write “was”) one of its last, great protagonists.

    Reply
  2. Stephen Menn

    A bunch of us have posted brief memories of Jerry at Crooked Timber; I'm sure more will be added. Everyone's in shock.

    Reply
  3. Brian

    The thread to which Stephen Menn alludes is here:

    http://crookedtimber.org/2009/08/05/jerry-cohen-is-dead/#comments

    That thread is, alas, unmoderated, so beware. But Menn, Tom Hurka, and Daniel Weinstock, among others, have posted comments. As has Jan Narveson, complete with a rather pissy comment about Marxism.

    Reply
  4. John Fischer

    I met Professor Cohen at the conference at Wake Forest University in honor of Harry Frankfurt some years ago. I had never met him, although I had read some of his work on Marxism and political philosophy. I was absolutely amazed that he knew so much about free will, and, in particular, the Frankfurt counterexamples (or purported counterexamples) to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities. We had a wonderful conversation about such matters. He had obviously read an incredible amount of this vast literature, and it was great fun to talk with him about it. What a wonderful surprise to know of his interest in this area of philosophy.

    Also, I think I was not the only person at this conference to think that his "after dinner" remarks were the funniest, most hilarious "stand-up comedy" I have ever heard–and not just by a philosopher (which would not be a high bar, admittedly).

    I'm so very sorry to hear of his death.

    Reply
  5. Christopher Morris

    Jerry was an excellent philosopher; we don't need to say that, as it is something that is obvious to us all. But part of the reason he was such a good thinker is that he was such a good human being. By this I don't merely mean that he was just and kind. Jerry was a splendid person; he was such good company. He was fun and playful; he was always interesting; he brought out (he sought) what was interesting in those he met. And then there was that twinkle in his eye.

    His sudden departure leaves a very large hole in our lives, one which cannot begin to be filled even by his great essays and books.

    Reply
  6. Ornaith O'Dowd

    The first class I attended on my first day of grad school was with Jerry. Impressed by his work long before my arrival, I was much too intimidated to give voice to my ideas in class, something I have always regretted. Nevertheless, it was one of the most valuable educational experiences I have had. Jerry was a wonderful teacher: engaging, challenging, incisive, and generous. I was particularly impressed by his willingness to admit error; I remember him responding to one student's critical remarks by retreating to a corner, thinking for a moment, and then saying simply "Yes, you're right. I'm completely wrong." Frankly, I was floored that a famous and important philosopher would do such a thing, and for me, the moment remains a model of what should take place in grad school.
    Class would always begin with ten minutes of jokes and stories, which were never less than hilarious. Then, we would engage together in some of the most serious and rewarding philosophical explorations I have experienced.
    I'm deeply shocked and saddened to hear of his death.

    Reply
  7. Mark van Roojen

    I'm not someone who knew him except through his philosophical work. But there's lots of that worth remarking on. The two papers taking apart Nozick's theory of original appropriation, "Self-Ownership, World Ownership and Equality," (parts I and II), are especially wonderful exemplars of good philosophical work for an important purpose.

    Reply
  8. David Estlund

    I've posted at Crooked Timber, but want to chime in briefly with friends here. Some months ago Jerry told me, a propos of his very recent retirement, how blessed (his word) he felt. I think he had some sense (along with some surprise) of the affection and admiration so many of us had for him, though he said nothing so immodest. (Such a shy man, as we all know…) I hope others find in that, as I do, a bit of comfort.

    Reply
  9. An Argentinean-American Philosopher

    In faraway Argentina, some of (what I take to be) the best philosophers and political theorists I know have been deeply influenced by Cohen's work. Whether admirers, loose followers, or friendly critics of his work, they all agree on Cohen's immense relevance — a glimmer of intellectual and political hope in these dark times. This loss will be sorely lamented beyond the confines of the Anglo-American milieu. I'd like to think that Cohen would've been pleased to know this.

    Reply
  10. Michael Rosen

    The closing remarks from the conference held in Jerry's honour in Oxford in January 2009 are absolutely wonderful and deeply, deeply moving (thanks, Colin Farrelly, for the link).

    http://www.sciencelive.org/component/option,com_mediadb/task,play/idstr,OX-tag_2009_04_23_152134_724_politics_general_audio/vv,-2/Itemid,98

    Jerry says everything about himself that I would have liked to say — but better. He expresses the idea that the pursuit of justice is part of a "noble cause" in which individuals seek to transcend narrow self-concern, as well as making fun of the ways in which the need to identify oneself through community and history can be exploited to justify oppression and inhumanity.

    I can't imagine admiring anyone morally and politically (or, in the end, being interested in their thought) who didn't feel both of those dimensions and these remarks reminded me how much I admire Jerry.

    Reply
  11. Michael Rosen

    As I write, it is pouring with rain, as it has been for much of the summer. Thinking about Jerry the rain has triggered a happy memory, one that I haven’t shared with others.

    I don’t know how many people saw Jerry give a performance called “How Bad Things Can Be Good”. The reason that I didn’t talk about it is that its content was a wonderful surprise to me and I didn’t want to spoil it for others in the future. I had hoped to have him present it in Harvard in the Spring of 08 but he was reluctant (in the end he gave a truly memorable presentation of all of his favourite skits and parodies). Now my reason has gone and I don’t suppose that there is any recording. At any rate, I was present at its debut outing.

    Some background. When I became a philosophy tutor at Lincoln College in 1990 one of the ideas I had was that it would be nice to organize a regular social evening for our students that would not be just a party – a lecture or seminar with a visiting speaker that would be stimulating and fun. It seemed obvious that Jerry would be the ideal first guest. He agreed and told me that the title would be “How Bad Things Can Be Good”. “Ah,” I said, “theodicy!” “Well, yes …” he said, uncharacteristically cagily, and wouldn’t say more about the content. He did, though, take a careful interest in arrangements. How would the audience be seated? Would they have a glass of wine in their hands (yes, no problem!) Could we provide a board with a flip chart? Could he set up a tape recorder? Well indeed, of course…

    The evening itself was a set of Jerryesque analytical distinctions (“I show you differences.” Ludwig Wittgenstein) between the various ways that a bad thing might be made good (“bonified”) or, at least, ways in which its badness might be moderated or neutralized – with illustrations from Jerry’s repertoire of popular song. I can’t remember all of them, although some are obvious (April Showers: “And if it’s raining, have no regrets/ Because if it’s raining, it’s raining violets” and “Pack Up Your Troubles in Dreams”: “Just remember the sunshine always follows the rain, so pack your troubles in dreams and dream your troubles away”). Most memorable, though, was the finale – this was why he needed the flip-chart – in which he got all of us to join in with “Singing in the Rain”. It was truly marvellous to be part of a group of people whom he had brought into such a state of shining happiness and I will never ever forget it.

    Jerry, as his friends know, had an extraordinary memory for song lyrics, but his repertoire (and his taste) was limited. I can’t help thinking that – style apart – this is the song that best fits the situation today:

    Reply
  12. Thom Brooks

    This is a major loss. I met Jerry while a graduate student in Ireland. The great kindness — and sincere interest — he took in philosophical questions I was grappling with (re: Hegel's philosophical system) persisted ever since. Always generous with his time and advice, he will remain a real role model — in more than ways than one — for all of us.

    Reply
  13. Daniel Groll

    When I was an undergraduate at McGill, Prof. Cohen came to teach a class, which I very foolishly did not take. One day, however, I found myself along with a friend in an elevator standing behind Prof. Cohen. Too intimidated to actually say something, but nonetheless wanting to engage him somehow, I turned to my friend and said, "You know, I don't think Schwartz's is all it's cracked up to be." Schwartz's, for those not in the know, is the best smoked-meat deli in the world, located just a short walk from McGill and, as I knew from the grapevine, a particular favorite of Prof. Cohen's. Upon uttering my blaspheme, there was a loud intake of breath. Prof. Cohen turned around and looked at me, eyes wide, like a bull ready to charge. "What?!" was all he managed to exclaim, before the doors opened on the ground floor. He went his way, I went mine. That, I'm afraid, was my most substantive interaction with him.

    I will add, however, that I was part of a reading group this summer that read *Rescuing Justice & Equality*. I found myself marking passages to read aloud to my non-philosopher friends, which is something I have never done before with a piece of philosophy. It is a testament, I think, to the combination of pithiness and insight that makes up so much of his work.

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  14. Robert Hockett

    I've been away on vacation, with no access to cyberspace or even the printed news loop, and am just so shocked and saddened to learn now on returning that Jerry Cohen has left us. One truly wants to weep.

    I never was formally Jerry's student, either during my Oxford time (during which I didn't do political philosophy) or after. Yet he has nevertheless been just an astonishingly generous interlocutor over the past decade or so in connection with various justice-related thoughts and projects he's been willing to discuss with me, now a newish professor. (All who know him will, of course, know that 'generous' in this case includes just as much as (or more) in the way of generous doses of trenchant criticism as it does of encouragement and cheer). I can think of no contemporary philosopher whose thought and person have been more seamlessly merged than Jerry's, and very few if any who have been his equal in this respect. It was always so easy to learn from him (even when sometimes disagreeing), in part, precisely because one always knew it was *he* who was speaking, always fully attentive and fully himself. God, what a terrible loss. If only we could have said goodbye.

    Here is oe anecdote that might hang together nicely with the first of Michael Rosen's many splendid observations above: Late this past April, Jerry and Michele travelled to India to visit Sarah, Jerry's "ultraspiritual Hinduizing
    daughter," as he put it. In an email that Jerry sent the day before they departed, he mentioned "[his]journey from parentally induced anti-religionism to
    anti-anti-religionism to my current pretty pro-religious condition in which
    spiritual things keep on happening to me." What spiritual things? Well, "like sitting in a subway train and looking at the faces and a voice inside me–not me, exactly, but in me–says: They are all suffering emissaries of God. And I don't smirk."

    I don't know how exactly to speak a Kaddish, but in some sense I believe I shall be trying to do so for many years ahead now. What a Mensch, and indeed what an "Emissary" in his own wonderful way. Bless you and thank you, dear fellow.

    Bob H

    Reply
  15. Michael Rosen

    Thank you very, very much, Bob, for that anecdote. It makes so much sense to me.

    One of the things that Jerry told me at lunch on Tuesday was that he had just written a piece on (I think) reverence. I told him I’d be really interested to see it and he promised to send it but said I wouldn’t like it. Oh, I said, why? Well, he said, you don’t like my self-revelation. You were the only person whom I sent my account of my journey to India to who didn’t like it. It’s true, I didn’t like it (though it wasn’t because of the self-revelation, I think). Anyway, what I’m trying to feel my way towards understanding is how “spiritual Jerry” relates to Marxist-historical-materialist-political-Jerry. (His friends will know what I mean, but Jerry was someone, I think, who spent a huge amount of energy trying to make sense of himself. Which was appropriate, because he was a very complex, unusual and interesting person. Now that he is gone, perhaps we have to go on doing it for him.)

    My all-time no-contest favourite Hegel quotation (it comes from his Jena notebooks) is: “In philosophy, the public are concerned with religion – lost religion – not science; that only comes later.” I think that there is a connection between Jerry’s secular political and moral commitments and many themes from religion. It’s hard to articulate this, though, without evoking the wrong associations (which would be a total abuse of Brian-the-scourge-of-religion's blog). I’m NOT saying “Marxists are just history-worshippers and authoritarian dogmatists”. It’s much more difficult, subtle – and morally honourable. I would have hoped to be able to discuss it with Jerry in the years to come.

    Your story about Jerry, Bob, shows the very best side of the search for the lost religion – the thought that the unity of humanity lies not just in our shared, practical engagement (let’s all link arms and sing the Party song!) but, more profoundly, in sympathy and the solidarity of suffering.

    So let me add a little anecdote about this. I assume most people know Jerry’s piece on conservatism (has it been published?) It’s wonderful in the way that it combines passion, originality and extraordinary Jerryish acuteness, although I disagree with it from top to bottom. And it puts surprising bits of Jerry’s thought to work. Who would have guessed from reading KMTH that Jerry had such a Platonic view of the nature of value? Anyway, I got Jerry to present that piece to the Government Department when he came to Harvard last year and we had a terrific evening and discussion. We talked abut the “solidarity of the living with the dead” as a conservative motif and I remember getting into a Benjaminian riff with him — mostly for the polemical fun of it, but with a bit of conviction behind it — about how there is no way to separate aesthetic value from moral context and there is no monument of civilization that isn’t a monument of barbarism. I sent him an e-mail later with Brecht’s “Questions from a Worker Who Reads” (“Who built Thebes of the 7 gates/In the books you will read the names of kings./Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?/And Babylon, many times demolished,/Who raised it up so many times ?) and I expressed the opinion that “If the solidarity of the living with the dead means anything it is empathy with their past suffering.” He wrote back: “Oy, vay iz mir! Please spare the cathedrals!”

    My God! How I miss him!

    Reply
  16. Marc Grinberg

    My own tribute – http://www.thepublicphilosopher.com/2009/08/07/jerry-cohen/

    Reply
  17. Robert Hockett

    Many many thanks for the further thoughts, Michael. One other thing that occurs to me in this connection is Jerry's cluster of reflections upon how best to view Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx in relation to one another about mid-way into his sort of semi-self-revalatory book published in 2000 ("If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?," which I think grew out of Jerry's Gifford Lectures). One plausible way of reading this first (right?) of Jerry's 'self-revelations,' it seems to me, might be as casting — partly via assertion, but also via exemplification in the very act of writing — a bit more light on why he ultimately rejects, in his more unalloyedly scholarly writing, a radical distinction between the pursuit of justice through rectified economic and political structure on the one hand, and the pursuit of justice in one's own and others' attitudes and affective orientations on the other. The 'seamlessness' of person, practice, and inquiry to which I alluded before, which Jerry seemed to have succeeded so effectively in striving for (at least in comparison to me!), might be viewed as the starkest possible contrary to alienation in all of its most deeply rooted forms — economic, political, and hence ultimately philosophical and even 'spiritual' — as diagnosed by Hegel, the Left Hegelians, and ultimately Marx. Jerry's description of his own movement from mild contempt for those who strove for an egalitarian spirit as one indispensible means of bringing about a more solidarist and egalitarian world, to a gradually growing respect for, then agreement with them (though without, of course, ever renouncing the urgency of the need to work directly on the ecoomic and political structure as well), might be viewed in part as a move toward working on literally all fronts at once in the struggle to end alienation. There is surely a sense in which some people's experience in moving toward and then arriving at this position can amount to a kind of 'conversion experience' — one which one wishes that more of those who purport to belong to this, that, or the other faith tradition or political movement would actually undergo! (A side note: I believe that that other remarkable post-Hegelian, Kierkegaard, sometimes described his own project as 'an attempt to introduce Christianity into Christendom.' I'd bet that Jerry would not object to a description of his project as, among other things, an attempt to introduce justice to 'constructivist' justice theory.)

    Thanks again, in solidarity,
    Bob

    Reply
  18. Michael Rosen

    Interesting, Bob. I'll have to think about this, not least because I'm not so much up to speed on *If You're An Egalitarian* as I am on some of Jerry's other writing.

    My initial thought is that Jerry's "justice monism" is connected with his value Platonism. (If justice "just is", wouldn't it be weird (even weirder ;)) if it "just was" differently in different domains?) On the other hand, there is Jerry's value pluralism. Marxist believers in value Platonism with discursively indefensible trade-offs — you aren't going to see one of those come around again in a hurry, I don't think. 🙂

    Reply
  19. Stephan Kinsella

    David Gordon has a nice remembrance here http://blog.mises.org/archives/010425.asp

    Reply
  20. Cheyney Ryan

    I would like to add my voice to those who have spoken of Jerry's great warmth and generosity, especially with younger scholars. Back in the 1970s, when I was starting out, there were still many in our profession who felt that political philosophy, and Marxism in particular, did not belong in philosophy departments. Jerry was not just a model and inspiration to us all, but a source of support even to those he did not know well. When several members of my department tried to fire me in the early 1980s for not doing "real" philosophy, Jerry was increadibly helpful in numerous ways, though we only knew each through correspondance.

    I only got to knew Jerry well a few years, when I was a visiting fellow at Oxford. We got together every time I returned there, and even saw each other in New York not that long ago. He was looking forward to "retirement" as a time for continuing his important work. My fondest memory is of an afternoon spent discussing the Marxist dimensions of "Finnian's Rainbow", whose score Jerry knew by heart. I was shocked to learn that such a brilliant, warm, funny, good-hearted person had passed on. I will always miss him.

    Reply
  21. Karim Zahidi

    The Monthly Review also has a nice obituary by James Farmelant:

    http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/farmelant080809.html

    Reply
  22. Michael Rosen

    I have just come back from Jerry’s funeral. I can say that they were two of the most moving, riveting, inspiring and just downright cry-your-eyes-out sad hours of my life. My impressions are just that. I don’t think that even in my best shape I could retain everything that was said and read and sung. But it was a truly wonderful experience and, although I know that there were a lot of people there who had come a long way, no doubt there are others who would have liked to be there but couldn’t be. These notes are for them.

    The funeral was in the Chapel of All Souls, a very beautiful place, of course, but not suitable for the very large number of people who wanted to be there. I was lucky enough to have a seat with an excellent view of everything (I arrived very early) but a lot of people had to sit in the transept. Fortunately, the sound system was excellent, but I don’t suppose they saw very much.

    What an amazing occasion it was in the circumstances! I guess that I assumed (I’m old enough to have been through this kind of thing before on more than one occasion) that the funeral would be a brief and gloomy sharing of misery and that a more upbeat celebration of Jerry’s life would have to wait for the memorial service, which is also planned. That, in my experience at least, is pretty much the “Oxford way”. What an extraordinary surprise (and a remarkable achievement) that Michele and the family, in all their grief and shock, had planned this as a celebration of Jerry. They succeeded quite remarkably.

    Of course, as it should have been, while it was recognized that Jerry was a remarkable philosopher, a great teacher and a significant figure within the academic universe, the main emphasis was on Jerry as a father and a husband and a friend. But a lot of people in their expressions of grief have pointed out how Jerry the person and Jerry the philosopher were united (Jerry’s voice: So, how could they not be?) and it was one of the many wonderful things about the service that it did justice to that. Another thing that I had thought and became even more clear to me this afternoon was how Jerry was, in a sense, a compartmentalized person. That is not to say that he suffered from false consciousness (Jerry again: what you mean is that it doesn’t entail that he suffered from false consciousness, although he may have done so for other, independent reasons). I think that Jerry’s gift for engaging with people meant that he showed them things that (he thought) particularly related to them and their needs. And, since he was a brilliantly empathic person, he was almost always right. But that meant that we all – even those of us who knew him for a very, very long time – got a partial perspective, a bespoke suit ("That poor man!" "Yes. Nice suit though!"). His family both saw more of him and had very personal needs (particularly, of course, as children). I can’t tell you how much I valued the various contributions of Gideon, Miriam and Sarah, Jerry’s children as well as Michael (his brother) and Michele and Maggie (the mother of his children) – very different individuals with very different commitments, all of whom clearly understood Jerry as much as they loved him (which is a very great deal). I think that they all did him proud and I know that he would have been as proud of them today as ever – if not prouder.

    Michael Cohen not only spoke very movingly and recalled Jerry from before any of the rest of us knew him but acted as a wonderfully warm and generous “chief mourner”. Jerry’s old friend (and comrade) from student days, Michael Seifert, talked about Jerry’s political commitments – as did most of his family (Gideon was especially moving in explaining how Jerry had transmitted his sense of what Jewishness as part of his political identity meant to his family). Michael Otsuka said (if I remember correctly) that Jerry was unmatched for philosophical clarity, incisiveness and decisiveness since Socrates. Sarah (Jerry’s youngest child) read from the not-yet-complete essay on spirituality that Jerry talked about to me at lunch only a week (and an epoch) ago. Many people were thinking about Jerry from a spiritual perspective and several of the speakers have religious commitments that Jerry (as I judge) didn’t share. I was glad, however, that where religion entered the service (Gideon and Sarah (?) said Kaddish and we all recited the Twenty-Third Psalm) it did not do so in a way that violated Jerry’s (again, as I judge) much less affirmative but not downright hostile attitude to these matters.

    And then – how could it have been otherwise? – there was music. Yiddish music, rasta music, Pete Seeger progressive folk, happy Broadway music. Michele talked about sharing music with Jerry – and sang so beautifully. If anything could have opened the coffin lid to show us that it had been one big practical joke that would have been it. But it didn’t.

    So sadly on a beautiful, beautiful, terrible day we all of us in our different ways said goodbye to a great and wonderful human being. Thank you to all of you who were there to share it and to all of you whose hearts were with us.

    Reply
  23. robert allen

    Can anyone explain Prof. Cohen's "fascination with Christianity?" Was he taken by its otherworldliness or its overlap with Marxism? As a Jew, how did he regard the figure of Jesus Christ? Are these questions answered in his essay on spirituality? Sounds like he would have been a heckuva Catholic. RIP.

    Reply
  24. Mike Otsuka

    Thanks, Michael, for that beautiful account of Jerry's funeral. (To fill out the sentences from my remarks that you report, they were: 'There is not another political philosopher who has made his case more clearly, and more incisively, and more decisively than Jerry did. Not just among his contemporaries, but at any point in the history of political philosophy going back all the way to Socrates.')

    Reply
  25. David Estlund

    I wish I could have been there. It's lovely to have this account, and to know that the service was, in its way, full of life. Perfect.

    Reply
  26. Faik Kurtulmus

    Stuart White has a remembrance on the blog Next Left: http://www.nextleft.org/2009/08/jerry-cohen.html

    And here's another one by Nicholas Vrousalis, one of the last graduate students Jerry supervised, which gives 'a rough summary of Jerry Cohen’s intellectual voyage from the Second International marxism of Karl Marx’s Theory of History to the egalitarian political philosophy of Rescuing Justice and Equality': http://blog.theorein.org/?p=208

    Reply
  27. Nathan Jun

    "Sounds like he would have been a heckuva Catholic."

    Perhaps, but I have an exceedingly difficult time imagining Professor Cohen as anything other than a reyacha – one whose Jewishness informed his politics, and vice versa. Professor Rosen and other close friends are obviously in a much better position to speak to this relationship than I. Speaking for myself, however, I have always viewed Professor Cohen – with much respect and more than a little pride – as a quintessentially Jewish philosopher, not because of his religious beliefs (or lack thereof), but because of his special gift for moral and political insight. He is gone, but the spirit of "tikkun olam" is alive and well in his works.

    He was one of the greatest philosophical minds of his generation. May he rest in peace.

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  28. Thom Brooks

    Many thanks, Michael!

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  29. amelie rorty

    Jerry was/is the most alive –the most immediately present and responsive person — I have known. His immediate outrage at injustice, his immediate sympathy –sometimes to the point of tears– for suffering was, I believe, the source of his (early, middle, late) political theory…He was persistent in his search for clarity, in working in and through Marxism, in his coming to think that an egalitarian ethos is as essential to justice as fair economic distribution. He was the funniest, most outspoken, most unihibited, the most lovable Yiddish mensch imaginable. Like many others, I feel more vulnerable in the world without Jerry's intellectual passion and energy, his immediate humane presence.

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  30. Mimi Bick

    First, I havent stopped thinking about Jerry since I received a mail on Monday morning about his sudden death. And then yesterday all afternoon I was lamenting living in Chile, so far from the All Souls Chapel where I would have liked to have been.

    I met Jerry when I was a political philosophy student at Balliol College in the 80s. I cant remember who pushed me in his direction — Alan Ryan or Charles Taylor, I think — on the grounds that I too was a Montrealer and a Jew, but our conversations are still so vivid to me. I attribute that to Jerry's way of being in the world and with people, so widely commented on by colleagues and students worldwide who have been blogging and reminiscing about him these last days. He tapped into my "needs" and we laughed so hard about many things – Oxford quirkiness and Montreal jewishness included.

    I saw Jerry last in late 2007. I was participating in a Seminar being held in Oxford. On a break one morning, I went over to Blackwells and bought, amongst other books, "If you're an egalitarian…". Walking back to Examination schools to the Seminar I stopped at the Lodge and asked the Porter if Jerry was in. Yes, he said, I´ll ring him for you. But it had been such a long time since we had seen each other, so I hesitated. Surely he would not remember me as I did him.

    After lunch with a friend as we crossed at the light on the High full of people and traffic, there was Jerry looking straight at me and me at him. Mimi, he said, how are you and how could you be in Oxford and not be in touch? When are you leaving? Come talk! That was Jerry. His memory, clarity, warmth, empathy, humanity will be cherished and not forgotten.

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  31. Gideon Elford

    I posted this last week on a private page and a friend suggested I post it here. I hope it provokes in others the same kind of fond memories I have of Jerry.

    Jerry Cohen died last week. His funeral was on Tuesday. During that funeral, in a fitting and moving tribute, Michael Otsuka said of Jerry that no other political philosopher has made his case more clearly, incisively or decisively since Socrates. Whatever one thinks about the accuracy of this assertion, it is not absurd. The very fact that it is not absurd is testament to the place and significance of Jerry as a thinker. He was a great philosopher, and will be remembered as such. Moreover, as the many tributes from his contemporaries attest, he was unique in that company, not because of his abilities and achievements, but in virtue of his character. I did not know Jerry as well as many others, nor am I anywhere near able enough with words to offer a tribute that might come close to adequately reflecting his brilliance. His death is, however, of great significance for me. Because of this, I want simply to make note of some of my own memories of him.

    I won’t forget the first time I went to one of Jerry’s ‘special presentations’. I had long been convinced of Jerry’s philosophical excellence, ever since I had read parts of his ‘History, Labour, and Freedom’ and ‘Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality’. Both full of compelling argument, expressed with precision and clarity, much of which I found irresistible. I also knew he was a funny man, of a comedic disposition. This much I learned in attendance at his Contemporary Political Philosophy Seminars, watching his constant wisecracking with Alan Ryan.

    It was only when I turned up at a small ‘special lecture’ in the philosophy department that I came to understand that Jerry was a man who was nearly as much in love with comedy as he was with philosophy. It was advertised under the title ‘Ways That Bad Things Can Be Good: A Lighter Look at the Problem of Evil’. I had expected a relatively orthodox presentation of some light-hearted philosophical reflections. Instead I found what would better have been described as an extended stand-up routine. It wasn’t just that it was extremely funny – which it was – but that it was so manifestly clever; indeed, in parts, funny precisely because it was so clever. Drawn of source material from a lifetime spent observing at close quarters the pompousness, pedantry and absurdity that sometimes accompanies an academic career in philosophy; all told with a mischievous wit and a deftly reverential mockery. It was like nothing I had seen before. A seamless blend of philosophy, comedy, impersonations, and song, leaving the audience enraptured with gleeful mirth. As the routine progressed Jerry would inhabit new philosophical types, effortlessly shifting between caricatures that were recognizable in one guise or another.

    In several places, Jerry would pause and, much as a philosopher might, reflect back on the joke itself, uncovering the structure of the piece that had provoked this mysterious, yet quite familiar, reactive laughter, out of which a further joke would subsequently emerge. Indeed, this was expressive of part of the underlying genius of the whole enterprise – it wasn’t simply standup on the subject of philosophy; there was a sense in which it was standup as philosophy, for it was reflective and revealing in a way in which philosophy characteristically is. Such was the nature of the routine, constituted as it was by jokes that were multilayered, often subtle, invariably clever and frequently hilarious. I will never forget a quite brilliant sketch – and a personal highlight – entitled ‘the difference between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, told in mime’.

    I won’t forget my confirmation of status interview with Jerry. I arrived at his room in All Souls, knocked, and he invited me in. In a strange way I always found his appearance somehow surprising; mildly jolting. Not because it was in anyway distinctive. I think it had more to do with my perception of being in the presence of philosophical greatness; of a man who, even amidst the company in Oxford, was an intellectual giant. Before we began he asked me if I would like some coffee, to which I replied that I was ‘fine’. The response drew a mischievous smirk and a momentary silence which was initially disarming. He cheerfully broke into a lengthy but captivating explanation of why such an expression had its drawbacks. An acquaintance of his, whose identity I forget, had advised him that one should not reply to an offer with the expression ‘I’m fine’ in case of further offers that left one nowhere else to go. If, for example, he were now to offer me a whisky, which I might want to accept, this would necessitate, on pain of consistency with my earlier response, a degree of backtracking from the kind of generality which that prior remark implied. If I were to insist on using the term in question – ‘fine’, that is – one ought to anchor it with the appropriate qualification. I was ‘fine’ with respect to coffee, not ‘fine’ tout court. Jerry wasn’t just making playful chit-chat, he was, as he was no doubt perfectly conscious, engaged in the very pedanticism that formed the subject of many of his funniest routines. It was this reflective game of humour from precision and comedy from philosophy on which Jerry seemed to thrive, and for which I will remember him. After this initial intellectual excursion, he then proceeded to comb my submitted work with a merciless rigour. It was the same insightful, devastatingly incisive type of analysis with which I was now very familiar from his Contemporary Political Philosophy seminars and his Lecture series on his then forthcoming book ‘Rescuing Justice and Equality’.

    It was during the former that I came to appreciate Jerry’s excellence not only as a practitioner of Philosophy, but as a teacher. I won’t forget his introductory seminars on How to do Philosophy. Of course he knew, as well as anyone else, that there is a sense in which philosophy cannot be conventionally taught as such, but must be shown. But to the extent that it is possible to explain, as opposed to demonstrate, how one goes about the business of philosophizing, Jerry was brilliant at doing so. I was also struck by his generosity in seminars. His analysis and criticism was often dispassionate, sometimes brutal, but he was always instructive, and seldom failed to give fair consideration to views that opposed his own. He was consistently humble, and wholly unafraid to concede that he was in error. It was, for Jerry, as I heard him remark on one occasion, about seeking the truth of the matter; and in that pursuit, ego could have nothing to do with it. One spends a lifetime learning how to do philosophy, but I am certain that I am learning quicker, and how to do it better, having listened to Jerry over the past few years.

    Nor was this a mere aptitude. He was not just a skilful tutor but a conscientious, purposeful one. The final words of his valedictory lecture were inspirational ones, not for their eloquence or profundity, but for the sentiment they expressed. They were not about himself, or his work, but to his students. Words of encouragement for those seeking to tread the path of the same sort that he had so brilliantly navigated before them.

    Jerry’s philosophy, both in substance and in character, has influenced my own thinking as much, if not more, than any other, and for that I am most grateful to him.

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  32. Michael Rosen

    Readers may like to know that my review of *Rescuing Justice and Equality* appears in this week's T.L.S. (August 21). Unfortunately, it is not, I believe, available on-line.

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  33. Grahame Lock

    On a suggestion by Michael Rosen – i.e. a suggestion which encourages me to think that there might still be someone in the world who is interested in the matter – it may be useful to recall that Jerry did engage with the ideas of Althusser. Thus Jerry remarked (see the Virtual Stoa blog): "I was involved in three long-running arguments over the course of my career. The first was with the Althusserians, on Marx’s theory of history, and I knew what that was about. The second was with Nozick, on self-ownership, and I knew what that was about. The third was with Dworkin, on expensive tastes, and I still have no idea what that was about.”
    I taught the Oxford political theory seminar with Jerry, Ronald Dworkin and Derek Parfit in one academic year, and I thought I had understood what the debate on expensive tastes was about.
    In contrast (and having been supervised by Jerry in London in 1966-67, and by Althusser in Paris in 1971-73) I am not sure what the debate with the Althusserians was about – or rather, my impression is that the views of the two "camps" on what it was about were rather different. Once I published a piece in Economy and Society (November 1988) called "Louis Althusser and G. A. Cohen: a Confrontation" in which I tried to work out that point and others.
    Debates in Marxism have of course moved on since, but I am not sure whether in a more fruitful direction than in the "Althusser-Cohen" epoch.

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  34. Michael Rosen

    @Grahame Lock

    I am pretty sure that I know what the Althusser-Cohen debate was about from one side at least.

    For Jerry, it was: what does "structural causality" mean? Answer: either it means functional explanation or it doesn't mean much at all. And talk about the peculiar "scientificity" of Marxism is arm-waving bullshit which avoids the question. Science is science, whatever the domain (although, many positivists' assumptions to the contrary, functional explanation is a legitimate part of it).

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  35. Grahame Lock

    Thanks, Michael – indeed.

    In respect to "structural causality", Althusserians talked about it as an idea drawn from Spinoza: Nature actively creating itself (natura naturans) "is only the obverse of Nature as the … structure of the universe (natura naturata): both the elements and the whole are necessary and complementary aspects of [any causal story]", as Robert Paul Resch puts it in his book on Althusser.

    Anyway, what I was hinting at in my comment was that, rightly or wrongly, the Althusserians didn't see the key point(s) at issue between the two camps as Jerry did. Simplifying, they tended to understand the dispute as concerning a difference between on the one hand the Cohenian claim that the *productive forces* of society enjoy explanatory primacy over the production relations (Jerry adstructs this claim in terms of a wider discussion of functional explanation, to which Michael refers) and on the other hand the thesis, defended by Althusser, Etienne Balibar and others (especially in Reading Capital), that the *production relations* must be attributed explanatory primacy – plus that, pace Jerry, the productive forces are themselves relations, namely connexions "of 'real appropriation' between their elements, to wit means of production, direct producers and non-wage-earners".
    I don't think that the Althusserians were worried about the bullshit claims made against them, one non-presuppositionless reason for this being that if these claims were well-founded, then Marx himself – who they had certainly read very carefully, and from whose writings much of their conceptual apparatus was of course borrowed – would turn out to be one of the biggest bullshitters. That might of course also be the case, but then non-bullshit Marxism would be a paradoxical project. Perhaps Jerry came to draw just this conclusion. (And in the meanwhile, Althusser came to welcome the "crisis of Marxism".)

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  36. Rhodri Lathey

    I was a graduate student who knew Jerry (and Michael Rosen) through attending the Hegel and Marx seminars at All Souls. When it came to discussions on Hegel, Michael generally had the upper hand. However, I remember one argument between them (it's hazy now, but I think it had something to do with Winckelmann's art paradox) in which Jerry began his argument from the most unintellectual of standpoints ('the Greeks just produced better art'). This set off a tennis match-styled argument as we, the audience, watched the two philosophers respond to each other with increasing sophistication and abstraction. At the end of the lengthy rally, which left the audience utterly lost, Jerry hit home the winner, with Michael (uncharacteristically) being unable to respond.

    I also remember being in an All Souls garden party with Jerry. He warned me as we were drinking that if I addressed him as 'Professor Cohen' again, he would pour his glass of wine over me. Sure enough, and even though I was dressed in a suit in preparation for an evening engagement, I erred and he delivered his promise!

    Having enjoyed Jerry's company so much at this party, a group of us invited him out for a curry, at a later date, on Cowley Road. We picked him up at All Souls, wearing a baseball cap (!), and continued to the restaurant via an off license. On being seated, we wondered what we might talk about with the Chichele professor. Marxism? Rawls? Jerry simply looked at us and, rubbing his hands, said 'Right, what departmental gossip do you want to know…?'

    I found him to be both a great man and a great thinker, and am shocked and saddened by his death.

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  37. Michael Rosen

    Rhodri must have misremembered. Clearly, I was not "unable" to respond, but had decided that a tactical withdrawal was the only way to return to normal programming. 😉

    Seriously, it was a privilege to be Jerry's "straight man" for sixteen years. Being a Tutorial Fellow at Oxford is very demanding — at least, I found it so — and I would often arrive for seminars feeling simply too worn out to be able to engage with Jerry at anything like his level. But the challenge of his energy and perceptiveness never failed to stimulate me — I always left our seminars feeling that I was more intellectually alive than when I went in. I only hope our students enjoyed them half as much as I did.

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  38. Rhodri Lathey

    We certainly did enjoy them, Michael. By the way, I hope you are doing well in Harvard. There's a DPhil thesis in Oxford – which took too long to complete (!) – with a heartfelt tribute to you in the acknowledgements…

    Best wishes, Rhodri

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  39. Vidhu Verma

    It is with immense sadness and grief that I write these lines as they are for someone who played a very important role in the shaping of ideas on justice for the last three decades. I was an M. Phil student from India at Oxford in 1986 and Jerry Cohen supervised my initial meanderings in western political theory. But even today when I am stuck in some argument I can remember him shooting me with his glare, his brows knitted together, pushing me to clarify further.

    He was an amazing teacher in the seminars and extremely energetic in the question-answer sessions giving each question a thorough response. But he had his rare moments when he would swirl around and open his book and read out for exactness and rigor or just crack jokes!!

    Each personal interaction with him left me philosophically active and physically drained. He had a very sharp mind and would dissect every sentence written in the drafts submitted to him. I remember that first meeting in his room where I stood awestruck. I had read Karl Marx’s theory of History as an undergraduate student in India and was amazed at the range of his analytical mind. But I could not answer the questions he asked me! He told me to return the following day. When I opened the door he was sitting on the chair and did an impromptu performance as a clown. He then went on to mimic the English way of complaining about the weather and the long queues in the bus stop. At first disconcerted, I gradually relaxed, laughed while he signaled for me to sit down. He asked me about my life as a student in Delhi University and how I was drawn to ideas of social justice. He was keen to know since he had never visited that part of the world. After that he was a philosopher guide who was extremely patient and gentle if I was late and lost count of his appointments but very demanding when it came to written work.

    Once I arrived late due to a dentist appointment and lamented about my first tooth decay. He stared at me for several moments and then said, ‘Now don’t say it is a cultural thing!! (alluding to our debates on non-class phenomenon in Marxism) You will be surprised how in the first world we all have teeth of this kind’. To my dismay he opened his mouth wide to display several dentist appointments. He spoke very fondly about his family including his grandson. But along with this playfulness was the way he had set very high standards for his students. He went through my initial hand-written assignments (since I had no personal computer) very meticulously with interjections, comments and humour! I still have many of his comments lying somewhere about my incorrect definitions, grammatical errors and misplaced arguments.

    We met up when he came to India in 1992 for giving a series of lectures on justice. He had witnessed the riots in Mumbai from his hotel room and was quite shocked at the sequence of events that followed but had made it to Delhi for the lecture. His sincerity and commitment to egalitarian ideals were still there. Recently I had established contact with him for a project on social justice. Unfortunately he will not be there to comment on it. His death is a great shock for all of us. But Jerry’s voice will always be there telling us to go on thinking and writing about philosophical problems even if they are not fashionable any more.

    Vidhu Verma, Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi India

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