Book review: 'Socialism' gives alternate view

By Sanford G. Thatcher

The current lively debate over health care reform has been punctuated by charges from right-wingers that implementing President Obama’s plan would be to install socialism in our country.

Rhetorically, this kind of sound bite has been effective because of Americans’ historical aversion to anything smacking of communism or even the European brand of socialism, which stokes fears of excessive government control and loss of individual freedom.

But is socialism really such an alien way of organizing human society? In this stimulating essay titled “Why Not Socialism?” (just 92 pages long), the late Oxford philosopher G. A. Cohen invites us to think seriously about what socialism has to offer in comparison with capitalism.

He examines its basic premises, shows what aspects of human nature it requires and promotes, and speculates both about its desirability as an alternative to (or, in the guise of market socialism, a complement of) capitalism and about the feasibility of implementing it in our modern society.

He begins the book by sketching the forms of human cooperation involved in a camping trip, using this as an example of socialism in microcosm. The norms of equality and reciprocity that govern people’s interactions here are so natural that they are simply taken for granted — a point Cohen neatly demonstrates by imagining the reactions people would have in this situation if various elements of a market economy were introduced.

But of course, he admits, the circumstances of a camping trip are special in many ways, and one may not infer readily from the acceptability of socialist principles in this kind of setting to the desirability and feasibility of socialism in society writ large. So the rest of the book is devoted to examining the salient differences between a camping trip and social life in general so as to arrive at an assessment of “why not socialism” for the wider society.

Cohen focuses on the two principles he sees to be at the core of socialism: equality and community. For socialism, it is equality of opportunity that is basic.

Socialism aims at removing obstacles to everyone’s having an equal chance to succeed in life through personal choices based on individual preferences.

Thus, contrary to right-wing rhetoric, socialism is not only compatible with democratic liberties but a precondition of freedom insofar as it results in fair and just outcomes — outcomes that nevertheless may end up distributing benefits and burdens unequally.

Recognizing that the principle of equality of opportunity alone does not rule out even very substantial degrees of inequality in outcomes, Cohen brings to bear the principle of community as a moderating element.

The comparison between the norms of reciprocity that are central to capitalism and socialism, respectively, is one of the most interesting and insightful parts of this book. Cohen makes it clear why the reciprocity that is necessary for a market economy to function well is purely instrumental in nature and fosters greed and fear as key elements of motivating human behavior.

But he rightly asks us to reflect whether we really want to live in a world where people are mainly motivated by greed and fear, and the picture he draws of an alternative society where caring and community (such as now arise widely in our society only when a crisis like Sept. 11 occurs) prevail as motivating forces certainly has strong appeal.

But can we ever have a society that operates on such principles? Cohen professes himself to be unsure.

The obstacle, he thinks, is not so much human selfishness as such as it is our failure, so far at least, to figure out how to design institutions that can make these principles work in practice.

The last lines of the book say it all: “Our attempt to get beyond predation has thus far failed. I do not think the right conclusion is to give up.”

Sanford G. Thatcher, formerly director of Penn State University Press, is now executive editor for social science and humanities there. Earlier in his publishing career he worked at Princeton University Press, where he was the editor for G. A. Cohen’s prize-winning “Karl Marx’s Theory of History” (1978). He studied philosophy at both Princeton and Columbia.