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If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? By G. A. Cohen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. 233p. $35.00 cloth, $18.00 paper.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2002

Gillian Brock
Affiliation:
The University of Auckland

Extract

In this work, G. A. Cohen presents his Gifford Lectures. He explains why he no longer believes in the inevitability of equality, why he rejects liberals' faith in the sufficiency of political recipes, and why he now believes “that a change in social ethos, a change in the attitudes people sustain toward each other in the thick of daily life, is necessary for producing equality” (p. 3). Both just rules and just personal choices are required for distributive justice. Good structural design is not enough: You cannot change the world without changing the soul, as it were. He discusses how closely this aligns him with Christian views he once utterly disparaged.

Type
Book Review
Copyright
© 2002 by the American Political Science Association

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