A Study Of Cohen’s Socialist Concept Of Equality And Its Contemporary Value

Equality is an issue of great concern to many thinkers.Enlightenment thinkers often strayed from the real historical development process and took natural human rights or human nature as the theoretical cornerstone of the rationality and legitimacy of equality sought by man.Marx and Engels discussed the issue of equality based on the materialistic view of history.They criticized the inequality of capitalist society and pointed out that in a communist society with the elimination of classes,equality would be achieved naturally.Rawls did not support changing the capitalist system;he believed that justice is equality and tried to change the gap between the rich and the poor from the perspective of distribution.Cohen proposed "equality of access to advantages" and built his own socialist concept of equality on this basis.At the present stage,the main contradiction of our society has changed profoundly.How to achieve common prosperity and promote social equity is worthy of people’s attention and consideration.The values of the times embedded in Cohen’s socialist view of equality can provide a reference for solving the equality problems arising from the development process in China at present.In addition to the introduction,the paper is divided into four parts:The first part focuses on the background of Cohen’s socialist view of equality from three aspects.First,his family and upbringing gave Cohen a strong belief in communism.Secondly,after the 1970 s,capitalist social contradictions kept coming to the fore and the socialist movement entered a low ebb.Finally,the Western liberals represented by Nochick and others launched an attack on socialist equality,and the two factual assertions of Marx and Engels on the future of equality,namely,the workers’ group becoming the vast majority and the great abundance of material wealth,did not show a good development trend in the real society.As a result,Cohen began to focus on the study of political philosophy in an attempt to defend socialist equality on a moral level.The second part focuses on Cohen’s establishment of his view of socialist equality in his arguments with the liberals.Cohen’s defense of socialist equality manifests itself in two main ways: on the one hand,it is a critique of Nochick’s free willism.Cohen pointed out that Nochick did not take the oppressed and exploited proletariat as the subject of his theory,and therefore his theory was a formalism for the proletariat;on the other hand,it was a critique of Rawls’ s theory of justice.Cohen takes Rawls’ principle of difference as a starting point to show that inequality caused by incentives is unjust.On this basis,Cohen emphasizes the need not only to change the basic structure of society normatively,but also to value the role of individual choices in everyday life and the moral ethos of society as a whole.To this end,Cohen proposed the idea of "equality of access to advantage",which aims to eliminate involuntary disadvantages in individual choice.Cohen then built his vision of equality through an ideological model,the camping trip model,which introduced the principles of equality of opportunity and sharing.The third part focuses on the Marxist analysis of Cohen’s socialist view of equality.Based on the materialistic view of history,Marx discusses equality from the perspective of real people.Unlike Marx and Engels who treated the possibility of equality realization from the perspective of historical development,Cohen thinks about the possibility of equality realization from the perspective of morality,which can be regarded as a modern interpretation and extension of Marxist concept of equality.But at the same time,Cohen’s view of equality also has certain limitations.The fourth part focuses on the contemporary value of Cohen’s socialist view of equality.Cohen’s theory expands the horizon of studying the Marxist concept of equality,criticizes the inequality in contemporary capitalist society,and proves the possibility of realizing socialist equality.Cohen’s socialist view of equality has some reference value for solving a series of problems encountered in development at the present stage in China.