Is socialism desirable? Is it even possible? In this concise book, one of the world's leading political philosophers presents with clarity and wit a compelling moral case for socialism and argues that the obstacles in its way are exaggerated. There are times, G. A. Cohen notes, when we all behave like socialists. On a camping trip, for example, campers wouldn't dream of charging each other to use a soccer ball or for fish that they happened to catch. Campers do not give merely to get, but relate to each other in a spirit of equality and community. Would such socialist norms be desirable across society as a whole? Why not? Whole societies may differ from camping trips, but it is still attractive when people treat each other with the equal regard that such trips exhibit. But, however desirable it may be, many claim that socialism is impossible. Cohen writes that the biggest obstacle to socialism isn't, as often argued, intractable human selfishness--it's rather the lack of obvious means to harness the human generosity that is there. Lacking those means, we rely on the market. But there are many ways of confining the sway of the market: there are desirable changes that can move us toward a socialist society in which, to quote Albert Einstein, humanity has "overcome and advanced beyond the predatory stage of human development."
Why Not Socialism - Against G.A. Cohen’s defence of socialism’s feasibility and desirability
Heaven on Earth is a story filled with character and event while at the same time giving us an epic chronicle of a movement that tried to turn the world upside down—and for a time succeeded.
In this text, Roemer proposes a new future of socialism based on a redefinition of market socialism.
A few months before the 2010 midterms, Newt Gingrich described the socialist infiltration of American government and media as “even more disturbing than the threats from foreign terrorists.” John Nichols offers an unapologetic retort to ...
Schafer found that in Wisconsin German Catholics and the Irish were solidly opposed to Lincoln; a few German Lutherans and Forty-eighters did vote for Lincoln, but by no means all. More recent research by Kleppner supports these ...
Explores the failure of the socialist movement in the United States using comparisons between the United States and other industrialized nations to explain why American values, political structure, union divisions, and other key factors ...
In The Case Against Socialism, Rand Paul outlines the history of socialism, from Stalin’s gulags to the current famine in Venezuela. He tackles common misconceptions about the “utopia” of socialist Europe.
All of them have ended in varying degrees of failure. But, according to socialism’s adherents, that is only because none of these experiments were “real socialism”. This book documents the history of this, by now, standard response.
As Kevin Williamson explains in this myth-busting book, socialism never works because it can't work. It assumes the authorities have all-knowing planning abilities that human beings don't possess--and can't possess.
The final book by the noted British Marxist and sociologist, father of British Labour Party politicians, David and Ed Miliband.