Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2009
Summary
The essays collected here were written between 1981 and 1992. They are organized into four parts, which follow a roughly, but not exactly, chronological order. (The most recently written essays are numbers 8 and 15.) The four parts also display the intellectual development of an author who began thinking about egalitarianism from a Marxian viewpoint and whose tools were those of a neoclassical economist. Some personal details of that development may help the reader discern a thread through these essays that is not, perhaps, readily apparent.
In 1979–80, while writing what was to become a book in Marxian economics (A General Theory of Exploitation and Class [Harvard University Press, 1982], hereafter referred to as GTEC), I came to realize that the political philosophy motivating the Marxian concept of exploitation was unclear. At the time I was reading G. A. Cohen's magisterial Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford University Press, 1978), my first introduction to analytical philosophy. In my book and a previous one (Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory [Cambridge University Press, 1981]), I had examined Marx's economics from a modern and rigorous viewpoint; Cohen's example showed me that it was possible and important to apply the same standards to Marx's philosophy. Essay 1 summarizes my version of exploitation theory as I had developed it in GTEC.
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- Information
- Egalitarian PerspectivesEssays in Philosophical Economics, pp. 1 - 10Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994