Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality

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by G. A. Cohen

Cambridge University Press

Due/Published January 1995, 287 pages, paper

ISBN 0521477514

Defenders of capitalism claim that its inequality is the necessary price of the freedom that it guarantees. In that defense of capitalist inequality, freedom is self-ownership, the right of each person to do as he wishes with himself. The author shows that self-ownership fails to deliver the freedom it promises to secure. He thereby undermines the idea that lovers of freedom should embrace capitalism and the inequality that comes with it. In the final chapter he reaffirms the moral superiority of socialism, against the background of the disastrous Soviet experiment.

Series: Studies in Marxism and Social Theory