A Short Intellectual Biography of G.A. Cohen

By a longtime Oxford colleague, Michael Rosen (now at Harvard), presented at a recent memorial conference at Columbia University.  It's a good read, and illuminating also for its capsule history of Marxist thought.  Rosen makes a particularly useful point, I thought, about Cohen's extreme (and not very worked out) moral realism, one of many ways in which Cohen was a most unMarxian Marxist, and which probably explains his highly moralized version of Marxism in his later work (which I take as my target in this paper, from The Future for Philosophy volume [OUP, 2004]).