G. A. (Jerry) Cohen died of a stroke early on the morning of August 5. Poignantly, an advance copy of his newest publication, the pocketbook Why Not Socialism?, reached his office only a few hours later. Though he never saw it finished, he’d been delighted with its progress and especially with its cover, which shows the red rose of socialism rising up from the “Y” of the title’s “WHY.” It’s a fittingly positive image for an optimistic, or at least sunnily determined, work. Despite the very real obstacles in socialism’s way, Cohen writes: “I do not think the right conclusion is to give up.” It’s also a suitably uplifting image for Cohen himself.

Cohen was born in Montreal in 1941 to Jewish parents who worked in the rag trade, and was raised and initially educated in a staunchly communist environment. He always held fast to the egalitarian ideals of his childhood. Over his long academic career, mainly at University College London and Oxford, he became one of the world’s leading philosophical explorers and exponents of socialist ideas. Along with Jon Elster, he pioneered the application of analytical (he called them “no-bullshit”) methods to Marxism. And he produced penetrating analyses of the concepts of equality and justice that underlie socialism, and what they require of us if we care about them. With many articles and five books—most notably Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence and 2008’s Rescuing Justice and Equality—he became a giant of political philosophy, a thinker to stand alongside Rawls, Nozick, and Dworkin, with whose views he deeply and publicly disagreed.

He never wavered in his core convictions, but he did at least slow down in his academic life. In his final year, his only year of retirement, he said that he had done almost all that he wished to do, that he had few new ideas to work on and looked forward to a new phase of life, harvesting. At his valedictory lecture, he said that the line from Tennyson that he recited to himself almost weekly—“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”—lately sounded better to him rewritten as: “To strive, to seek, to find, and then to yield.”

Obituaries (links below) make his place in the canon of political philosophy clear. They also make plain what an extraordinary man he was, crackling not just with intelligence, but a dazzling, almost superhuman wit that, mischievous as it could be, was cotton-padded by his exceptional personal warmth. He was a professional philosopher, but he could have been a professional comic, and was renowned for his regular stand-up routines in Oxford and for the entertainment that peppered his lectures. Two links below convey his combination of brilliance and zaniness (one is hard to hear, but it’s worth persevering, especially for his 10-minute imitation of a lecture by Isaiah Berlin).

He published two books with Princeton, Karl Marx’s Theory of History and Why Not Socialism? We’re lucky to have them on the lists. Those of us who worked with him are even luckier to have known him.

Obituaries:
The Times
The Guardian
The Independent
The Montreal Gazette
Crooked Timber
Crooked Timber

Jerry Cohen in action:
Jerry Cohen’s closing comments at a conference held earlier this year–Rescuing Justice and Equality: Celebrating the Career of G.A. Cohen
Jerry Cohen’s retirement speech in 2008

Additional links of interest:
Simon Tormey interviews Jerry Cohen for Contemporary Political Theory
Nicholas Vrousalis offers a “a rough summary of Jerry Cohen’s intellectual voyage”

(9/2/09 - we corrected the number of books in the piece above per the comment below)

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Brazilian edition

Brazilian Portguese

Chinese edition

Dutch edition

Dutch edition

Finnish edition

French edition

German edition

German edition

Greek edition

On Bullshit has become an instant classic and we’ve been fortunate enough to spread the fertilizer around the globe. In this article from Foreword Magazine, press director Peter Dougherty considers the various titles and covers the international editions of the book have carried.

According to my colleague Ben Tate, PUP’s Director of Subsidiary Rights and Translations Editor, many of the foreign editions have retained the English term, “bullshit,” either as their title or in their title of their respective editions. “Among the…editions which conveyed the book’s title in the local language, only the Italian comes closest to a straightforward translation, as ’stronzate’ means bullshit in the literal sense of cow excrement, but also in the sense which Frankfurt is considering. The rest of those publishers who sought to localize the title either had to approximate the expression using several words or had to settle for something close but inexact, such as the Brazilian Portuguese edition, Sobre falar Merda (On talking Shit) or the French edition, De l’art de dire des conneries (On the Art of Saying Crap) . Indeed, that is the reason so many of the publishers left the word untranslated. It’s a unique word with a specific history, and its meaning as addressed by Frankfurt is underpinned by the crassness and vulgarity of its literal meaning. It’s a special word.”

And while many of the international editions have emulated PUP’s sober, monochromatic cover, some of our foreign co-publishers bravely chose to go the graphic route, in the process rendering some pretty imaginative cover art. The Dutch edition is a shocking pink, the Portuguese edition sports stripes. Truly amazing is the Japanese edition which features anatomical images.

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Taiwanese edition

Swedish edition

Spanish edition

Russian edition

Portuguese edition

Norwegian edition

Japanese edition

Italian edition

Indian edition

Hebrew edition

Princeton University Press’s esteemed author and professor Perez Zagorin has passed away following complications following open-heart surgery.  He was 88.   You can read his obituary in the Washington Post.  His Princeton books include the highly-regarded FRANCIS BACON, the Los Angeles TImes Book Review’s Twenty Best Books of 2003 HOW THE IDEA OF RELIGIOUS TOLERATION CAME TO THE WEST, the well-reviewed THUCYDIDES: An Introduction for the Common Reader, and the forthcoming intellectually-powerful HOBBES AND THE LAW OF NATURE (February 2010).

We were so pleased to find out last week that our author Bernard d’Espagnat has been awarded the prestigious 2009 Templeton Prize, billed as the world’s largest annual award to an individual, for his work affirming the spiritual dimension of life.

The Templeton Foundation announced the $1.42 million prize at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris on Monday. You can read an article about the news on Reuters. 

Princeton University Press had the pleasure of publishing his book ON PHYSICS AND PHILOSOPHY in the Fall of 2006.  We offer our congratulations to him on this tremendous honor.  Read more about the prize here.

From the NY Times:

WHEN the documentary filmmaker Astra Taylor speaks of a cinema of ideas, she means it more literally than most. Her first film, “Zizek!” (2005) accompanied the Slovene philosopher Slavoj Zizek on a lecture tour. Her second, “Examined Life,” opening Wednesday at the IFC Center, recruits a wide array of thinkers and theorists to muse out loud about the role of philosophy in our lives, playing off the Socratic observation that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

Examined Life is composed of interviews with a virtual who’s who of philosophers including several PUP authors–Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cornel West, and Martha Nussbaum.

Join Director Astra Taylor and Kwame Anthony Appiah for a special screening of the movie tonight at the IFC Center. Show times are 7:35 and 9:45. Contact the IFC Center for tickets and more information.

The American Philosophical Association held the  annual meeting of its Eastern Division in Philadelphia last week, as per long-standing custom, during the days between Christmas and New Year (Dec. 27^th - 30^th). As usual, what precisely philosophers do at this meeting proved to be fodder for a journalistic round-up of the conference’s events as Carlin Romano does here in a piece for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Some things never change it seems. In a previously unpublished essay included in PUP’s just released 30^th anniversary edition of his seminal work Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty, who died last year, used the occasion of the journalistic coverage of the annual meeting as a launching point for his musings on what it is philosophers do and should think of themselves as doing.