Since G. A. Cohen’s death in 2009, Princeton University Press has issued three posthumous collections, of which this is the third. The book comes in three parts. The first, which fills up the first two-thirds of the volume, consists of seven chapters presenting lectures that discuss Plato (with some coverage of both the Sophists and Aristotle), Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. These were never given all together as a single lecture course; rather, the material has been drawn from a number of courses Cohen gave over the course of his teaching career as a lecturer at University College London, as the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford, and as a visitor at McGill. (I was fortunate enough to hear the lectures on Hobbes, Locke, and Hume when I was an undergraduate in Oxford 20 years ago.)

Part II consists of around 80 pages of previously uncollected academic papers. There are two 1968 articles on Marx, one of which, “The Workers and the Word,” indicates that Cohen’s interest in examining tu quoque arguments was lifelong (see also, “Casting the First Stone?” in Finding Oneself in the Other [2012]). There are then three critical discussions of the ideas of other scholars. The first of these is the 1982 “Reply to [Jon] Elster on ‘Marxism, Functionalism, and Game Theory,’” which is one of the most significant pieces Cohen wrote as a follow-up to his landmark study, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978). The second is a review of Allen W. Wood’s 1981 book Karl Marx, which is a significant text in the 1980s debate over whether Marx was committed to the view that capitalism was unjust or not; and there is also a commentary on Christine M. Korsgaard’s 1992 Tanner Lectures (reprinted from her 1996 book, The Sources of Normativity). Part III reprints the editor Jonathan Wolff’s affectionate memoir of Cohen that was written for the British Academy.

Although each part is quite different, and the material presented in Parts I and II ranges across four decades (1963–2004), it all sits between the same covers surprisingly well. The commentary on Korsgaard, for example, dovetails nicely with parts of the argument of the lecture on Hobbes. There are no lectures on Marx, but Marx-ish concerns are never terribly far away throughout. And Wolff’s preface and his intellectual biography both provide some context for the volume’s various components and tell a story that helps to tie them all together. In what follows, I concentrate on the lectures, since these are what have not been published previously, and are what give the volume its chief purpose, as well as its title.

In recent years, especially in light of his criticism of the Rawlsian enterprise expressed, above all, in the last substantial book that he published during his lifetime, Rescuing Justice and Equality (2008), Cohen was often described as a kind of Platonist. Whether or not that label was a fair one, the lectures on Greek philosophy make it clear just how much he disliked Plato. Aristotle might have been a “conservative,” but Plato was a “reactionary” (p. 56), and Cohen’s approach was to interpret Plato’s political thought as built around fashioning a reply to the Sophists’ sharp separation of nature (phusis) and convention (nomos), which was threatening insofar as it was foundational for radical social criticism (p. 1).

The chapter on Hobbes offers a striking discussion of whether the good that Hobbesian men (and Cohen insists that they are men) seek includes “underivative other-regarding elements” (p. 67), as well as game-theoretic elucidations of his state of nature (p. 71ff), and a lucid presentation of four different strands of argument that he offers concerning political obligation, which Cohen labels “consequentialist,” “contractarian,” “consent,” and “authorization” approaches (p. 87). A preoccupation with and opposition to Robert Nozick’s political theory is palpable in the lecture on Locke, which concentrates on his arguments about the foundations of private property and political obligation, and the discussions here form a useful supplement to the arguments of Cohen’s 1995 book on Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality. The chapter on Hume focuses narrowly on his criticism of Locke’s contract theory, chiefly as articulated in his 1741 essay, “Of the Original Contract.” The discussion of Kant examines his ethical theory, identifying and discussing twelve separate distinctions on which the validity of the argument in The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is held to depend (p. 153). The treatment of Hegel offers a helpful account of the famous master—slave dialectic from The Phenomenology of Spirit. After 200 pages of often quite detailed argument, the lectures on Nietzsche, which date back to 1965 and 1970, offer an engaging and some might think surprisingly sympathetic introduction to some of the major themes from the Nietzschean criticism of morality.

Cohen was not primarily a historian of political thought, of course, but rather a remarkably careful, incisive, and probing reader of philosophical texts. As he acknowledged, the lectures “don’t refer at all to recent scholarly literature on their subjects” (p. vii), but he was sufficiently familiar with enough of the academic commentary to generate valuable critical encounters, whether disagreeing with Leo Strauss’s interpretation of Hobbes (p. 80) or James Tully’s of Locke (p. 105). The microscopic gaze is what is impressive here. Although Cohen is unsurpassed at finding places where his subjects’ arguments fail, he is not the kind of scholar to ask the follow-up questions about, for example, why Hobbes might have chosen to pepper Leviathan with incomplete arguments that pull in different directions concerning the foundation of political obligation, or what it tells us about Hume’s philosophy insofar as he seems to have no interest in engaging with Locke’s fundamental premise of self-ownership when he comments on his arguments. And when Cohen takes a broader historical view, his judgments are not always persuasive, whether it is his idea that Hobbes’s concerns with “competition” and “diffidence” reflect a “bourgeois outlook,” whereas his interest in “glory” stemmed from a more “aristocratic” view, and that he fails to “disentangle” his various stories during an “age of transition” (p. 87), or the opinion he expresses about how “the difference between Hegel and the empiricists” is that Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Adam Smith focus too much on “material” needs and ignore “our needs for recognition” (p. 199). But this is to pick at nits.

These lectures are closely argued, brilliantly clever, unfailingly lucid, extremely interesting, and, on occasion, very funny. It is excellent to have them more broadly available than heretofore.