Seven chapters of this book were once published as articles: they reappear here in (sometimes extensively) altered form. Four chapters, and the Introduction, are new. But the whole book represents a single intellectual journey. It displays the development of my response to the challenge posed to my once dogmatic socialist convictions by libertarian political philosophy.

In this book G. A. Cohen examines the libertarian principle of self-ownership,which says that each person belongs to himself and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else. This principle is used to defend capitalist inequality, which is said to reflect each person's freedom to do as he wishes with himself.

The author argues that self-ownership cannot 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. He goes on to show that the standard Marxist condemnation of exploitation implies an endorsement of self-ownership, since, in the Marxist conception, the employer steals from the worker what should belong to her, because she produced it. Thereby a deeply inegali-tarian notion has penetrated what is in aspiration an egalitarian theory. Purging that notion from socialist thought, he argues, enables construction of a more consistent egalitarianism.

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction: history, ethics and Marxism

1 Robert Nozick and Wilt Chamberlain: how patterns preserve liberty

2 Justice, freedom, and market transactions

3 Self-ownership, world-ownership, and equality

4 Are freedom and equality compatible？

5 Self-ownership, communism, and equality: against the Marxist technological fix

6 Marxism and contemporary political philosophy,or: why Nozick exercises some Marxists more than he does any egalitarian liberals

7 Marx and Locke on land and labour

8 Exploitation in Marx: what makes it unjust？

9 Self-ownership: delineating the concept

10 Self-ownership: assessing the thesis

11 The future of a disillusion

Bibliography

Index of names

Subject index