G.A. (“Jerry”) Cohen (1941–2009) was a Canadian philosopher and the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford from 1985–2008. Cohen was born into a Communist Jewish family in Montreal, where his “upbringing was as intensely political as it was antireligious” (Cohen 2000, 22). He received his BA from McGill University in Politics and Philosophy in 1961, and then his BPhil in philosophy at Oxford, where he studied with Gilbert Ryle. Cohen’s irst book, published in 1978, was Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. This became a central work among the so-called “Analytical Marxists” who, in the 1980s, sought to apply the tools of analytic philosophy to critically reconstruct the insights and approaches of Karl Marx. While there was – and is – a debate concerning whether Marx’s theory implicitly relies on normative principles of justice or rejects such moralizing, in the introduction to a collection of his essays published in 1995, Cohen writes that he never had any doubt: “I did not think that Marxists could be indifferent to justice. On the contrary: I was certain that every committed Marxist was exercised by the injustice of capitalist exploitation, and that Marxists who affected unconcern about justice, from Karl Marx down, were kidding themselves” (Cohen 1995, 2–3).