G. A. Cohen

G. A. Cohen was a Canadian political philosopher who combined Marxist political economy with analytic rigor, critiquing both Nozick's libertarianism and Rawls's difference principle.

Cohen reconstructed historical materialism using analytic tools, defended Marx's theory of history as technological determinism, and later argued that the difference principle is undermined by a just society's reliance on talented people choosing to earn more for incentive reasons — a motivation incompatible with genuine egalitarian ethos.