Abstract
The present contribution questions Gerald A. Cohen’s intellectual journey, both directed to emancipation and marked by theoretical breaks. While Nicolas Vrousalis’ book, The Political Philosophy of G. A. Cohen. Back to Socialist Basics (Bloomsbury, 2015) aims to restore, in a complete and consistent manner, Cohen’s intellectual construction around an emancipatory perspective, brightly lays out the decisive stages in the intellectual evolution of Cohen, it seems to us that he puts too little emphasis on the breaks in his thought. We believe that if its unity is due both to his method and to his assigned objective, it significantly changed, in such a way that it might seem that some of the claims he ever defended are mutually inconsistent, at least to some extent. Vrousalis is not able to fully grasp this, since he grants not much importance to the transitional phases in the development of Cohen’s thought. This contribution first introduces Vrousalis’ book, and then proposes a complementary approach, which might be an alternative to Vrousalis’.