470
PAR.TISAN REVIEW
which he gives special attention is Albert Einstein. But the key to Co–
hen's vision of the place of the Jew in American civilization is contained
in his essay first published in
The New Republic
in 1919, immediately after
the First World War. He does not deny the "tribal" aspects of Zionism.
Indeed, he gives it a painfully accurate rendering. Cohen concludes,
however, by noting that "Zionism has rendered the supreme service of
increasing men's self-respect, and has helped men to realize that they must
be ready
to
give of their own past experience as well as to accept. For
this, the American ideal of civil and political liberty still provides a fair
field."
This quintessential search for a level playing field links Cohen's faith
in a liberal Judaism with his commitment to law and justice as such. But
his work in legal philosophy remains pivotal to this day. His book
LAw
alld Social Order
is anticipated in the essay, "Constitutional and Natural
Rights in 1789 and Since." Here he separates himself from the conserva–
tive notion that the courts should limit themselves to decision-making in
terms of the literal words of the Constitution. For Cohen, this "fiction"
only relieves the law of taking responsibility for critical decisions and
serves to justify the terrible disparity between power and responsibility.
It
is the empirical foundations of decision-making that determine the inter–
pretation of law. And beyond that, anticipating the social consequences
of decision-making distinguishes totalitarianism from liberalism.
Cohen's powerful sense of the law as being essentially
active
may weU
have been fueled by his no less deep sense of injustice. Although he was a
graduate of the City College of New York, that revered institution with
which he maintained a lifelong love affair - never mind association - and
a graduate from the philosophy department at Harvard University in
1906, he was hired to work in the mathematics department at City
College. Only six years later, in 1912, was he allowed to enter the
philosophy department. Yet this involuntary exile was not an
unmitigated disaster, since the years of association with mathematicians
gave Cohen a feeling for logic and scientific method that often escaped
others who had uncritically embraced pragmatic philosophy.
To be sure, Cohen came
to
scorn those who had a "popular sci–
ence" image of actual processes involved in experimentation and research.
He may be declared by
The Columbia Ellcyclopedia
to be "one of the
most important American philosophers since William James," but he was
in fact far more beholden to Charles Sanders Peirce's "realism" than to
either Jamesian or Deweyian varieties of pragmatism. Throughout his life,
in almost Kantian fashion, he identified with science as an end in itself, or
at least with a concern to establish all possible causal linkages, great and
small. Neither Peirce nor Cohen believed for a moment "that action was
