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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
- Sprache: Englisch
Amartya Sen is one of the world's best-known voices for the poor, the destitute and the downtrodden and an inspiration for policy makers and activists across the globe. He has also contributed almost without peer to the study of economics, philosophy and politics, transforming social choice theory, development economics, ethics, political philosophy and Indian political economy, to list but a few. This book offers a much-needed introduction to Amartya Sen's extraordinary variety of ideas. Lawrence Hamilton provides an excellent, accessible guide to the full range of Sen's writings, contextualizing his ideas and summarizing the associated debates. In elegant prose, Hamilton reconstructs Sen's critiques of the major philosophies of his time, assesses his now famous concern for capabilities as an alternative for thinking about poverty, inequality, gender discrimination, development, democracy and justice, and unearths some overlooked gems. Throughout, these major theoretical and philosophical achievements are subjected to rigorous scrutiny. Amartya Sen is a major work on one of the most influential economists and philosophers of the last couple of centuries. It will be invaluable to students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences and an excellent guide for policy makers, legislators and global activists.
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Seitenzahl: 428
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Preface
Acknowledgements
Key Texts
Introduction
Notes
1
:
Choice
Social choice
Deprivation
Conclusion
Notes
2
:
Capability
Capabilities
Objectivity
Incompleteness
Conclusion
Notes
3
:
Freedom
Literature
Rationality
Power
Conclusion
Notes
4
:
Justice
Distribution
Injustice
Comparison
Impartiality
Conclusion
5
:
Democracy
Public reason
Human rights
Global imperatives?
Conclusion
Conclusion
References
Further Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Key Contemporary Thinkers Series
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Heidegger
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Reidar Andreas Due,
Deleuze
Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook,
Simone de Beauvoir
Nigel Gibson,
Fanon
Graeme Gilloch,
Siegfried Kracauer
Lawrence Hamilton,
Amartya Sen
Christina Howells,
Derrida
Simon Jarvis,
Adorno
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Irigaray
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Žižek
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Terry Eagleton
James Williams,
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Christopher Zurn,
Axel Honneth
Amartya Sen
Lawrence Hamilton
polity
Copyright © Lawrence Hamilton 2019
The right of Lawrence Hamilton to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2019 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1984-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1985-9(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hamilton, Lawrence, 1972- author.
Title: Amartya Sen / Lawrence Hamilton.
Description: Medford, MA : Polity, 2019. | Series: Key contemporary thinkers | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018040025 (print) | LCCN 2018052297 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509519880 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509519842 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509519859 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Sen, Amartya, 1933- | Economists–India. | Welfare economics. | Social justice. | Economics–Moral and ethical aspects.
Classification: LCC HB126.I43 (ebook) | LCC HB126.I43 .S467 2019 (print) | DDC 330.15/56–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018040025
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In memoriam John Hamilton
Preface
There is something neatly apt about finishing a book on Amartya Sen on the day the world celebrates Labour Day or International Workers Day (truth be told, on the United Kingdom's watered-down ‘May Day’ version) and a couple of days after Karl Marx's birthday (Marx at 200). Marx is much more of a forebear for Sen's ideas than many admit – including Sen himself; and Marx, Sen and Labour Day all celebrate the powers and solidarity of workers the world over. A great day to end a period of great labour, though not easy, as it is a beautiful spring day out there – the warmest May Day on record – and I am stuck inside. Moreover, today is supposed to be about leisure, something that has inspired Marx and Sen's thinking though, of course, the sheer volume of their writings attests, in all likelihood, to very little leisure time.
It has been a privilege to write this book. It has also been really hard work. This is the case for two main reasons, the one positive and the other negative. The positive reason is, of course, that trying to distil the main ideas of someone who has published so many groundbreaking works in such varied fields is quite a task. I hope I have done some justice to the work of Amartya Sen's prolific and original contributions to so many areas of inquiry into the human condition. The negative reason is that, as Sen himself notes when discussing the work of John Rawls, ‘every summary is ultimately an act of barbarism’ (IJ: 53). I hope that on the scale of literary barbaric acts this one is not too bad.
At first glance, the informed reader may ask herself how a book on Sen does not include a chapter on ‘development’ or ‘famines’ or ‘gender’. The easy answer would be to say that they are covered throughout, as dictated by Sen's own way of dealing with them in relation to the subjects covered by the book's chapters, which, although true, sounds a little like a cop out. The more correct answer is that I cover all of these topics at some length in the main introduction and in the first chapter; though, given Sen's interdisciplinary approach, the answer that sounds like a cop out is, in fact, closest to the truth. As will become obvious, all three of these topics are constant areas of concern and inspiration for Sen's work, and so they also make appearances throughout the rest of the book.
As regards ‘development’ in particular, I take it to be so central to understanding Sen's ideas as a whole – including the later ideas on justice and democracy – that it constitutes a helpful mechanism of ‘entry’ into the colossus of his corpus, which is why a large part of the substance of the introduction covers Sen's approach to development. As I argue there, development (and its deprivations) is what animates most of Sen's work. The book is thereafter structured around five main themes: choice, capability, freedom, justice and democracy. These are the titles of the substantive chapters. I have chosen this structure for both intellectual historical and pedagogic reasons. As regards the former, if rather loosely, these themes map the development of his thought over time. As regards the latter, the way in which I have laid out the chapters introduces the reader to the extraordinary breadth and depth of Sen's work and allows me to highlight two things: his most important ideas and a few possible lines of criticism. In other words, the chapters build on one another, so it does make sense to read them in the order they appear. However, they are also completely self-contained, so a reader with a particular interest could easily and productively dip in and out of chapters as required. Needless to say, given their subjects, they also cover some of the most important topics in economics, philosophy and politics.
So, in very brief outline, in chapter 1, I focus on choice, how Sen engaged with and transformed social choice theory and critiqued many of the main assumptions in welfare economics, including ‘utility’, ‘revealed preference’, ‘rationality’, ‘poverty’, ‘inequality’ and ‘welfare’. I also discuss his innovative work on famines under the general rubric of deprivation. In chapter 2, I dissect the conceptual schema for which Sen is now most famous: his ‘concern for capabilities’, as he now likes to put it (Meeks 2017, 2018). I suggest that, taken together, ‘functionings’ and ‘capabilities’, as Sen conceives of them, constitute a marked conceptual improvement for assessing well-being, the quality of life and standards of living. This is particularly true as compared to the main contending rivals over the last century: the notion of ‘utility’ central to welfarism and utilitarianism, the concept of ‘primary goods’ propounded by John Rawls and the idea of ‘resources’ submitted by Ronald Dworkin. The important focus on agency within Sen's capability approach, for a number of reasons, leads felicitously into a discussion in chapter 3 of his account of freedom and the role it plays in his ideas. I position it vis-à-vis the broad spectrum of competing theories of freedom, and suggest that it provides the basis for a unique, fourth conception of freedom as power. This, in turn, given the centrality of freedom in his account of justice, makes for a smooth transition, in chapter 4, to his work on justice. Again here, as Sen himself does, I compare his view of justice, aimed at resolving instances of injustice rather than providing a blueprint for an institutionally ideal society, to various other accounts, particularly that of John Rawls, but also a wide variety of western and non-western views. I submit that, while his ‘idea of justice’ never escapes the confines of the North Atlantic analytical philosophical tendency to view justice in the artificially reduced form of ‘distributive justice’, it marks an important departure. Nevertheless, in a similar way to his treatment of the topic of the fifth chapter – democracy – we are left wondering whether impartiality, public reason and deliberation can achieve as much in the real world of politics and economics as Sen supposes.
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to thank Amartya Sen for carefully and brilliantly pushing every boundary he has come across and for putting up with my stumbling early criticisms as a graduate student more than twenty years ago. He has grace. I have gratitude.
I am also indebted to a number of teachers, colleagues, friends and students for reading and commenting on parts or all of versions of this book and discussing some or all of the topics covered in this book. These include Thomas Aubrey, Candice Bailey, Jude Browne, John Dunn, Ze’ev Emmerich, James Furner, Raymond Geuss, Sophie Harbour, Tim Karayiannides, Duncan Kelly, Stephen Louw, Mairéad McAuley, Gay Meeks, David Moore, Moshibudi Motimele, Ayesha Omar, Laurence Piper, Ramakwe Nicholus Pule, Ian Shapiro, Nicola Viegi and three very helpful anonymous reviewers sourced by Polity. Everyone I have worked with at Polity has been excellent and efficient; together, they are a model of the patient, informed and polite editorial team. However, George Owers deserves special mention. He has been an absolute pleasure to work with: he approached me with this idea, cajoled me at all the right times, allowed me to miss a few deadlines, and yet stuck firm when necessary. He read the entire manuscript really carefully, returning his marked-up version with so many helpful insights it was as if I had had four academic readers. He is a member of a small and dying breed of editors that still read every word you produce. Polity should cherish him, as I am sure they do. I am also indebted to audiences in Accra, Cambridge, Cape Town, Johannesburg, London, São Paulo and Tokyo, who have heard me talk about topics covered in this book and offered help and criticism, not all of which I have been able properly to respond to, but all of which have made me think harder. The usual disclaimer applies.
Many thanks, too, to my colleagues in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and the Department of Political and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Cambridge, for allowing me the space to get on with this project and for constant inspiration. I am also extremely grateful to Wits, Cambridge, Clare Hall College, Cambridge, the South African National Research Foundation, the Newton Fund and the British Academy for their institutional and financial support. The last three in this list can also be credited for providing me the research space and financial support that allowed me to take on and complete a project of this kind. It comes in the form of the SARChI/Newton Research Chair in Political Theory that I hold and they fund (grant number 103137). Without it, I would not have had the time and opportunity to offer back to the academic community (and beyond) something I hope will be of use. Amartya Sen's ideas are of enormous importance across the globe, but many of them are also challenging to comprehend. If I have enabled the process of their understanding, significance and application – via elucidation and constructive criticism – this little book has been worthwhile. We are all therefore also indebted to Robin Drennan, Wits's Research Manager, and his team for their managerial skill, patience and no-nonsense attitude in the complicated process of implementing this Bilateral Chair I hold; no easy job! I have also been very fortunate, both before and during the early days of my new Chair, to have been blessed by a number of exceptional departmental and Chair administrators and research assistants. Many thanks Suzy Adcock, Candice Bailey, Alexandra Barry, Catherine Cebindevu, Thoko Jean Chilenga, Rae Israel, Dan Jones, Rita Kruger, Moshibudi Motimele, Thandeka Ndebele, Gillian Renshaw, Ricardo de Sao Joao and Cerys Thomas for everything you have done to keep my work environments (and me) running smoothly.
The range of researchers and graduate students that constitute my Chair, both at Wits and Cambridge, is like a family to me, but it is my real family that I must thank the most. Mairéad heard more about Amartya Sen than she may care to think about and also read a lot of what I tried to write about him with great patience and insight. Lorcan, Cormac and Lanark are too young to fully comprehend why a ‘book’ could keep their father so busy for such a long time, but they are at least happy to hear it is finished. Sadly, my father passed away at the beginning of this project, so he is gone forever, something I and my kids cannot quite comprehend. I dedicate this book to him.
Finally, I would like to thank Government and Opposition for allowing me to reuse some material from my article, ‘A Theory of True Interests in the Work of Amartya Sen’, Government and Opposition 34(4) (1999). Parts of the middle of chapter 2 and a small section of the main conclusion are loosely based on this article. Parts of the book's main conclusion also originate in two other articles of mine: ‘Justice and Real Politics: Freedom, Needs and Representation’, in C. Boisen and M. C. Murray (eds), Distributive Justice Debates in Political and Social Thought: Finding a Fair Share (London: Routledge, 2016); and ‘Amilcar Cabral and Amartya Sen: Capability, Freedom and Resistance’ (forthcoming).
Key Texts
Introduction
Amartya Kumar Sen is one of the world's leading contemporary public intellectuals. He is probably the world's best-known economic, social and political theorist since the Second World War. Although his primary academic recognition has been in economics, for which he was awarded the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize, he has also made significant contributions to a myriad of topics within philosophy, social theory and politics. His work on social choice theory is seminal, his capabilities approach changed the way we think about human well-being and the quality of life, and his contributions on freedom, agency, the standard of living, justice and democracy shake to the very foundations many of the theoretical edifices we have constructed around how best to conceive of our lives together.
The sheer volume of his published work is something to behold. He has published more than two dozen books and countless academic articles, so many that most of his 30-page curriculum vitae is made up of a list of his publications. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages. However, it is once you get beyond this edifice that you realize that the quantity of output is eclipsed by its quality. The consistent excellence and polite erudition of his contributions are inspirational. Most of his published work is not just good. It is groundbreaking. Very few, alive or dead, have produced so much of such significance.
Sen is an economist by formal training, but he is also one of the world's leading social, moral, legal and political philosophers. Besides his fame for discipline-defining contributions to social choice theory, welfare economics, development and our understanding of famines, among others, he is less recognized for also contributing to and, in some cases, completely transforming the way we think about, for example, public health and medicine, population and the environment, gender and feminist economics, education, and Indian economics, society, culture and politics. The list goes on. A mere list, though, would take away from a very important component of his work: always with elegant charm and grace, he has transcended the standard categories, gently chiding those who have felt too comfortable in the received opinions and traditions of their disciplines.
In other words, while Sen's many contributions to human understanding are rooted in economics, they are far from confined to it. This is the first goal of this short book: to introduce the reader to the full breadth of Sen's work in philosophy, economics and politics. The second objective is, simultaneously, to be selective, that is, to focus in on his most important ideas and their development. In other words, as a mere introduction to Sen's ideas, this little book cannot hope to cover the entirety of his massive corpus, even in introductory outline. If the reader feels short-changed, I can but beg indulgence. The final aim of this book is to assess the legacy of his thought, outline the debates surrounding his work and propose a novel critique of his political theory.
Sen is justly famous for his 1998 Nobel Prize in economics, though he is also the recipient of many other global awards (Sen 2015: 276; and more since). This highest of accolades, the Nobel Prize, was awarded for his pioneering work in social choice theory, welfare economics, poverty indexes and his empirical studies of famine. Yet his tendency not to be bound by traditional academic boundaries is often not celebrated as much as it might be. Its importance is manifest in two main ways, which also reflect two of his most breathtakingly courageous academic moves. First, despite his training in the mainstream of strait-laced post-Second World War economics, in exemplary fashion he grasped the opportunities provided to him and schooled himself in the main currents of contemporary philosophy. This gave him a much broader and more capacious view of the assumptions of the ‘dismal science’ of economics, the main shibboleths of which would be his targets for years to come. In other words, in line with two of his greatest forebears and two of the political economists upon whom he draws most, Adam Smith and Karl Marx, he has done all he can to understand the main problems and issues in economics from the perspective of a broader ethical concern: improving the quality of life of all. Second, especially in his work on famines, but also right across his many contributions in other areas, such as development, freedom, justice and democracy, Sen has always immersed his reader in his deep and broad knowledge of theory, while never tiring of supporting his claims and arguments with relevant empirical facts. Needless to say, the Nobel Committee was well aware of both of these points: ‘Amartya Sen has made a number of noteworthy contributions to central fields of economic science and opened up new fields of study for subsequent generations of researchers. By combining tools from economics and philosophy, he has restored an ethical dimension to the discussion of vital economic problems’ (Nobel 1998).
While it would be fair to suggest that Sen is first and foremost a man of letters (and numbers), he has also been involved in a number of practical projects that have changed the way the world thinks about and carries out a number of important and pressing matters, particularly as regards development. In fact, it is his work for and criticisms of large international bodies such as the United Nations (UN) and the World Bank (the Bank), and many others besides, that has broadened his appeal and fame, along with his associated practical contributions to, for example, global attempts to eradicate poverty and reduce inequality. These interventions are the fruits of a number of collaborative academic and political interventions. These include theoretical and applied writings on poverty, inequality, famine and development; a central role in the creation of the UN's Human Development Index (HDI) and his role, alongside the founding role of Mahbub ul Haq, in the birth and nurturing of the UNDP's Human Development Reports (Sen 2000); the foundation of the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), which recently celebrated 30 years of research excellence; and his various (sometimes controversial) roles in a number of higher education institutions in India. These and many other practical achievements have helped reconfigure how most international development practitioners go about their craft.
Not least of all these practical achievements has been the practical effects of his work on, and his willingness to engage with, the Bank. Thanks to Sen, part of what I describe below as having characterized the top-down failed development projects of the Bank for many decades is now no longer true of how it proceeds. While not exactly fully embracing all his recommendations, it has at least started to focus more on education and various other components of how best to enhance the quality of life of individuals in the developing world. At long last, the Bank has realized that while this shift in focus from growth to measures of individual quality of life may not have immediate, quantifiable returns, as compared to the way that, say, building a factory produces a quantifiable return, it is possible to see substantial returns, especially if you change your evaluative profiles and weightings to make them look a little more like what Sen proposes (cf. Chang 2003; Williams 2014).
Sen has provided new ways of conceiving of development, as well as new tools for measuring it and its component parts: famine, poverty, inequality, growth, freedom and so on. So, while some of Sen's most important and telling contributions have been theoretical, many more have been practical, and most of his theoretical moves have been developed with at least one eye on their implications for pressing economic or political matters of the moment. Moreover, especially of late, the public intellectual in him has come strongly to the fore as he has critically engaged with the political leadership of the United States of America, the European Union and India, as I discuss in greater detail in chapter 5.
It will not surprise many to hear that Sen's impressive contributions to a variety of fields is grounded in excellent early training and matched by a stellar academic career. He was born in 1933 in Santiniketan in West Bengal, India, on the campus of Rabindrath Tagore's Visva-Bharati University. Rabindrath Tagore, probably India's most famous literary figure and musician, who founded Visva-Bharati University, himself gave Sen his name (Bengali অমর্ত্য ômorto, literally ‘immortal’). Growing up in these university campus surroundings and with academic parents and grandparents, some with close ties to Tagore and to public service (his mother was a close associate of Tagore and his father, a chemistry professor who also held various public service posts), it is not surprising he excelled at school, university and beyond. He went to a Bengali-medium school (Patha Bhavan, also in Santiniketan), where, as he puts it, he was ‘deeply involved with the study of Sanskrit, on one side, and with mathematical and analytical reasoning, on the other’ (Sen 2015: xxviii). The study of Sanskrit – the intricacies of the language and its literature – enthralled him. For many years, Sanskrit was Sen's second language, after Bengali, and he could read classical, Vedic and epic Sanskrit. This fascination with the language and literature of Sanskrit also balanced and complemented his acumen in mathematics. Both of these important skills have been readily apparent ever since in his academic work, often side by side in the same volume. His grandfather, Pundit Kshiti Mohan Sen, was a great Sanskrit scholar and, although Sen did not need much encouragement, was also helpful in firing his enchantment with the literature of Sanskrit, from the famous Bhagavadgita, actually only a small part of a grand epic, the Mahabharata, the plays of Kalidasa, Shudraka, Bana, through the ‘clarity of reasoning’ of Gautama Buddha, who moved Sen so much, to the mathematics and epistemology of Aryabhata, Brahmagupta and the Bhaskaras (Sen 2015: xxix–xxxi). Hardly surprising then that a little later, at Presidency College, Calcutta, he earned a first-class BA in economics with a minor in mathematics. In 1953, he moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, where only two years later he earned a second first-class BA in economics, topping the year list. While still officially a PhD student at Cambridge (though he had finished his research), he was offered the position of professor and head of the department of economics at the newly created Jadavpur University in Calcutta. He served in that position from 1956 to 1958. Thereafter, he taught and held professorships at the Delhi School of Economics, Oxford, the London School of Economics and Harvard, before being elected Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1998. In 2004, he returned to his Harvard position as Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy.
Sen's work is, of course, the result of a razor-sharp and capacious mind combined with an enormous capacity for dedicated hard work and commitment to a cause. This prodigious output and commitment to hard work may not have always sat easily with his enduring love of cricket, at least in its five-day test match version. It has not stopped him, however, from giving amply of his time as an inspiring teacher and supervisor, something to which a long line of academics and development specialists will happily attest.
This book has no pretensions to be a comprehensive work of intellectual history or a biography, but two things are worth noting about the background to Sen's famous academic career. First, he is a product of India at independence, where the upper echelons of society were well equipped by a combination of eastern and western learning to handle the rigours of his subsequent Anglo-American academic trajectory. In fact, if the number of top global economists produced by the Delhi School of Economics alone is anything to go by, this is a gross understatement. This post-independence milieu was a veritable hothouse for the growth of a diverse and large number of academic and political leaders. Second, Sen is also a child of the Bengal famine and Indian Partition. He experienced at first-hand as a nine-year old boy the horrors of the Bengal famine of 1943, as he did a little later the horrors of communal violence of Partition. In a number of places in his academic and non-academic work, he tells the story of how, during the sectarian tensions and violence that accompanied Partition, a Muslim man, a poor day-labourer, was attacked by a gang in his mainly Hindu area. The man was still alive as he stumbled into Sen's childhood home; the now slightly older boy helped organize to have him sent to hospital. Unfortunately, he did not survive. Not only does Sen use this story to illustrate his oft-repeated and convincing point about the dangers of sectarianism and dogmatic community and identity-based thinking, but also that, despite his wife imploring him not to go into Hindu areas in this period fearing for her husband's life, this poor man felt impelled to do so as he was the breadwinner for his family and could get work nowhere else. The harsh realities of economic underdevelopment – economic unfreedom – coupled with sectarian violence left the man with no real choice and culminated in him losing his life and his family losing their loved one and breadwinner (Sen 2006a, 2015; and many more besides).
From very early on, these experiences and the elective affinity Sen developed with the famous Cambridge Marxist economist, Maurice Dobb, put him at odds with the highly theoretical and dogmatic utilitarianism of most economists he came across in Cambridge, including that of his formal supervisor Joan Robinson. His earliest research work – his PhD thesis, which led to the publication of his first book (Sen 1960) – displayed all of his mathematical expertise alongside a need to escape the confines of mainstream welfare economics in general and development economics in particular. Most obvious, even from early on, was an enduring belief in developing an approach to development economics that moved beyond the assumptions of utilitarianism and the idea that economics was a singular science – with a concrete set of analytical tools – that, once mastered, could be applied anywhere any time. This early work was directly concerned with how a society chooses possible models or paths of development – that is, plans for development – from within an ‘underdeveloped economy’.
Having grown up in a developing world context, a number of Sen's subsequent theoretical and empirical moves would be driven by the unique demands of development. This abiding interest in questions of development is evident in the more than fifty articles he has published on the topic, from as early as 1957, via his justly famous Development as Freedom (DF), published in 1999, which presents an overview of Sen's thinking on development, while pulling together a whole tapestry of themes familiar from his earlier work, alongside the various volumes on development in India he has published with Jean Drèze (Drèze and Sen 1999 [1989], 1999 [1995], 2002, 2014), and beyond. This predominance of the central problems and challenges of development is apparent in his thinking more generally, despite the fact that he has also contributed to so many other fields and that, en passant, he has pursued very deeply a number of seemingly unrelated theoretical problems. Social choice theory and welfare economic theory was, for example, at the forefront of what he did at least from the publication of his Collective Choice and Social Welfare (CS) in 1970 up until what might be called a full ‘return’ to development economics marked by the publication of his ‘Development: Which Way Now?’ (Sen 1983c; see also Sen 1989, 2000). This is not to suggest that all of his arguments around choice, capability, freedom, justice and democracy are not also applicable to a whole range of questions and issues in developed contexts, as he is at pains to stress repeatedly (see DF for just a few examples). Rather, my point is that it is obvious that the main inspiration for his work is the terrible effects of a series of deprivations on human lives most evident in less-developed contexts.
Sen has stayed away from many of the more virulent ideological battles that have characterized development economics, but he has a firm and clear position on how best to approach the economics of development. Alongside his important contributions regarding how best to understand famines, Sen is most famous for developing a substantive, broad view of development based on his conception of capability, or what he prefers to call his ‘concern for capabilities’. This is important for a number of reasons. First, he presents a philosophical alternative to the utilitarianism that underpins so much of economics, something that is discussed at length in the first two chapters of this book. Second, he delivers an alternative development objective, where development becomes ‘a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy’ (DF: 3). This transforms the ‘evaluative space’ for determining development issues. As Sen puts it, ‘for many evaluative purposes, the appropriate “space” is neither that of utilities (as claimed by welfarists), nor that of primary goods (as demanded by Rawls), but that of the substantive freedoms – the capabilities – to choose a life one has reason to value’ (DF: 74). This is an important advance on a number of narrower views of development proposed by those who identify development with the growth of gross national product (GNP), or with the rise (or maximization) in personal incomes, or with industrialization, or with technological advance, or with social modernization. As he argues, all of these can be very important as means to expanding the freedoms enjoyed by members of a society. But freedoms and quality of life depend also on other determinants, such as social and economic facilities for education and health care as well as political and civil rights. If freedom and quality of life is what development advances – if that is the goal of development – ‘then there is a major argument for concentrating on that overarching objective, rather than on some particular means, or some specially chosen list of instruments’ (DF: 3).
This alternative development objective not only informs a wide range of issues, from markets to gender, democracy to poverty and freedom to justice; it also meets head-on an enduring problem within the theory and practice of development: paternalism. From a variety of different ideological perspectives, development has been unable to escape a top-down method of proceeding, where ideas and institutions from afar are given licence to dictate to the poor how best to develop without reference to their needs, values and conditions. Sen's starting point is different. As he puts it in DF, his approach to development as freedom investigates various contributions ‘to enhancing and guaranteeing the substantive freedoms of individuals, seen as active agents of change, rather than as passive recipients of dispensed benefits’ (DF: xiii). It is worth quoting Sen at length on this point.
In terms of the medieval distinction between ‘the patient’ and ‘the agent,’ this freedom-centred understanding of economics and of the process of development is very much an agent-oriented view. With adequate social opportunities, individuals can effectively shape their own destiny and help each other. They need not be seen primarily as passive recipients of the benefits of cunning development programs. There is indeed a strong rationale for recognizing the positive role of free and sustainable agency – and even of constructive impatience … I am using the term ‘agent’ … in its older – and ‘grander’ – sense as someone who acts and brings about change, and whose achievements can be judged in terms of her values and objectives, whether or not we assess them in terms of some external criteria as well. (DF: 11, 19)
Sen's theoretical and practical proposals based on his version of capability value the agency of individuals in and of itself – as constitutive of a life worth living – and because they tend to produce better overall effects in development projects. This is the third important contribution that Sen's approach to development provides. As will become obvious in this book, agency in general and the requirements for it lie at the very heart of most of Sen's work.1
The substantive link between agency and freedom is outlined and discussed in the first three chapters of this book. For the purposes of this introduction, it is sufficient to point out that Sen's view of freedom is much richer than is the norm in a great deal of economic, development, philosophical and political theoretical literature: it encompasses both the requisites for individuals to make their own individual choices and the social, economic and political means for individuals to exert the necessary democratic power within and beyond their own societies. Effectively, Sen is suggesting that citizens themselves, whatever their income level, can budget for themselves, but they cannot do so if, say, 80 per cent of their income has to be spent on health care or education. Within development, Sen is famous for transforming the main indicators with which practitioners and policy makers are concerned about when thinking about development, as he is for his work on famines – for arguing, against the grain, that famines are not ultimately about a shortage of food but a lack of entitlement over food, that is, the power or means to acquire it. He argues convincingly that income maximization or GNP, or any other particular means that enables individuals to live a life they have reason to value, while important, are not the main concern for development.
Development is about generating the capacity, the capability, the power of citizens to determine themselves how best they should live. Some on the left have criticized this kind of approach for feeding into a market-based view – that markets best enable the ability to make choices for development – but Sen has little truck with this criticism for, as he says frequently, in the longue durée markets are one central component of enabling this development capability. As Karl Marx argued, despite their deficiencies and failures, as compared to earlier forms of exchange, markets have been revolutionary in enabling more efficient exchange, that is, in empowering individuals to acquire the necessities and luxuries of life. As Sen argues, to be against markets generally speaking would be like being against communication. Yet critics of markets are clearly onto something (however overstated the criticism may sometimes appear): the problem lies not in the nature of markets themselves but in the exploitation and domination to which they can give rise; thus the crucial question becomes whether and how they are regulated. Consequently, more often than not, the first important question in development is how to help poor people enter markets securely, given that many still struggle even to enter them. How to enable them to do so with similar entitlement or power as those already securely enmeshed in existing markets often becomes the key question in development. The seemingly more radical idea of being completely opposed to markets often ends up in practice disabling this process of empowerment and leaving large swathes of poor people in forms of existence and relations of power that are, at best, riddled with traditional forms of domination and, at worst, ripe for extreme misery, as in the causes and consequences of famine. Here, the large amount of empirical research on Indian development, which Sen has undertaken with Drèze, proves very telling (Drèze and Sen 1999 [1989], 1999 [1995], 2002, 2014). Drèze, as Sen himself notes, has been one of his most important and influential collaborators.
In changing the language and the philosophical underpinning for how best to conceive of development, Sen successfully confronts a number of competing alternatives to development that have had more or less impact on actual development over the decades, at least since ‘development economics’ began as a separate subject in economics. In various forms, and with various different effects, development has always been about outside experts dictating to local people living in poverty. They have dictated either ‘directly’, or at least via their support for non-governmental organizations (NGOs), or more indirectly via the state in question. The role of the state – or, more exactly, silence regarding the role of the state – has always been pivotal in these arguments. Welfare economics has not kept politics and the state as central to its concerns as it might have done, in line with a more general tendency in economics: the prevalence of the view of economics as a universal science whose ‘scientific’ findings could be applied, irrespective of contextual conditions of authority and power (or ‘externalities’). As the poor cousin within the extended discipline of economics, development economics then more or less assumed that models of development could be determined without reference to the practices and institutions of the developing context in question. Once the core of the problem of development was correctly identified, then the universal solution could be applied anywhere and everywhere (Hirschman 1981).
One of the two main models against which Sen develops his view is the Harrod–Domar model of development, which stresses the importance of savings and investment as key determinants of growth. It is a classical Keynesian model of economic growth, originally devised with advanced industrial countries in mind and quickly adapted by development economists in the planning exercises for developing countries that became common in the 1950s and beyond. It explains an economy's growth rate in terms of the level of saving and the productivity of capital investment (or the capital-output ratio). It suggests that once the capital gap, that is, the shortfall as regards capital brought about either by low levels of savings or low capital productivity, has been found, development programmes can come in to help fill that gap. (As Albert Hirschman [1981] notes, this is based on the ‘mutual benefit assumption’ – varying in acceptability over the years – that ‘core industrial economies’ could contribute to the development of the ‘periphery’ via large injections of financial aid.) This is what you might call ‘capital fundamentalism’, something that was central to the Bank's thinking for some time.
As Sen (1983c) notes, as well as many others, the shortcomings of this approach, with its assumed capital–output ratio, are most obvious in a case like Ghana between 1960 and 1980, which despite managing a 5 per cent savings rate (as a percentage of GDP), rather than being a stationary economy, it in fact slipped back (its economy shrunk) by 1 per cent per annum. Having said this, in typically subtle terms, in this 1983 article, Sen in fact qualifies Hirschman's more forthright critique of development economics by suggesting that some of the figures from 1960–1980 do not contradict the traditional wisdom of development economics in general and the Harrod–Domar model in particular. He agrees the latter is oversimplified but is not as willing as Hirschman to discard it completely (Hirschman 1981; Sen 1983c: 750).2 He undertakes similar, nuanced critiques of those development economic theories that focus uniquely on industrialization or the role of disguised unemployment, and contends that, all told, as far as growth is concerned, ‘it is not easy to deny the importance of capital accumulation or of industrialization in a poor pre-industrial country’ (Sen 1983c: 751).
The second model against which Sen expounds is the idea that, even if it is accepted that markets can fail, states fail more often and more seriously. Thus it follows that the state should play as small a role as possible, maintain law and order and, at most, enable some very large infrastructural interventions. This is what has been called ‘market fundamentalism’. This is supported by an ideology of self-help, that is, that left to their own devices, people will make the right choices to develop their own societies. It is therefore best to reduce the power of the state as much as possible. This has a deep and long history in liberal and libertarian thought, but in the 1970s and 1980s it was given extra ballast by Robert Nozick (1974) and the idea of the ‘night-watchman state’, coupled with the generally accepted ideology that it is good for you to ‘pull yourself up by your own bootstraps’.
This view underpinned the infamous structural adjustment programmes imposed by the Bank across large swathes of the planet, most of which failed dismally (Chang 2003). The idea here was that shock therapies would enable ‘underdeveloped’ societies to wean themselves off bloated public sectors. The Bank supported developing countries financially on condition that they undertake large-scale adjustment of the core structures of their economies. Sen provides a lot of evidence to support the exact opposite conclusion: that, in fact, in low and middle-income countries the best performers are those in which there is a good deal of state intervention and even economic planning. Moreover, success is not dependent on ideology. It was, for example, as true of Soviet centrally planned economies such as Romania and Yugoslavia as it was (and still is) of capitalist South Korea, which has had an economic system in which the market mechanism has been driven hard by an active government in a planned way. In a typical instance of his firm understatement and dry wit, Sen puts his conclusion as follows: ‘Trying to interpret the South Korean economic experience as a triumph of unguided market mechanism, as is sometimes done, is not easy to sustain … If this is a free market, then Walras's auctioneer can surely be seen as going around with a government white paper in one hand and a whip in the other’ (Sen 1983c: 752; see also Sen 1981).
Sen criticizes both of these mainstream models for missing three obvious things about development: the first two are more general points and the third is a particular precondition for either of the arguments, or ‘fundamentalisms’, against which he moves so deftly. First, growth is not the same thing as development, even if it can scarcely be denied that economic growth is one aspect of the process of economic development. Second, his point is not so much that the government is powerful in the high-growth developing countries, but that it is powerful in nearly every developing country. The real issue is that development seems to require the systematic involvement of the state in the economic sphere. As Ha-Joon Chang argues convincingly, although free marketeers (and most of the discipline of economics) would have us believe otherwise, the same has also been true for centuries in what we now call ‘developed’ countries: not only is the state very powerful but, generally speaking, it has been very interventionist in national and international markets, especially (ironically) in the United Kingdom and the United States (Chang 2003, 2015). The third thing mainstream models in development economics miss, Sen suggests, is that, before people can save or make the right choices to develop their own societies, individuals first need the ability to make choices. It is out of this that he develops his capability approach as an achievements-based (or realizations-based) approach.
Sen's first move is to show that development is not the same as growth. Economic growth is no more than a means to some other set of objectives, insufficient recognition of which has plagued development economics: ‘the real limitations of traditional development economics arose not from the choice of means to the end of economic growth, but in the insufficient recognition that economic growth was more than a means to some other objectives’. He does not suggest that growth does not matter. It may matter a great deal, but this is because of some associated benefits ‘that are realized in the process of economic growth’ (Sen 1983c
