Development as Freedom

Amartya Sen

OUP Oxford, Jan 18, 2001 - Business & Economics - 366 pages

In Development as Freedom Amartya Sen explains how in a world of unprecedented increase in overall opulence millions of people living in the Third World are still unfree. Even if they are not technically slaves, they are denied elementary freedoms and remain imprisoned in one way or another by economic poverty, social deprivation, political tyranny or cultural authoritarianism. The main purpose of development is to spread freedom and its 'thousand charms' to the unfree citizens. Freedom, Sen persuasively argues, is at once the ultimate goal of social and economic arrangements and the most efficient means of realizing general welfare. Social institutions like markets, political parties, legislatures, the judiciary, and the media contribute to development by enhancing individual freedom and are in turn sustained by social values. Values, institutions, development, and freedom are all closely interrelated, and Sen links them together in an elegant analytical framework. By asking 'What is the relation between our collective economic wealth and our individual ability to live as we would like?' and by incorporating individual freedom as a social commitment into his analysis Sen allows economics once again, as it did in the time of Adam Smith, to address the social basis of individual well-being and freedom.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - wealhtheowwylfing - LibraryThing

This is a treatise on the importance of individual freedom, both as an end in itself and as the best means of economic development. It is based on a series of lectures Sen gave in 1996-7, which netted ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - justindtapp - LibraryThing

This was the first book I bought after returning home from two years overseas in 2004. It has traveled with us until now. It's probably best that I didn't read it until recently since I have a much ...

Contents

• The Perspective of Freedom: 13
• The ends and the Means of Development: 35
• Freedom and the Foundations of Justice: 54
• Poverty as Capability Deprivation: 87
• Markets States and Social Opportunity: 111
• The Importance of Democracy: 146
• Famines and Other Crises: 160
• Womens Agency and Social Change: 189
• Population Food and Freedom: 204
• IO Culture and Human Rights 227: 227
• Social Choice and Individual Behavior: 249
• Individual Freedom as a Social: 282
• Notes: 299
• 53: 318

About the author

Amartya Sen is the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Science. He has been President of the Indian Economic Association, the American Economic Association, the International Economic Association and the Econometric Society. He has taught at Calcutta, Delhi, Oxford, Cambridge, the London School of Economics, and Harvard.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Development as Freedom; Oxford University Press paperback
• Author: Amartya Sen
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2001
• ISBN: 0192893300, 9780192893307
• Length: 366 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / Economics / General; Political Science / General