Amartya Sen

“It’s beautifully written, a really good read. It’s all about his intellectual formation, growing up in Bengal in British India—which became part of Bangladesh—in a school established by Rabindranath Tagore and the philosophy of education that instilled in him.” Read more...

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Diane Coyle, Economist

“This book is an antidote to the nationalist backlash and the temptation, which we thought we had buried, to put people into nationalist boxes and say that nations are homogeneous and national identity is what uniquely defines us and sets us apart from others. Amartya Sen argues that that is an easy and extremely dangerous trap to fall into. Actually, we all have multiple overlapping identities — so that you can be both British, a Londoner, a husband, an Arsenal fan, a Christian, a liberal and so on. These rich overlapping identities are something to treasure…it’s a book everyone should read.” Read more...

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Philippe Legrain, Political Commentator

“He puts on the table a much more tolerable statement than simply, ‘Everyone should be equal.’ No one believes that, because I can’t be equal to a brilliant musician or mathematician, or someone who can run the 100 metres in close to nine seconds. Those apologists are out there, but once you think about the whole basket of things that everyone needs you quickly get yourself into a fix. What works much better is to say that everybody has the right to live a life of value, and it is the job of all of us to create the institutions and processes that permit people to develop their capabilities wherever they are on the rungs of intellectual or physical capability. To have the opportunity, given what they’ve got, to develop themselves to be the best they can be…you can’t have freedom, Amartya says, if you can’t read and write.” Read more...

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Will Hutton, Journalist

“Amartya Sen…got the Nobel Prize in development economics. There are many books by him in this area but I chose this one as representative of many of his ideas. It is a collection of the essays he has written over many years so it covers his various interests in this field. He also belongs to the tradition of paying attention to improving the access of the poor. He is very interested in the issues of equity. He also follows the Adam Smith tradition of economics in that he tries to bridge ethics and economics. For many years his appointments have been jointly in departments of economics and philosophy. In development economics, he looks at education and health improvements for the poor as well as women’s autonomy and the larger issues of democratic freedom being an integral part of development.” Read more...

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Pranab Bardhan, Economist

“The Idea of Justice is a magical book, not just because of the unbelievable depth and breadth of everything he’s read, but also because of his generosity of spirit. He argues with people at their absolute best, expressing their ideas often better than they had formed them themselves and then disagreeing with them in a way that makes them think: ‘I got that wrong pretty well, actually.’ The book’s central idea is the importance of what he calls capability but I would call power, and that it is not just about money. In the past, the centre left has got lost in the cul-de-sac of this definition of equality being about money. Sen’s example disproving that is that of a disabled person who will need more money because of his disability. Power is about the ability to make decisions and choices in your life, about capability. He is brilliantly withering about democracy being a Western value, citing the example of Indian leaders Ashoka (304-232BC) and Akbar (1542-1605). The ancient history of democracy, he says, has even deeper roots in India than in Greece. This is about democracy as discussion as much as democracy at election.” Read more...

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James Purnell, Politician

“The book does a tremendous job of giving you a sense of the many, many layers of history, of identities, that constitute this society. It goes back way into the past: it talks about medieval India, it talks about Islam in India, it talks about Buddhism, it talks about the Indian calendar. There’s an article on how India has many different calendars. Different people, different communities have had a very different sense of time. It really attests to the particular character of Indian society that it can accommodate within itself people living at very many different levels time-wise…The broad thesis that he offers is that there is a particular philosophical tradition – in fact not just one tradition but many traditions – in India that really stress the idea of discussion, of consensus-building through argumentation. He goes back to various philosophical discourses, various conversations that are part of Indian philosophy and part of Indian history, to stress this notion that the whole construction of what we now know as India, the modern nation state, the world’s largest democracy, isn’t something that’s just happened in the last 50 to 60 years.” Read more...

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Pankaj Mishra, Political Commentator