Amartya sen books pdf download






















Furthermore, the arguments put forward by Sen in Inequality Re-Examined has had many practical applications throughout policy circles including the Human Development Index, the Multi —Dimensional Poverty Measure, the compilation of lists of capabilities and drawing further attention to human agency and democracy.

Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for Economics in for his contribution to welfare economics; the core arguments of this work is found in this book. Download Konomische Ungleichheit books ,. By asking the question, 'equality of what'? The text lays out the fundamental ideas to Amartya Sen's Capability Approach. Furthermore, the arguments put forward by Sen in Inequality Re-examined has had many practical applications throughout policy circles including the Human Development Index, the Multi -Dimensional Poverty Measure, the compilation of lists of capabilities and drawing further attention to human agency and democracy.

Mit diesem Buch hat Sen eine Schneise in die Globalisierungsdebatte geschlagen. Als einer der bedeutenden Wirtschaftstheoretiker der Gegenwart fordert er die Moral in der Marktwirtschaft ein und packt das Weltproblem Nr.

Download Inequality Reexamined books , In this deft analysis, Amartya Sen argues that the dictum all men are created equal serves largely to deflect attention from the fact that we differ in age, gender, talents, physical abilities as well as in material advantages and social background.

Download Der Lebensstandard books ,. Das Ziel des Handbuchs ist es, den aktuellen Stand der philosophischen Forschung umfassend abzubilden. This book outlines the range and usefulness of his work for gender. Measuring Justice. This book brings together a team of leading theorists to address the question 'What is the right measure of justice? Others, following John Rawls, argue.

Capabilities, Freedom, and Equality. Amartya Sen has made deep and lasting contributions to the academic disciplines of economics, philosophy, and the social sciences more broadly. He remains wedded to universal accounts of reason and impartiality based on his arguments for capability expansion via social choice, public reason and rational deliberation. This is no surprise. They may posit a similar account of the development of human capacities and powers, but, for example, they have markedly different views on political change.

Some may think it awkward or unfair to compare the ideas of a university academic with those of a revolutionary activist. Cabral was fundamentally action-oriented and steeped in practical revo- lutionary work, whereas Sen is unequivocally a theorist. It may be unfair, but it is nonetheless illuminating, partly because it is disrup- tive of how we think about these silos: real action versus theory in thinking about politics.

In any case, Cabral was no ordinary revolu- tionary engaged in armed resistance to colonial rule. Although his primary objective was to mobilise his compatriots for the radical realisation of his ideas, he was also an accomplished theorist and poet. And Sen is no ordinary theorist: extraordinarily huge volumes of theoretical contributions to many fields in economics, philoso- phy and beyond; and he was a man of action — he has been actively involved in a whole array of practical achievements, with the World Bank and the UN at a global level, in Europe, the United States and India more specifically, changing how many practise development.

To assume that it can only be legitimate and persuasive if it adopts universal axiomatic positions and arguments based on reason, impartiality and the like is, I shall argue, to misunderstand one of the points of political theory: to use context, history, language, theoretical abstraction, moral suasion, amongst other things, to convince your fellow citizens to think and act in one way as opposed to another, that is, to guide and inform action in a particular context and time — or, in other words, to bring about change.

Bringing these differences out by means of a com- parison between Cabral and Sen on development and capability Section 2 , freedom Section 3 , resistance Section 4 and political change Section 5 helps to identify a distinction between realis- tic political theory and realism in political theory, where the latter cannot proceed without utopianism.

Especially when significant change is necessary, politics is not the art of the possible, but the art of the impossible, and this is as true of change in politics in general as it is of change in development. Realism in Political Theory The revival of realism in political theory is two decades old now, inspired mainly by the work of Bernard Williams and Ray- mond Geuss , a.

Though there is no single, fixed posi- tion as regards what it is to be a realist political theorist, various positions are coalescing around four main characteristics Rossi and Sleat Second, a realist political theory rec- ognises that politics is in the first instance about action and the contexts of action, often involving conflict. Third, politics is his- torically located.

In other words, political theory and development cannot escape history and context. Although this is no objection to generalising, if one wants understanding or any guid- ance to action one has to take the specific cultural and historical cir- cumstances into consideration.

Fourth, given that the circumstances are always changing that is, genuinely different and unexpected , politics is not about applying or mastering certain theories. It is more like a craft, art or skill: there is no axiomatic, universal theory that can guide action in every context and circumstance Geuss a, ; Runciman This requires a diagnostic, critical approach to the existing normative and institutional order of the context in question, which depends upon local, practical knowl- edge about and for the context and acceptance that, by dint of its necessarily historical and contextual nature, political theory will normally be partisan, embroiled in power relations and, potentially, conflictual.

That radical realism in political theory embraces partisan conflict and utopian transformation is important for understanding Cabral. He often mentions the importance of being realistic. In other words, in contrast to a realistic political agent, a realist will strive for the impossible beyond the given laws of her society; she will, without contradic- tion, be utopian in thought or action.

As will become apparent as this article unfolds, I think we can safely say that Cabral sells himself short: as a revolutionary political agent, he is striving and resisting in a realist, not realistic fashion. The same, however, cannot be said for Sen. Now, as compared to the work of Rawls and his followers, Sen may well seem so. But this conclusion is over-hasty. Sen is not a realist in the sense being espoused here for two main reasons.

First, at least in The Idea of Justice, his magnum opus, Sen reduces the myriad of values and concerns in politics to one particular social ideal, the ideal of justice, about which I will discuss more below. More specifically, his concern for capabilities does not provide a convincing basis for critique and thus resistance of the formation of practices and preferences.

In other words, it is not proposed as a means of enabling political change, if this is understood as requiring and involving significant and mean- ingful change to the institutions and practices upon which liberal capitalist societies rest. To bring these points out, I will now turn to comparing Cabral and Sen on capability, development, freedom, resistance and change.

Development and Capability The link between development and capability is as apparent in the work of Cabral as it is, most famously, in the work of Sen. Shorn, for the moment, of its conceptual architecture, capability, accord- ing to Sen, is the individual ability, determined by developmental circumstance, to do this or be that — that is, the freedom and power necessary for individuals to be well nourished, to be able to read, write and communicate, to take part in literary and scientific pur- suits, and so on.

Sen is known for happily cherry-picking from the history of political thought, but Marx looms larger than most, all the way from lengthy discussions in On Economic Inequality to repeated references in the The Idea of Justice.

This is well documented in Sen. As regards Cabral, the jury is still out, but those who knew him well say very similar things. These are what people are effectively able to do and to be.

These conceptual innova- tions refocus economic and political theory and development stud- ies onto what goods do for humans, that is, how they enable or disable humans to lead the lives they would reasonably choose to lead Hamilton They are similar too in the way they marshal their ideas.

Famously, Sen goes on to conceive of many development issues in terms of capability deprivation, providing him with a single ready tool with which to conceptu- alise and evaluate issues that bedevil developing and developed countries — health, literacy, poverty, inequality, gender discrimi- nation, etc. Rather, they conceive of freedom in more ample, concrete and substantive terms by linking it to power.

Functionings and capabilities enable us prop- erly to conceive of and measure the quality of life. This is an under- standing of freedom as effective choice or the power to make and scrutinise the whole range of choices that constitute a human life. Similarly, Cabral expressly links the development of capacities to freedom and thus freedom to effective power. The link is clear in his discussion of the negative effects of colonialism. True to this, once the PAIGC had control of half of Guinea in , not only did they quickly improve the quality of life of what had been an extremely impoverished and nearly completely illiter- ate population, but they also put in place village democracy, includ- ing popular assemblies and judicial institutions.

In them, the PAIGC quickly moved to help improve the quality of life of their inhabitants via securing val- ued opportunities and freedoms, in particular access to agricultural products, but also education in general and militant education in particular, that is, a combination of technical skills and forms of individual and collective consciousness and training aimed at the development of the self and the liberated African citizen Borges Anti-colonial and decolonial principles and political freedom were, needless to say, central to this project but so too were general means of empowering individuals to lead lives of free choice and power as regards their individual choices as militants, farmers, mothers, etc.

Cabral argues that resistance to achieve political freedom is necessary for development and that it demands courage. He discusses four kinds of resistance: political resistance, economic resistance, cultural resistance and armed resistance. Each form of resistance, he notes, is a response to a type of Por- tuguese colonial oppression Cabral [].

I shall spare you the details of this violent repression of the entire population, which included the use of napalm and white phosphorous, but one event is a defining moment in the struggle. The PAIGC decided then to go underground, move to the coun- tryside and prepare themselves for armed struggle Cabral This turn to the countryside was also inspired by how the demographics of Guinea reinforced what Cabral had learnt from the strategies of Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse Tung: a very small urban working class, whose efforts to resist were repeat- edly crushed by a ruthless urban-based colonial police, and the rest of the country characterised by impoverished, disaffected peasant farmers.

Cabral specifies a series of essential objects of political resis- tance. It is crucial to win local and international allies , Regarding economic resistance, Cabral argues as follows. An abhorrent racist political agenda drives a nonsensical and destructive economic agenda. To resist this, Cabral claims, is to do the opposite: to help develop all Africans to their full potential by removing — by force, if necessary — the barriers imposed by this Portuguese colonial agenda. He is, though, careful not to essen- tialise culture.

Later, he even argues that, dependent on context, some parts of a culture under national liberation — the vertical hier- archy of the Fula in Guinea, for example — are easily exploited by the colonisers. Chiefs, and their associates, are co-opted, lose their link to their culture and then, on liberation, try to return to some original, hierarchical structure.

This is because they have been alienated from their own culture. And this is where Cabral and Sen diverge dramatically. Yet, this is a hardly a call to resistance. It is made as part of a subtle, if important, point about the nature of human rights.

If it is a call to action, it is one that is not intended to shake up the existing hege- monic order, but rather to work within it on the assumption that it is generally sound. Resistance, Realism and Political Change This difference around the centrality of resistance in the writings of Cabral and Sen points to a deeper divergence.

This divergence is most prevalent in three major themes, all of which revolve around the question of how best to bring about political change for development: justice, taking sides and dealing with conflict; focus on the local; and impartial global institutions. While what I have to say positively as regards what Cabral argues is in the context of a military liberation struggle, these modes of thinking about poli- tics apply just as well to the question of how best to bring about policy and institutional change for development.

While Cabral emphasises partiality, local knowledge and struggle, Sen espouses impartiality, global ideals and goals, and supposedly global sites of change. They also carried out several successful strikes on all major urban centres Cabral The only reason Portugal could keep up the fight for as long as it did was because of the significant military support it received from NATO. Otherwise, the war would have been won by Cabral , First, in attempting to overcome domination there is no point in try- ing to espouse an impartial, universal perspective.

Partial positions that take sides and delineate a clear enemy are also the best means to win external allies with similar concerns or enemies Cabral []. Who are we, who is our enemy? Third, know your circumstances in two senses: whence you struggle; whence your fighters.

Fourth, Cabral has little faith in global institutions with no pow- ers of enforcement, such as the UN. He made three famous speeches before the UN, only to be frustrated. Yet, he is not so obsessed with the local that he forgets the global, moral force of the UN.

He knows he needs this audience on side. His realism, though, is never far off, even when addressing this audience. Justice and Judgement The distinction I have drawn between realistic and realist is particu- larly apposite as regards the reduction of politics to justice.

This is clearly evident in the work of Sen. Sen is concerned with behaviour and social choice mechanisms to resolve distributional questions of justice; he is not concerned with critiqu- ing the basic institutional structure of modern polities. The tendency in devel- opment discourse, progressive parlance and analytical political philosophy to reduce politics to one particular social ideal — distrib- utive justice — rests on an unhelpful slippage.

In particular, there are four problems with this slippage. First, as many theorists and activists have expressed especially during real struggles for liberation from domination under colonialism, impe- rialism, apartheid and patriarchy , not all politics is about justice. Politics is also at least about freedom, security, the coordination of action, legitimacy, the exercise of influence, the regulation of power relations, the overcoming of domination, development, the control of the use of force and so on Geuss , ; Shapiro



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